Libertarian "freedom" vs. civil rights movement freedom

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun May 30, 2010 at 18:00

(1)  The Civil Rights Movement was much more involved in fighting private discrimination that Rand Paul acknowledges, which means there is no way that Paul would have marched with Martin Luther King.

(2)  The Civil Rights Act was much more involved in fighting private discrimination that Rand Paul acknowledges, which means there is no way that Paul would have supported it.

(3)  Barry Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights Act was largely based on the same broad reasons that Rand Paul has a problem with it.

(4) Private discrimination has played a significant role in conservative politics in the years since the Civil Rights Act was passed, which means it is anything but an historical irrelevancy.

(5) Libertarians have a very different vision of "freedom" from the Civil Rights vision, although they take great pains to obscure the fact.  In fact, the libertarian vision of freedom was part of what helped keep slavery in place, as well as what helped justify opposition to the Civil Rights Movement.

In the end, because of length, I did little more than state the last point.  In this diary, I will complete what I started.  

In his book Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea, George Lakoff lays out the argument that liberals and conservatives mean very different things when they talk about "freedom", which has a common core meaning that liberals and conservatives flesh out in very different ways.

Lakoff's argument is developed in terms of concepts, and how they how they emerge from concrete physical experience into realms of increasing abstraction.  While the root meaning of freedom, common to virtually all of us, is grounded in the physical reality that freedom of movement is fundamental to our well-being, and that physical restraints are the most fundamental restrictions on our freedom as creatures, the ways that liberals and conservatives flesh out the meaning of freedom diverges so fundamentally that neither can understand the other.

Rather than go through Lakoff's arguments, however, I want to take this general perspective he lays out and apply it to the history discussed in the previous diary.  In particular, I want to stress that the civil rights struggle for freedom was grounded in much longer historical struggle, which had its origins in the initial resistance to becoming slaves in the first place.  It was, in short, a struggle that was directly about the most fundamental physical meaning of freedom that is common to all definitions of it.  

This struggle for freedom, so basically defined, was also a part of a much broader tendency, which Lakoff lays out at the very beginning of the introduction in Whose Freedom:

There are two very different views of freedom in America today, arising from two very different moral and political worldviews dividing the country. The traditional idea of freedom is progressive. One can see traditional values most clearly in the direction of change that has been demanded and applauded over two centuries. America has been a nation of activists, consistently expanding its most treasured freedoms:

• The expansion of citizen participation and voting rights from white male property owners to non-property owners, to former slaves, to women, to those excluded by prejudice, to younger voters

• The expansion of opportunity, good jobs, better working conditions, and benefits to more and more Americans, from men to women, from white to nonwhite, from native born to foreign born, from English speaking to non-English speaking

• The expansion of worker rights--freedom from inhumane working conditions--through unionization: from slave labor to the eight-hour day, the five-day week, worker compensation, sick leave, overtime pay, paid vacations, pregnancy leave, and so on

• The expansion of public education from grade school to high school to college to postgraduate education

• The expansion of knowledge through science from isolated figures like Benjamin Franklin to scientific institutions in the great universities and governmental institutions like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health

• The expansion of public health and life expectancy

• The expansion of consumer protection through more effective government regulation of immoral or irresponsible corporations and class action suits within the civil justice system

• The expansion of diverse media and free speech from small newspapers to the vast media/Internet possibilities of today

• The expansion of access to capital from wealthy landholders and bankers to all the ways ordinary people-more and more of them-can borrow money today

• The expansion, throughout the world, of freedom from colonial rule- for the most part with the backing of American foreign policy.

The simple fact is that all the above actions actually expanded human freedom, defined simply as the capacity to act in accordance with ones freely chosen desires. We may not immediately think of all the above in terms of "freedom"--but that only goes to show how stunted our concept of freedom has become.

