Rand Paul and Right-Wing Libertarianism

By now, must of us now that the Republican candidate for Senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, has decided to quickly ruin his honeymoon period following his landslide primary victory by suggesting that he would be opposed to crucial components of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (he said that he supports ending public discrimination, voting, segregation in public services, etc.; the controversy was over his claim that the federal government should not prohibit racial discrimination in businesses). 


A number of people have taken him to task for this, including most prominently Rachel Maddow and George Stephanopolous. Bruce Bartlett I think has an excellent take on it. One line of defense for Paul, indeed his own line of defense, is that he is not a racist, just a principled believer in libertarianism. He himself claimed that finding himself in the position of having to defend the right of private business to engage in racial discrimination to be "the hard part about believing in freedom." Yglesias skewers this, pointing out that claiming to not be a racist but rather stuck due to your principles not only defending the rights of racists to be racist but defending their insistence on maintaining a vicious form of oppression is possibly even more damning than being a conservative.

I always find it shocking that conservatives in 2010 openly say that the political founder of their movement and an icon to be admired is Barry Goldwater, and that Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign was an admirable thing that constitutes a key foundationstone of the modern conservative movement.....Whenever I bring this up, people quickly rush to assure me that Goldwater didn’t stand shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists on the most important political issue of his time out of racism, instead at the decisive moment in his career he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists out of principled constitutional reasoning that made it impossible for him to do otherwise. But this is actually more damning....[H]aving acquired a major party presidential nomination he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists on the most important issue of the day because his sincere political ideology led to horribly wrongheaded conclusions.

Likewise, Adam Serwer points out that 

Paul would never face the actual "hard part" of his vision of freedom, because it would never interfere with his own life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness. Rand Paul would not have been turned away from a lunch counter, be refused a home, a job, or denied a loan, or told to sit in the black car of a train because of his skin color, or because of the skin color of his spouse. Paul thinks there is something "hard" about defending the kind of discrimination he would have never, ever faced. Paul's free-market fundamentalism is being expressed after decades of social transformation that the Civil Rights Act helped create, and so the hell of segregation is but a mere abstraction, difficult to remember and easy to dismiss as belonging only to its time. It's much easier now to say that "the market would handle it." But it didn't, and it wouldn't.

 Both of these critiques accept at face-value the premise that Paul's position here is driven by his philosophical belief in liberty as the right to engage in private acts without the intervention of the state. And accordingly, I think they are very compelling critiques: they do not just cry hypocrisy, but rather argue that it is the adherence to the principles themselves that requires acquiescence to manifest injustice.

I, however, am somewhat of a less noble man, and am just going to cry hypocrisy. Or at the very least point out what I consider to be a tendency in modern libertarianism that I have difficulty explaining in a non-cynical fashion.

Libertarians hate the National Labor Relations Act. They hate unions. And yet the capitalist corporation can do very little wrong. (It was noteworthy that Paul today was criticizing President Obama for being too critical of BP for the Gulf spill: "I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business.")

Now yes I know that we are all brought up to think 'corporations, intrinsic to market economies and free enterprise' and 'unions, wedge in the door for socialist takeover.' And certainly unions have articulated critiques of capitalism and market economies from their inception (of course, corporations and the trusts in the early 20th century had armies of apologists saying that the rise of the monopolistic corporation and the centralization of the economy into an economic oligarchy was the height of progress, a near-inevitable trajectory to a better life, provided the unions and do-gooders didn't screw things up.) But it seems to me that the union is a mirror image (somewhat distorted) of the corporation: they both create a space of non-market relations within a market economy. They both entail the combination of individually controlled factors (capital and labor) so as to achieve better terms of trade. And the strike? Exactly what labor should be doing in a market economy: trying to maximize its utility, in this case by maximizing the wages or benefits of its members. If a corporation decided not to produce a good or sell a good below a certain price, its hard to believe that libertarians would find here an assault on the foundations of liberty.

There are obviously key differences between them, but they are both fundamentally market actors. Furthermore, while libertarians hate the National Labor Relations Labor Act, for providing institutionalized supports for unions, they don't seem to have any gripe with the court decisions and state institutions that provide a similar, public foundation for the development of the modern corporation.

Yglesias rightly points out that

any effort to ground your political philosophy in an incredibly rigid and dogmatic division between what’s “public” and what’s “private” is ultimately going to fail. For one thing, as Charles Lane points out the way you enforce your private “no black customers in my restaurant” law is by having the police arrest someone for trespassing.

And like I said, the critique that adherence to libertarian principles both leads you to morally repulsive conclusions and relies heavily on a distinction between public and private that is often impossible to sustain is a deep criticism of libertarianism as a philosophy. But practically speaking, in my readings and debates with libertarians, it is not just the combination of a repulsion of any form of public power (no matter how democratically legitimated or controlled) with a total indifference to massive concentrations of private power that strikes me; it is also their glorification of certain 'private' concentrations of power and their vilification of other 'private' concentrations of power. I've never heard a convincing explanation for why the combination of capital is not a threat to liberty, but the combination of labor is such a threat (the most frequent retort is that the combination of capital leads to certain goods, such as economic growth, that outweigh the potential threat. Of course unions also provide important goods, such as providing for community stability and greater income growth for the median member of society, but these goods tend to be rejected out of hand, almost as though they cannot be considered as a matter of first principles).

Which leads me to the more cynical reason for this pattern suggested by Steve Benen

if the government is considering a measure that interferes with the practices of a private entity, it's necessarily unacceptable. (Unless, of course, we're talking about a woman's uterus or a gay couple's bedroom, which Rand Paul defines as public entities.)

 That is, libertarianism as it is practiced in the contemporary United States is really just window dressing for right-wing policies. The unpopular positions right wing positions (scrap the minimum wage, remove all public support for unions, opposition to the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and a host of others) are portrayed as a principle stance, the "hard part about believing in freedom," while the politicians who advance the cause nonetheless make exceptions for abortion, gay marriage, religious fundamentalism in public education, and the like. I don't honestly believe this: I respect and have learned much from libertarians opposition to encroachments on civil liberties. But the more the Pauls elder and son become the public face of libertarianism in America, the more this cynicism rings true as a matter of practical politics.

p.s I really should add, and really should start following, the insights of Brink Lindsey.

I’m a libertarian because I’m a liberal.  In other words, I support small-government, free-market policies because I believe they provide the institutional framework best suited to advancing the liberal values of individual autonomy, tolerance, and open-mindedness. Liberalism is my bottom line; libertarianism is a means to promoting that end.Ron Paul, by contrast, is no liberal. Just look at his xenophobia, his sovereignty-obsessed nationalism, his fondness for conspiracy theories, his religious fundamentalism — here is someone with a crudely authoritarian worldview. The snarling bigotry of his newsletters is just the underside of this rotten log.