Rand Paul: The Cancer That (We Hope) Kills the GOP

[redneckgaijin]

So: Rand Paul, the day after winning the Republican primary for Senator from Kentucky, went on BOTH Rachel Maddow and NPR and said that, had he been in Congress at the time, he would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, on the grounds that private businesses and individuals should have the right to discriminate.

Fair enough- at one time I held the same view, before I was persuaded that, without stripping that "right" away, then official discrimination likewise would never leave. Bruce Bartlett actually put it very well:

As we know from history, the free market did not lead to a breakdown of segregation. Indeed, it got much worse, not just because it was enforced by law but because it was mandated by self-reinforcing societal pressure. Any store owner in the South who chose to serve blacks would certainly have lost far more business among whites than he gained. There is no reason to believe that this system wouldn't have perpetuated itself absent outside pressure for change.

In short, the libertarian philosophy of Rand Paul and the Supreme Court of the 1880s and 1890s gave us almost 100 years of segregation, white supremacy, lynchings, chain gangs, the KKK, and discrimination of African Americans for no other reason except their skin color. The gains made by the former slaves in the years after the Civil War were completely reversed once the Supreme Court effectively prevented the federal government from protecting them. Thus we have a perfect test of the libertarian philosophy and an indisputable conclusion: it didn't work. Freedom did not lead to a decline in racism; it only got worse.

. . .

If Rand Paul were saying that he agrees with the Goldwater-Rehnquist-Bork view that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was unconstitutional and that the Supreme Court was wrong to subsequently find it constitutional, that would be an eccentric but defensible position. If he were saying that the Civil Rights Act were no longer necessary because of the great strides we have made as a country in eradicating racism, that would also be defensible. But Rand's position is that it was wrong in principle in 1964. There is no other way of interpreting this except as an endorsement of all the things the Civil Rights Act was designed to prohibit, as favoring the status quo throughout the South that would have led to a continuation of segregation and discrimination against African Americans at least for many more years. Undoubtedly, changing mores would have broken down some of this over time, but there is no reason to believe that it would have been quick or that vestiges wouldn't still remain today. Indeed, vestiges remain despite the Civil Rights Act.

So: I was wrong then, and Rand Paul is wrong now, but at least it's a matter of principle, right?

Um... no, no it isn't. Today, while Rand Paul blamed Rachel Maddow for twisting his words, his campaign office released a statement to the effect that Rand Paul does support the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposes repealing it, and would indeed vote for it if he had been there.

GOP leadership is suspiciously silent, either while they get their story straight or in order to avoid pissing off their racist base. Jim DeMint has broken the silence just long enough to say, "I'm going to talk to Rand about his positions."

But... is this racism? Maybe not... but Talking Points Memo reminds us about how Rand's dad Ron Paul, who Rand worked for in his various election campaigns, routinely played footsie with the most radical racist elements in America. There's the fact that Rand Paul employed an openly racist spokesperson for months during his campaign, until a liberal blogger blew the whistle and forced his resignation.

And then there's this tidbit from the past, in which Rand Paul argues that discrimination is a necessary evil to have a free society.

For my money? A racist, and a fairly idiotic one, too. By initially endorsing the right of private clubs, businesses, etc. to be bigoted, Rand Paul pissed off liberals, most moderates, and any conservative who thinks of themselves as NOT bigoted. Then, by flip-flopping, he pisses off the racists... AND the tea-partiers who want their candidate to stand on principle.

And the initial silence of the GOP, especially the predominantly Southern leadership, shows that they also are either racist or afraid to offend their racist voters.

But even if Rand Paul is nothing but a libertarian standing on principle to the absolute last extreme, he's wrong. As I said before, I also once thought that, in order to be true to freedom, you had to let bigots be bigots in their business dealings. This TPM reader sums up why I was very, very wrong:

I do not think it's possible to be a libertarian in the mode of Paul and believe in civil rights. Paul may well believe that discrimination is wrong, and that minority members have some kind of moral right to sit at any lunch counter they choose, but he evidently does not believe it is a civil right, because he does not support legislation to enforce it. As the Supreme Court once understood, there can be no right without a remedy. To say that you support civil rights but not civil rights legislation is nonsense.

You don't have a right to be treated as an equal citizen unless you can make it stick. That requires the law.

Rand Paul, in opposing the law, opposes equality- and thereby opposes freedom for at least part of the population he seeks to represent in the Senate.

