A libertarian pin-up gives an intellectually dishonest speech
By Lexington
RAND PAUL, the libertarian pin-up and Republican senator from Kentucky, today travelled the short distance from Capitol Hill in Washington to Howard University, a historically black college, to pose an important question. How, Mr Paul asked a distinctly sceptical audience of students, did the party of Abraham Lincoln and emancipation come to lose black votes to the point that 95% of them went to Barack Obama in 2012?
According to press reports, some students chided Mr Paul for spending so much time dwelling on the past. But had he been bent on giving a history lesson, he would have had to answer his own question—at least in part—by discussing his party's "Southern strategy". Under that strategy, such Republican leaders as Richard Nixon set out to woo white southern voters angered by the civil-rights movement. As Mr Paul, a Kentuckian, knows well, the effect was a sort-of pre-Copernican shift in American politics, with black and white southerners remaining fixed in their respective ideological positions, while the two national parties rotated around them, leaving white Democrats and Dixiecrats (including such ardent foes of civil rights as Strom Thurmond) to become Republicans, and African-Americans to become Democrats.
Instead, Mr Paul was surely talking about himself. If the senator is to make a run for the White House in 2016, he needs to square away some bumpy moments from his early political days, notably a series of confused interviews that he gave in 2010 about the Civil Rights Act. At the time Mr Paul seemed to suggest that he did not think it proper for the federal government to order private businesses to drop racial discrimination, even if he himself deplored such racism. And it is that last caveat, I suspect, that is the problem. Mr Paul, a staunch libertarian who gives every impression of being a decent man, wants to argue that a purist libertarian position is compatible with supporting racial equality. But that is a difficult task. Here is how he tangled himself in knots in 2010, telling NPR's Robert Siegel:
Dr. PAUL: What I've always said is that I'm opposed to institutional racism, and I would've, had I been alive at the time, I think, had the courage to march with Martin Luther King to overturn institutional racism, and I see no place in our society for institutional racism.
SIEGEL: But are you saying that had you been around at the time, you would have hoped that you would have marched with Martin Luther King but voted with Barry Goldwater against the 1964 Civil Rights Act?
Dr. PAUL: Well, actually, I think it's confusing on a lot of cases with what actually was in the civil rights case because, see, a lot of the things that actually were in the bill, I'm in favor of. I'm in favor of everything with regards to ending institutional racism. So I think there's a lot to be desired in the civil rights. And to tell you the truth, I haven't really read all through it because it was passed 40 years ago and hadn't been a real pressing issue in the campaign, on whether we're going to vote for the Civil Rights Act.
SIEGEL: But it's been one of the major developments in American history in the course of your life. I mean, do you think the '64 Civil Rights Act or the ADA for that matter were just overreaches and that business shouldn't be bothered by people with a basis in law to sue them for redress?
Dr. PAUL: Right. I think a lot of things could be handled locally. For example, I think that we should try to do everything we can to allow for people with disabilities and handicaps. You know, we do it in our office with wheelchair ramps and things like that. I think if you have a two-story office and you hire someone who's handicapped, it might be reasonable to let him have an office on the first floor rather than the government saying you have to have a $100,000 elevator. And I think when you get to solutions like that, the more local the better, and the more common sense the decisions are, rather than having a federal government make those decisions.
Amid much public comment Mr Paul quickly reversed his position, making clear that he did not endorse segregated lunch counters or other examples of private discrimination. But at today's event the question of civil rights still provided a challenge. Defending both his party and himself, he said:
No Republican questions or disputes civil rights. I have never waivered in my support for civil rights or the civil rights act. The dispute, if there is one, has always been about how much of the remedy should come under federal or state or private purview.
He noted, as he did in 2010, that the 14th amendment of the constitution clearly allows the federal government to weigh in when states deny certain fundamental rights, from voting to property ownership, to all citizens:
Many Republicans do believe that decentralisation of power is the best policy, that government is more efficient, more just, and more personal when it is smaller and more local.
But Republicans also realise that there are occasions of such egregious injustice that require federal involvement, and that is precisely what the 14th amendment and the Civil Rights Act were intended to do—protect citizens from state and local tyranny.
But at this point Mr Paul was in a pickle. Given that he had decided not to mention the Southern strategy, and given that he had argued that Republicans' attachment to devolved government did not blind them to racial injustice, that left the senator needing to find an alternative explanation for the black electorate's drift towards the Democratic Party.
This is what he came up with:
I think what happened during the Great Depression was that African Americans understood that Republicans championed citizenship and voting rights but they became impatient for economic emancipation.
African Americans languished below white Americans in every measure of economic success and the Depression was especially harsh for those at the lowest rung of poverty.
The Democrats promised equalising outcomes through unlimited federal assistance while Republicans offered something that seemed less tangible—the promise of equalising opportunity through free markets.
Really? Is that the best that Mr Paul can come up with as he prepares for a national run? Because that explanation fails in two important ways. First, at the level of pure campaign politics, it sounds uncomfortably close to crude conservative arguments in which Republicans suggest that Democrats buy the support of black and minority voters with "gifts" (cf, Mitt Romney's post-election analysis of his defeat by Barack Obama). No doubt Mr Paul would contest that reading of his comments, and argue that he was merely contrasting equality of outcomes, a leftish dream that requires punishing success, with the sounder conservative goal of ensuring equality of opportunities.
But secondly and more seriously, Mr Paul surely heads into perilous territory when he accuses blacks of being "impatient for economic emancipation". In the context of race-tinged equality, patience is a loaded term. From Jefferson wringing his hands about slavery to Kennedy hesitating to enact civil-rights legislation, history is full of the privileged urging the oppressed to be more patient, and not to advance rash claims for equality.
Republicans have been here before, when they nominated their only true libertarian candidate for the White House, Barry Goldwater. And if you go back to Senator Goldwater's own manifesto, "The Conscience of a Conservative", you find the urtext of all libertarian arguments about civil rights, and the tensions between racial justice and states' rights. Goldwater's argument ignored reality back then, and it sounds even worse today.
With apologies for one last quote, here is Goldwater commenting on the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in favour of public-school desegregation:
It so happens that I am in agreement with the objectives of the Supreme Court as stated in the Brown decision. I believe that it is both just and wise for negro children to attend the same schools as whites, and that to deny them this opportunity carries with it strong implications of inferiority. I am not prepared, however, to impose that judgment of mine on the people of Mississippi or South Carolina, or to tell them what methods should be adopted and what pace should be kept in striving towards that goal. That is their business, not mine. I believe that the problem of race relations, like all social and cultural problems, is best handled by the people directly concerned. Social and cultural change, however desirable, should not be affected by the engines of national power.
Patience, Goldwater was urging, patience. And even in 1960 that argument sounded hollow. In those angry, dark days it was simply not possible to praise equality of opportunity, deplore racism and then oppose the only force—federal intervention—capable of overcoming segregationists bent on denying equal opportunities to black schoolchildren.
Mr Paul did not cite Goldwater in his speech to Howard University today. That is a shame. There is a great deal to admire and debate in libertarian thought. But the movement's weakness has always been a sense that—when weighing the trade-offs between freedom and basic justice—libertarians are just a little too quick to dismiss calls for equality as folly or special pleading. Goldwater's ghost hung over all that Mr Paul said about civil rights, federal power and black impatience.
Mr Paul arrived at Howard University today congratulating himself, telling the students that some might think him "brave or crazy to be here today". A brave speech would have wrestled honestly with the history of civil rights and conservatism, equality and Mr Paul's own libertarian philosophy. This was not that speech.
