Jonah Goldberg: Rand Paul's Civil Rights Act Comments Revisited
[Jonah Goldberg writes a column for the LA Times.]
It has already become a cliche on the right to tut-tut at U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul's "rookie" mistake of trying to conduct a "libertarian seminar" during the campaign.
I'm not so sure. For starters, if you're not invested in Paul's political career, why not seize this rare opportunity for one of those much-coveted national conversations on race?
Besides, Paul's not going to lose because of his reservations about some aspects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He's from Kentucky, a very red state. And contrary to what you might suspect from reading the national media, not only has he not made repealing the law the centerpiece of his campaign, he has no desire to do so if elected....
What really makes this debate remarkable is that someone has volunteered to be the straw man liberals are always creating.
It's also proof that conservatives just can't win. During the Bush years, liberals elevated libertarianism as the "good" right-wing ideology, sanctifying Barry Goldwater as the betrayed founding father of a more noble anti-statist tradition than the one presided over by the crazed apostate George W. Bush (whose racial views happened to be more benign than Goldwater's)....
And yet, when a very clearly nonracist libertarian politician merely raises the possibility that Goldwater might have been a teensy-weensy bit right to vote against the 1964 bill (Goldwater had voted consistently for civil rights laws before then), it's an outrage.
For the record, Paul and Goldwater were both wrong. The libertarian position is not to defend Jim Crow but to condemn it, and not just because of its unjust bigotry but because of its economic folly that served to entrench that bigotry.
Paul weeps for the lost right of white businessmen to refuse black customers (even though he rejects the practice himself). But he fails to appreciate the perverse irony that one of Jim Crow's greatest evils was its intrusion on the property rights of whites. Jim Crow wasn't merely some "Southern tradition" undone by heroic good government. Jim Crow laws were imposed by government. And they banned white businessmen from serving blacks (Plessy vs. Ferguson, which enshrined "separate but equal" in the Constitution for another six decades, was largely about how blacks could be treated on railroads)....
Read entire article at LA Times
It has already become a cliche on the right to tut-tut at U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul's "rookie" mistake of trying to conduct a "libertarian seminar" during the campaign.
I'm not so sure. For starters, if you're not invested in Paul's political career, why not seize this rare opportunity for one of those much-coveted national conversations on race?
Besides, Paul's not going to lose because of his reservations about some aspects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He's from Kentucky, a very red state. And contrary to what you might suspect from reading the national media, not only has he not made repealing the law the centerpiece of his campaign, he has no desire to do so if elected....
What really makes this debate remarkable is that someone has volunteered to be the straw man liberals are always creating.
It's also proof that conservatives just can't win. During the Bush years, liberals elevated libertarianism as the "good" right-wing ideology, sanctifying Barry Goldwater as the betrayed founding father of a more noble anti-statist tradition than the one presided over by the crazed apostate George W. Bush (whose racial views happened to be more benign than Goldwater's)....
And yet, when a very clearly nonracist libertarian politician merely raises the possibility that Goldwater might have been a teensy-weensy bit right to vote against the 1964 bill (Goldwater had voted consistently for civil rights laws before then), it's an outrage.
For the record, Paul and Goldwater were both wrong. The libertarian position is not to defend Jim Crow but to condemn it, and not just because of its unjust bigotry but because of its economic folly that served to entrench that bigotry.
Paul weeps for the lost right of white businessmen to refuse black customers (even though he rejects the practice himself). But he fails to appreciate the perverse irony that one of Jim Crow's greatest evils was its intrusion on the property rights of whites. Jim Crow wasn't merely some "Southern tradition" undone by heroic good government. Jim Crow laws were imposed by government. And they banned white businessmen from serving blacks (Plessy vs. Ferguson, which enshrined "separate but equal" in the Constitution for another six decades, was largely about how blacks could be treated on railroads)....