Mike D:

I’m sure you have a well articulated answer for this already, Charles, but can you explain how sit-ins were not trespassing, and did not violate the NAP?

Well, what Roderick said.

But also, even if we bracket the question about the legitimacy of ownership, I think that there’s a good case to be made that sit-ins are a legitimate form of social protest. There’s a long, complicated story about the various different moments of what was going on in a sit-in protest, and how this affects the rights of each of the parties concerned (business-owner, sit-in protestor, and the police called in to haul them off), all of which I’d like to take the time to work out in more detail, but for now, the tentative, short version is that I think what the sitters-in did was a form of de minimis trespass, like shoving ads under someone’s windshield wiper or smuggling your own gummi bears into a movie theater, which doesn’t count as an invasion of the rights of the owner unless you go on to use physical force to try to stay when the owner tries to make you leave.

No matter what the form of trespass, the owner of the property has a right to demand that they leave, and they have a right to have the protestors forcibly removed (within limits of proportionality) if they won’t. But if the protestors aren’t causing any lasting damage to the facilities, aren’t trying to physically fight the owners or the police in order to stay where they are, etc., then I don’t think that there is any act of force that would give the owners a claim for anything beyond the simple removal of the protestor from the scene. So my view is that sit-in protestors weren’t violating rights or moral duties by sitting down, and that lunch-counter owners weren’t violating rights by evicting them, but were violating a moral duty (while evicting was within their rights, what they ought to have done is to take the opportunity to abandon their stupid racist lunch-counter policy).

If the form of intrusion on the business’s property were more intrusive or destructive (e.g. by barging into closed shops or doing some kind of physical damage to the property or by physically blocking other patrons from sitting at the counter, or what have you), then my judgment on the matter might change. Of course, that wouldn’t change my view of the rest of the social movement (e.g. the organized boycotts and public pressure campaigns) that surrounded the sit-in movement.

12:31 PM: s not like if only the mean old racist authoritarian president of the CSA or whoever had said "alrighty I guess y'all can fraternize with coloreds if'n ya wanter" that segregation would've disappeared; it took the violence of the federal government to do that,

Well, except that Woolworth's lunch counters weren't desegregated by Title II.

They were mainly desegregated by the social and economic pressure created by the student sit-in movement and the boycotts that accompanied it. Years before the Civil Rights Act even existed. The Greensboro Woolworth's was desegregated in July 1960, and the Nashville Student Movement won a desegregation agreement from all the downtown merchants in Nashville in May 1960. If they had waited around for the Feds to show up with Title II, they would have been waiting at least four years. (Or, more likely, they would have been waiting forever, because the cultural changes created by their direct action were a major part of what made it even possible for later legislative actions to get through the Democratic Congress.)

1:12 PM: The protests were intended to force a change in corporate policy (which was ultimately successful), they were not aimed at changing laws.

I agree, which is exactly why it's a ridiculous example for Maddow to try to use to prove her point against Paul. The sit-ins are relevant to the conversation, but in exactly the opposite of the way that Maddow (and apparently also Paul, because Paul is a moron and a politician) seem to think: they are a remarkable example of how a grassroots social movement succeeded in dismantling segregation in private businesses without the assistance of federal antidiscrimination laws.

12:07 AM: The libertarian position against militarism is a bit like the Catholic church's position aginst the death penalty. ... It's something they sort of believe in but won't really fight for.

I'm not sure what you expect in terms of "really fighting for" the libertarian position against militarism. It's certainly true that there are many people who call themselves "libertarian" who don't spend enough time talking about anti-militarism or doing antiwar organizing. But, while I have plenty o' problems with outfits like the Mises Institute, I do think the suggestion that they aren't serious enough in their opposition to American militarism is, well, rather eccentric. (One might also mention minor libertarian projects like Antiwar.com.)

Jake Squid:

Which part of “As it relates to the situation in the US,” do you not understand?