And the more this becomes apparent- and the more it becomes apparent that his brand of conservative is all the Republican Party has left, the racists, the teabaggers, and the corporate anarchists, the more the Grand Old Party will self-destruct.

Two months ago I was predicting a Republican takeover of both houses of Congress.

If Rand Paul, and the chicken lady in Nevada, and various other *cough* shining lights of the Republican Party keep up as they are, that might be another point on which I was just plain wrong.

I can only hope.

Comments

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I am amused by how many more candidates lately seem to be able to say directly what they mean when they're giving campaign speeches, but split hairs and backpedal constantly when they're giving interviews -- even soft interviews. Actually having to answer direct, not-particularly-challenging-or-controversial questions with "yes" or "no" is pretty damn tricky. Thing is, for all the things people can or can't see, they can see when someone's dodging like that.

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

Long political habit of presuming that things said on the campaign trail will not be remembered by the media. We've only had tiny portable movie cameras in the hands of practically everyone for a few years- ditto the ability to instantly distribute the resulting video around the world.

For centuries politicians presented different faces to different people, confident that they couldn't/wouldn't compare notes and that the media would never know. That era is over, but the habits persist... and all too often, the "official" mass media perpetuates it, because they don't want to lose their precious "access" to those politicians.

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

First, "civil rights" have nothing to do with being able to interact with any private citizen or business you wish, nor do the "privileges and immunities of citizenship." Second, Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act is patently unconstitutional. The federal government has no constitutional authority to end private discrimination. The states may, but this was federal legislation. And please don't waste your time or mine with appeals (pun intended) to the (Dred Scott) Supreme (Plessy) Court (Bush v Gore). Third, Rand Paul is certainly deserving of criticism, but only for dancing around in that embarrassing interview with Maddow rather than stating the above clearly and succinctly. His fault is lacking the courage of his convictions. Nothing is worse, especially when one is correct and one's opponents are wrong.

Racial discrimination by private citizens is irrational, and I personally find it offensive. But what I, or you, may find personally offensive is irrelevant. No one's rights are violated by being refused access to any private citizen's companionship or business. Contrariwise, prohibiting such discrimination does truly deprive citizens of their free association rights.

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

You're completely wrong, for two reasons.

First, if discrimination is a free-association right, then it is just as wrong when states ban it as when the federal government bans it. If it is proper for a state to prohibit private discrimination, then there is nothing other than structural issues to make it wrong for the federal government to do so.

Second, you ignore a simple practical fact: when there is enough private discrimination, it BECOMES public discrimination.

Bear in mind that, in places where segregation was mandated by law, it had the support of the vast majority of the white population. Merely repealing the laws that mandated it would not remove that vast majority support for it. Discrimination would still continue, enforced not by law but by mass unofficial, extralegal means. No restaurant could desegregate and stay in business; no hotel could rent to blacks without losing all its white business. This was demonstrated, repeatedly, during the decade between Brown v. Topeka Board of Education and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Through peer pressure, boycott, and terrorism, businesses that voluntarily desegregated were driven out of business... and blacks remained second-class citizens.

The only way to ensure equal treatment for all under the law was to mandate equal treatment under the law in every public sphere. Even then, the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not apply to private clubs or associations- only to businesses open to the public, engaged in general commerce. People were (and are) still allowed to be bigots, but not to act on that bigotry in the course of commerce- which the federal government IS quite empowered to regulate and enforce.

Only by enforced DEsegregation were generations able to grow up in a society that did NOT default to racism. Even now, a substantial minority of white Americans are racist- enough to control one of the two largest political parties in America, Q. E. D. If private discrimination in business had not been outlawed, we would still have segregation, race riots, and second-class citizenship today.

The fact that most Libertarians have no problem with this at all is an indicator of how morally bankrupt the movement really is, as I eventually learned to my frustration and sorrow.

And Rand Paul doesn't even have the excuse of being a principled Libertarian- or a principled anything at all.

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

I'm not wrong. Yes, it is just as wrong politically when states infringe on civil rights, but that does not mean that it is constitutionally impermissible. You seem to have an ongoing difficulty with the concept of federalism. I assure you that my distaste for the Constitution is far greater than yours, because I hate all government at every level, and the Constitution is not a libertarian document. But my assertions on constitutionality are correct.

