I’m familiar with some of Rand Paul’s arguments against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, because I’ve used them myself, years ago, when I was even younger than he is now.
A lot of people are asking themselves what the hell Paul is thinking. Since I used to believe some of what he espouses, I think I can shed some light.
I’m not saying I was right; in fact, my 17-year-old self was quite wrong. But I didn’t believe then the things Paul apparently believes now without reason. And I’m not saying they were good reasons; in fact, my short-lived believe that the Act was a bad idea was based in my own ignorance, naiveté, and lack of empathy.
I thought I was done with looking back on my Ayn Rand days. Oh, well. Clarence Page: "I, too, was a fan of Ayn Rand. Then I grew up."
[Suggested music to go with this post:
["A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission" by Simon & Garfunkel]
How anybody can possibly oppose the Civil Rights Act?
Here’s the libertarian line: Racism is bad. But statism is worse. Private property rights trump civil rights; in fact, the freedom to make money is essential to political freedom.
(We could never have imagined today’s China in 1972-73, the height of my Ayn fixation, but we might have looked to Singapore, Taiwan, or South Korea as challenges to that theory.)
The cure for racism, I believed along with Ayn and with Barry Goldwater, wasn’t the Act. It was the logical operation of pure capitalism. Under a system like that, you just couldn’t afford to be a racist. The market would force you to hire the best people you could find, regardless of race or any other prejudice.
Here’s where the naive comes in. At the time I knew very few people who weren’t white, middle-class, Catholic, and two or three generations removed from European immigrants. I had little but my own experience to go on. And what can I say: While other kids were reading Black Like Me, I was reading Atlas Shrugged.
It’s easy now to poke holes in the Rand/Paul/Goldwater view of civil rights. How do you get to the point where you must hire the best, regardless of race, when people of certain races or other conditions don’t have the same economic opportunities that you, the default white Euro Catholic, had? You also have to believe in public education. Somebody should ask Paul how he feels about the Brown decision, or about public education itself.
Somebody once said that maybe white South Africa wanted to destroy the black population, but the American South under segregation never did; if not for blacks, who would white Southerners look down on? (Maybe somebody can help me track down the origin of that observation.) Human irrationality often trumps economic reason.
Doesn’t opposing the Civil Rights Act mean you’re automatically a racist? Not necessarily. I do think it helps if you have low empathy and high ignorance. In other words, it helps if you're sort of a jerk.
In his terrific book on Goldwater, Before the Storm, Rick Perlstein points out how Barry harped constantly on the idea that trampling states’ rights to discriminate would inevitably lead to a police state. Perlstein observed that Goldwater didn’t consider that turning dogs or firehoses on people trying to vote, or go to school, showed that police states already existed in the U.S.A.
Ayn Rand and William F. Buckley, Jr. had similar blind spots. The latter at least admitted he was wrong, better late than never.
So I don't think my 17-year-old self was merely naive and intellectually wrong; I see a moral failing which I will conveniently blame on hanging out with the wrong crowd. There was a wilfulness to our ignorance about the Civil Rights Act. It was all a bit too arid and theoretical, too disconnected from reality. Our concern for the "economic rights" of ax-wielding ignoramuses trumped any concern we might have felt for a person who just wanted the simple human dignity of being able to sit at a lunch counter and have a coffee.
Paul, whose full first name is Randal, denies he was named after Ayn. Still, he’s got the true-believer glaze in his eyes. It’s an expression of utter certainty behind a hidden agenda, and I think it’s what made my wife, seeing him for the first time on our tee-vee machine months ago, say, "He doesn’t look like somebody I would trust."
Like his father, Rand Paul also seems to have a soft spot for a rhetorical technique that just kills whenever you want to float a radical new idea: State is as if it were something obvious, something that everybody sees the truth of, and then pour on the shock, outrage, and condescension when you’re called on it. His comments on BP strike me as a classic example. If I were coaching him, I would tell him that I’d tried that debating technique in my adolescence and never really got anywhere with it.
This post is descriptive rather than prescriptive. I wouldn’t know the first thing about what to do in Kentucky. I hope somebody can use it to help advance progressive causes and defeat the GOP/glibertarian/teabagger continuum.
I’m going to keep it short this time (for a change). Looking forward to comments.
Updated to include the music link, and the link to my LiveJournal.