PC-tarianism

For all its internecine squabbles, the libertarian movement has thus far managed to remain relatively insulated from the leftist cultural phenomenon known as PC, or Political Correctness. The reason is not difficult to isolate. The underlying premise of Political Correctness is the belief that the essence of every individual is his or her collective association with a group - a race, a gender, a sexual preference, a religion, a medical affliction - and that membership in that group fundamentally defines his or her interaction with all other levels of society, which is to say other collectively identified groups. In such a setting moral right and wrong is taken to derive not from acts infringing upon the rights of individuals or causing them injustice and harm, but rather acts that are perceived to infringe upon group identities and group sensibilities - including group sensibilities taken to a radical extreme in which even the most obscure perceived slight is construed as "racist," "bigoted," "homophobic," and simply social taboo. And as is typical of such social paradigms, certain persons are also designated the victims of history, the perpetually oppressed, though not as individuals but rather through their membership in a certain collective group. And for every perpetually oppressed is a perpetual oppressor group, compared to which no greater evil exists.

Starting to sound uncomfortably familiar? Substitute the word "class" for "race," "proletariat" for "black/gay/hispanic/non-Christian," and the word "bourgeois" for "rich white male" and you get a better picture from whence the nonsense of Political Correctness originates, and why it exists in such self-evident contradiction with libertarianism.

Yet the PC bug is a pernicious one, and it too has started to infect our movement. Its carriers come with little surprise, though two particular PC-tarians have been unusually aggressive of late: David Boaz and Tom G. Palmer. Boaz has long toed the politically correct line, dating back almost a decade to his bizarre Jesse Jacksonite crusade against the Mississippi state flag over its Confederate imagery. And readers of this blog already know of Palmer's bizarre Confederate fixation, which rears its ugly head even when such a topic is neither appropriate to the discussion at hand, nor even relevant to the muddled point he seems to be making. Each also recoiled in feigned horror over the manufactured Ron Paul newsletter "controversy," which "offended" them far more than even the most statist elements of the tax and spend big government socializing Bush and Obama administrations. (In fairness, Boaz assures us that he does not ever vote for candidates who support the Warfare-Welfare state or trample on personal liberty...he just donates to their campaigns instead). But today's Boaz rant, promptly endorsed by Palmer, was far more insidious, in that it attacked a fellow libertarian not for anything he said that may have been construed as offensive. Instead, the Palmer-endorsed Boaz screed attacked its target for what he did not say (and what he had no reason or need to say as it was of little relevance to his point).

Boaz's point of outrage? An innocuous column by the Future of Freedom Foundation's Jacob Hornberger on the decline of individual liberty in America. Boaz's objection centered around Hornberger's demonstrably valid contention that the United States of the 19th century was generally a time of smaller government, freer markets, and less overbearing and omnipresent federal intrusion into the daily lives of its citizens. To make his point Hornberger referenced a widely revered historical figure, that most libertarian of the primary founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson. What, precisely, was the offending passage? Evidently the following:

First of all, let’s talk about the economic system that existed in the United States from the inception of the nation to the latter part of the 19th century. The principles are simple to enumerate: No income taxation (except during the Civil War), Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, economic regulations, licensure laws, drug laws, immigration controls, or coercive transfer programs, such as farm subsidies and education grants. There was no federal department of labor, agriculture, commerce, education, energy, health and human services, or homeland security.

And just what was so wrong with that passage, and with citing Jefferson? Well as any PC Nazi will tell you, by simple omission Hornberger defied the PC paradigm in which all of American history is a pattern of weaker groups exploited by strong, wealthy, greedy, white males. Since Boaz evidently subscribes to that PC paradigm, he finds a fault in Hornberger's silence on slavery. And he then uses that silence to lump Hornberger into some sort of association with all those dirty rotten "neo-confederates," whatever that may be (other than a not-so-vieled pejorative reference to the Mises Institute, which Boaz gratuitously inserts in the middle of his discussion) who join "organizations" and argue that the Union win in the Civil War was a bad thing on the net for liberty. Mockingly, Boaz queries: "Did Mr. Hornberger really forget that 4 million Americans were held in bondage when he waxed eloquent about how free America was until the late 19th century?" Though he quickly backed away from further implying Hornberger to be a closet slaveocrat, simply asking this question cannot be construed as anything but an insult. Not to mention a suggestion that Hornberger has violated PC norms - a suggestion that Boaz reaffirms several times over by qualifying any and every good thing Hornberger has to say about the smaller government of the past with the usual list of all the classes and groups and ethnicities and sexual preferences that didn't get to enjoy all that liberty.

Now Slavery is an unconscionable wrong to any thinking libertarian. It's wrong is also so self-evident that Boaz's very line of questioning exudes all the intellectual sophistication of the Keith Olbermanns and Al Sharptons who pretend to see a sheet and a burning cross behind every critic of Obamacare...or Obama for that matter for no other reason besides the fact that Obama is black. And that is what makes Boaz's attempt to tar Hornberger so noxious. Nothing in Hornberger's column actually merits the scorn Boaz heaps upon him over slavery, and yet Boaz finds a "sin" in the very absence of evidence that such a "sin" was committed.