Second, private discrimination never becomes public sector (i.e., coercive, mandatory or prohibitive) discrimination. The amount does not change its character; the two are always distinct. The fact that sufficient private discrimination renders someone unable to live a happy life in a particular place is irrelevant, and no excuse for depriving others of genuine rights such as free association. And as I have told you elsewhere, I am quite familiar with conditions where segregation was mandated by law - and no libertarian supports mandatory segregation any more than he supports mandatory desegregation.

And the federal government is only empowered to regulate interstate commerce, and not arbitrarily regulate any private commercial activity.

I don't know any libertarians who do not have a problem with racism. Opposing legal "remedies" to private discrimination is not the same thing.

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

Second, private discrimination never becomes public sector (i.e., coercive, mandatory or prohibitive) discrimination. The amount does not change its character; the two are always distinct.

If you are so delusional as to believe that only government can coerce someone, then there's no point talking to you.

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

If your reading comprehension is so poor as to believe I ever said that "only government can coerce someone," then there is little point in talking to you. Only government can coerce someone legally (though in this instance, federal coercion is quite illegal). And if you believe that refusing to do business with someone is tantamount to coercion, then there is even less point in doing so.

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

When all businesses in a given industry in an area- or, indeed, all businesses period- refuse to do business with a group, that is a cartel- and that IS coercion.

When those who attempt to protest the cartel through sit-ins and demanding service are beaten and murdered, that ALSO is coercion.

When businesses that attempt to break the cartel are driven bankrupt through boycott, vandalism and terrorism, that ALSO is coercion.

In practical terms, there is no difference of any substance between a law which mandates racial segregation and a popular culture that enforces racial segregation regardless of what the law says.

WHICH WAS DEMONSTRATED.

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

A voluntary cartel is no more a form of coercion against non-member businesses or customers than any other association. And there is nothing intrinsically coercive about a boycott, which is simply commercial ostracism. This would even include unions, were they not granted special privileges by (unconstitutional, of course) federal labor law.

"Sit-ins" are a violation of someone's private property, which is criminal trespass. No one need tolerate trespassers, and not tolerating them is not coercion but self-defense. I would prefer that the minimum force necessary to eject them be used, but that is at the discretion of the person whose property is being violated.

Boycotts, for any reason whatsoever, are not coercion. I have never defended vandalism, which is a violation of the property of others. Nor will I defend terrorism, to the extent that it includes harming the person or property of others in non-defensive actions.

There is no principled difference between a law which mandates racial segregation and a law which outlaws it in the private sector. In both cases, the free association rights of individuals are violated, and both should be opposed.

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

Boycotts, for any reason whatsoever, are not coercion.

WHAT?!?

Boycotts ARE coercion. THAT'S THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT. Boycotts are meant to force the target into either changing conduct or collapse. If boycotts weren't coercive. they WOULD NOT WORK.

Claiming that boycotts aren't coercion is like saying that a man with a garrote around your neck, slowly cutting off your air supply, demanding that you do something or else he won't let you go, isn't coercion. Sure you have a choice- obey, or die.

There are all sorts of words I'm thinking to describe you at this point, and I'm going to pick the most kind and generous of them- "blind." You, sir, are so obsessed with anarchist philosophy that, when that philosophy clashes with reality, you become completely unable to see reality.

What's most appalling is that you, who married an African-American, who (unlike me) was actually alive during the height of the civil rights battle, you who have had a first-hand front-row seat to all the evils of discrimination, apparently saw none of it, and apparently refuse to acknowledge that it existed outside of statute law. You seem to think that Government, the evil fairy, waved a magic wand and said, "Let there be race-hatred and segregation," and a Law appeared and established it where none existed before, and that, once the Law was simply slain, the hatred, the segregation, and the violence and COERCION involved would simply vanish through the magic Invisible Hand of the Free Market.

THIS IS NOT WHAT HAPPENED.

It was the hatred of the people- the white people who wanted to keep non-whites "in their place"- that created law to enforce and uphold the segregation they had ALREADY created through violence and terror.

It was the people who DEFIED the law when it was changed, using violence and terror to defy the law when it ordered integration instead of segregation.

It was the people who did everything in their power to make the law a dead letter and to enforce, through nooses, burning crosses, firebombs, chains, shotguns, corrupt law enforcement, corrupt local government, and simple mass intimidation, their views that blacks could not exist in white society except as a permanent disenfranchised laboring class.

And the only thing that broke this cycle was the existence of a federal government, in which the racists were a minority, willing to step in and put a stop to it.

If you can't see that- and if you can't see that undoing the Civil Rights Act will, in several states, return us to those dark days- then you, sir, are quite wilfully BLIND.