In sharp contrast to the black freedom struggle, opponents of black freedom have used the notion of "freedom" as well--the "freedom" of slaveholder's to own slaves, for example, and to do whatever they wished with their human property.  Indeed, in Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism, Roger Wilkins makes the point that slaveowners were particularly zealous in demanding their freedom, precisely because they were so intimately aware of what it meant to be a slave.  But it was the very unthinkability of being in the slave's skin, in the position of the other, that drove them in their passion for "freedom". Thus, what was crucial for the slaveholder's struggle for "freedom" was the incapacity to feel empathy beyond the most superficial level entailed in being horrified at the mere thought of being in the other's place.

Historically, once slavery came under sustained attack from the Abolitionist movement, the Bible became the chief source of defense.  But "states' rights" and appeals to the slaveholder's right to property--and hence supposed Lockean "freedom" were never far from hand.  In the libertarian account that Goldwater invoked in opposing the Civil Rights act, and that Rand Paul reiterates today, black freedom cannot be advanced unless the slaveholder's freedom--or its modern-day progeny-be curtailed. But the libertarian position entails there is a profound misreading of Locke's argument for the social contract and inalienable rights.

The essence of Locke's argument is that in the state of nature of supposed "total freedom", no freedom is actually secure, because of the threat that every individual's exercise of "freedom" posses to everyone else.  Where no freedom is secure, Locke argues, it does not actually exist.  What threatens freedom, most fundamentally, is the inability to recognize and respect the freedom of the other--the inability to see oneself in the other, a failure of imaginative empathy.  The social contract is the means to overcome that inability. It is, in effect, an institutionalization of empathy, and the social nature of human freedom.

Libertarians fail to grasp this, because they are fundamentally anti-social and and anti-empathetic in their outlook. (This is not to say that all libertarians are necessarily anti-social and and anti-empathetic in their psychology.  Their psychology and their political philosophy can easily be deeply at odds.)  They regard their freedoms as a kind of property, and they regard their property as pre-social.

However, Locke's point is that property per se does not come into existence until there is a social contract that recognizes it.  Without the social contract, there is no recognition of property.  There is only brute force possessing objects--or stealing them. Because of his profoundly social understanding of the origins of property as well as all the rights we enjoy, Locke is directly opposed to the libertarian's view of things.

Back at MyDD in June 2007, in a diary "George Will's Lies Fails To Save Conservatism", I wrote:

The freedom that conservatives talk about is their freedom--not "liberty and justice for all," but  liberty and justice for them.  As the Dictionary of the History of Ideas says in its entry on liberalism:

The hero is free, or freer at least than the ordinary run of men; and the cult of the hero is common to many societies in which freedom, as the liberal thinks of it, means nothing.

This is the "freedom" which conservatives cherish--though without actually having to do anything heroic, like fight in wars they cheer from their keyboards.  It is the freedom of the slaveowner to own slaves. The freedom of the President to ignore laws he doesn't like. The freedom of corporations to ignore labor laws in breaking unions (and then pay petty fines years later, as a minor cost of doing business).  In the way of crumbs, it also includes the freedom of ordinary whites to discriminate against blacks, and of ordinary men to discriminate against women. But its essence is the freedom of the few to rule the many, the freedom of the powerful to dominate the weak.

Thus, history shows the real meaning of the saying that "conservatives care about freedom, while liberals care about equality"-- liberals care about liberty for all, while conservatives just want it for themselves.  Indeed, liberals believe that "as long as one man is in chains, I am not free"--a precept fully in line with the teachings of Matthew 25:31-46, in the midst of which Jesus says, "Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me."

Conclusion

In short, what it all boils down to is this:  libertarians have a theory of freedom, but it's a theory with (a) a piss-poor historical record of every delivering any actual freedom, and (b) a long historical record of being used by those with power to deny freedom for those with less power. In short, it's a theory that's repeatedly failed the empirical test of history.

And just to put a little cherry on the top of my argument at the end, he's a short tape of Rand's father defending some nutcase violent tax evaders by comparing them to Martin Luther King.  This is a classic demonstration of just how pathetically the libertarian model of freedom fails to comprehend what the hell it's talking about.  For the full context, you can read my diary, "Ron Paul Equates Former Militia Wingnut Tax Evaders With Martin Luther King" in which I first presented this video.

Okay, take it away, Ron: