Should-Read: Jacob Levy: Black Liberty Matters

Should-Read: Jacob Levy: Black Liberty Matters: “‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’… https://niskanencenter.org/blog/black-liberty-matters/

…This was Samuel Johnson’s bitter rhetorical question about the American revolution, and the conflict it identifies has never been far from the surface of American political and intellectual life…. The language of freedom in American political discourse has very often been appropriated for the defense of white supremacy. We have often heard the loudest yelps for liberty among those trying to protect the terror and apartheid states of the Jim Crow south, the quasi-serfdom of sharecropping, segregated schools, miscegenation laws, and the suppression of black votes. Particular types of freedom or particular strategies for limiting governmental power—freedom of association, religious liberty, federalism, bicameralism, and so on—all came to be identified at one point or another primarily as ways to prevent the federal government from breaking the power of white rule….

None of this means that liberty is not a worthwhile, and true, ideal…. [But] those who proclaim their commitment to freedom have all too often assessed threats to freedom as if those facing African-Americans don’t count—as if black liberty does not matter…. Two recent and awkwardly-connected controversies within, and about, American libertarianism.

Nancy MacLean Missed the Story on Libertarianism’s Race Problem: The more prominent is the debate about Nancy MacLean’s book on James Buchanan, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and a founder of public choice theory…. She treats Buchanan as the architect of a decades-long conspiratorial strategy to advance a political agenda that was both anti-democratic and compatible with (indeed possibly supportive of) the maintenance of Jim Crow…. The claims MacLean makes are untrue about Buchanan. But the history of the postwar libertarian movement is rich with moments of flirtation or outright entanglement with the defenders of white supremacy… the explicit sympathy for the Confederacy… Murray Rothbard’s support for Strom Thurmond… Lew Rockwell’s celebration of the beating of Rodney King… the racism… under Ron Paul’s name in… the 1980s and 90s… the insistence on discussing the Civil Rights Act primarily in terms of freedom of association (as if white supremacy in the Jim Crow south were just a private taste that some people indulged), and an interest in freedom of speech that focuses disproportionately on the freedom to indulge in racially-charged “political incorrectness” could all figure in such a book….

But there are ways to neglect black liberty that are subtler than the white nationalism of the Confederatistas. Think about the different ways that market liberals and libertarians talk about “welfare” from how they talk about other kinds of government redistribution…. The white welfare state of the 1930s-60s that channeled government support for, e.g., housing, urban development, and higher education through segregated institutions has a way of disappearing from the historical memory; the degrees earned and homes bought get remembered as hard work contributing to the American dream….

Returning for a moment to the overt white nationalists allows us to also think about the other recent dispute about libertarian politics: the embarrassingly large number of people associated with the racist alt-right who once identified as libertarians, or (even worse) still do. Some of this is just the inevitable sociology of the fringe…. But… the capture of the language of freedom by the defenders of white supremacy and the Confederacy is a major fact about American political language and its history, and there’s a small but vocal group of self-identified libertarians who participate in it and perpetuate it…. Reimagining libertarian politics in light of the truth that black liberty matters will take a lot of intellectual and moral work…