What's worse though is Boaz is even being dishonest about Hornberger's supposed neglect of historical slavery. True, it was not the subject of the column to which Boaz responded. But Hornberger has written about historical slavery many times before, and in strongly critical terms. Here is what he said about slavery in another column only a few weeks before the one Boaz found so objectionable:

The neocon mindset about Muslims is much like the mindset of plantation owners in the Old South. As long as the slaves were obedient, respectful, and subservient, everything was fine. Oh, sure, slaves would periodically complain about their condition in life but, by and large, such complaints were considered acceptable. What was not acceptable was resistance and opposition to slavery itself, especially when it turned violent. That was when a message had to be sent. Such an uppity attitude simply could not be tolerated.

Clearly then the root of Boaz's objection is not any legitimate quibble over Hornberger "forgetting" about slavery, but rather that Hornberger did not make slavery the singular focus of his historical discussion as the PC paradigm dictates.

But even to Boaz's rather shaky point there is a flip side. For all the fault and complicity to be found in the government-sustained institution of slavery, it is also a disservice to history to allow that fault to perpetually overshadow and thus forever taint the very real beacons of liberty and limited government we may find by looking to the American past. At stake is no less than the question of whether the events of 1776, in casting off perpetually warring, colonizing, and tax-feeding leviathan, may be considered a human advancement in the classical liberal concepts of free markets and free and limited government. If we cast aside all forerunners such as Jefferson, and dismiss the generally limited government and free market liberalism of the pre-20th century America for its fault of slavery, and if we embrace a need to ostracize other libertarians not for any actual defense of slavery but for the contrived "sin" of omission found in failing to incessantly harp upon it throughout all discussions of liberty throughout American history, then with what else does that leave us?

Stated differently, if we must always and explicitly qualify every instance historical liberty with its most egregious historical violations simply for the sake of paying those violations deference whether doing so is germane to the discussion or not, we also effectively taint and negate any value that may be gained in a comparison to the freer particulars of the past. In doing so we also necessarily resign ourselves to a position that true individual liberty is unattainable, for we are qualifying every past instance of liberty's existence, and every libertarian characteristic that the early American republic actually did exhibit, by reducing them all to the moral equivalence of that same republic's least free attribute. Boaz may not admit as much, but he spends his entire screed skipping, hopping, and dancing around this very conclusion.

It is no mystery why libertarian thinkers of much greater intellectual capacity than either Boaz or Palmer could make this distinction in their own day, even when dealing with the very same subjects that Boaz and Palmer now employ in their PC meanderings. They recognized what Boaz and Palmer do not - liberty is not a sales pitch to the slothful minds of modern political discussion, consumed in fraudulent outrage and hyper-emotional displays of offense and "hurt" over matters of frivolity.
It is not a trendy affectation of self-proclaimed enlightenment, meant to cultivate a personal image of sophistication and acceptable company. Liberty is an inherent condition of the individual, and its presence or absence is measured by that individual's relation to his fellow man under the auspices of that which asserts itself to govern him.

Even the great libertarian Lysander Spooner recoiled in horror at the outcome of the Civil War and the loss of the Confederacy - not because he disagreed with that which it affected of slavery, namely his lifelong quest for its destruction, but because it came about through authoritarian means and at a much larger and distinctly un-libertarian price. The reason for his objection was found in government, the antithesis of liberty:

"Who, but such usurpers, robbers, and murderers as they, ever established slavery? Or what government, except one resting upon the sword, like the one we now have, was ever capable of maintaining slavery? And why did these men abolish slavery? Not from any love of liberty in general - not as an act of justice to the black man himself, but only "as a war measure," and because they wanted his assistance, and that of his friends, in carrying on the war they had undertaken for maintaining and intensifying that political, commercial, and industrial slavery, to which they have subjected the great body of the people, both black and white...There was no difference of principle - but only of degree - between the slavery they boast they have abolished, and the slavery they were fighting to preserve."

One need not look far for clues of what Boaz might say of Spooner if their lifespans traversed, as it would probably consist of "reminding" the lifelong abolitionist that he had "forgotten" about the 4 million slaves.

Or what would Boaz say of Lord Acton, who in 1866 wrote Robert E. Lee to inform him "I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization, and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo." Judging by his snide remarks, he would probably dismiss the British philosopher as a "self-proclaimed" libertarian and perhaps a "neo-Confederate" engaged in the business of denying the "magnitude" and indeed overarching primacy of all things slavery, all things race, all things class, all things Politically Correct, and all things mired in the overtly Marxian analytical device of labor-reductionism in which an entire "social and economic system" is said to be defined and predicated upon the exploitation of a laboring class, with any and everything else about it that may commend itself to liberty being wholly subordinate and thus subject to dismissal.

But Acton and Spooner were genuine libertarians. They recognized the centrality of the individual's relationship with the state to his own liberty, and could accordingly explore the depth of that relationship beyond its worst (and best) particulars. Boaz and Palmer are PC-tarians who generally share and even occasionally advance on their common ground with liberty, but only through the accident of a mutual disdain for government...at least on paper. To PC-tarians, race and class and gender and religion are conversation stoppers, their finer details and the roles they play in human interaction an unexplorable taboo that must recieve unyielding elevation above all further (and thereby precluding all further) discussion. Hornberger's real "sin" was therefore not that he neglected slavery, but that he pushed the conversation of liberty beyond the constraining effects of the PC paradigm.