Jake, my concern is that your statement is treating the political situation maintained within the U.S. as if either (a) it had no consequences for people outside of the U.S., or else (b) those consequences for people outside of the U.S. just don’t matter for the purposes of evaluating whether or not the situation within the U.S. is a good situation or a bad one. If you meant (a), then what you’re suggesting is simply false: the form of military organization that the U.S. has achieved internal effects in part by creating a structure which has inflicted some really massive costs for the people outside the ring of bayonets. If you meant (b), then I wonder what kind of conversation we’re supposed to be having that that would be the case. Certainly that sort of “better-than” is not the kind of better-than that I care about when I’m trying to figure out whether an institution is a good thing or a bad thing to have around. If you’re evaluating the situation within the U.S. I think you have to look at the costs of that situation as well as just the benefits; gerrymandering out the costs by saying that you only care about costs to people within the U.S. makes me wonder what we’re trying to decide such that those are the only costs that would matter. Shouldn’t the effects on other people outside of the charmed circle also count when you’re deciding what kinds of social organization you’re going to support or oppose?

Whatever the correct interpretation of the claim is, I don’t think you’re making it out of malice or callousness, and I’m sorry if that’s how it came off in my comments. What I think is that you’re compartmentalizing, as many people do, and focusing on the familiar rather than looking at how the familiar depends on a lot of things further away. The upshot of this is rarely to come out as explicitly pro-war, pro-conquest, or pro-invasion, but rather simply to forget about them when talking about an idealized picture of the institutional structure that made them possible. My aim isn’t to smear you; it’s to remind you of something that I think you already know, but that you seem not to be applying.

(As a side bar, “internal” and “external” here are also more complicated than just a geographical distinction of inside-the-country vs. outside-the-country. I mentioned wars of extermination in my previous comment for a reason; more than one campaign of genocide was carried out by the U.S. standing military within the claimed territorial boundaries of the U.S. Actually, so did the mass murder of about a million Filipinos, since the Philippines were claimed as a U.S. territory at the time. The large U.S. army was also used to kill rebellious slaves in the South, and to violently suppress several labor strikes during the Gilded Age. These days, the ever-expanding Military-Homeland Security apparatus is also used to disappear Muslims and immigrants into hellhole “detention centers,” shoot immigrants or drive them into the godforsaken desert where they can die of exposure, and generally to make life hell for anyone in the country who can’t flash transit papers on demand. I don’t consider any of these to be minor matters. It’s not just that the situation only looks good from a standpoint inside the U.S.; it’s that the situation only looks good from a very particular standpoint inside the U.S.. A standpoint which not everybody in the U.S. has been fortunate enough to occupy.)

Well. The primary reason I mentioned the sit-in movement was that Maddow kept specifically bringing it up to beat Paul over the head with it. If she wants to make a point about recent history, I don’t think it’s weird to mention some actual historical data. I personally find that when some episode in recent history is very important to somebody, you can usually get further by showing them how that episode has a different lesson from the one that they took from it, rather than just telling them that they’re wrong to care about anything that’s not happening right now at this very instant.

Also, whatever the status of segregated lunch counters may be these days, it may also be worth mentioning if you think that there might be other social problems right now, or in a future free society, which similar forms of grassroots social activism might help to address. I think history’s worth talking about for its own sake; but it’s also worth talking about because you might be able to learn something from it. Like how to resist pervasive forms of discrimination or oppression without having to depend on laws or bureaucracies. Seems like that might be a helpful lesson for an Anarchist to learn.

Harry834:

Can’t we at least agree that the government should stop the “no blacks allowed” here at both public and private places?

Well, but I don’t agree that government should do that. What I do think is that grassroots pressure campaigns (like those practiced by the student sit-in movement) should stop that.

Agreeing that segregation is immoral is not the same thing as agreeing on the best strategy or tactics for dismantling segregationist institutions. Opposing one particular kind of strategy (e.g. the strategy of dismantling it coercively, by means of federal prohibitions) is not the same thing as opposing desegregation.

Myca:

Why do you think there was such a kerfluffle about the eulogizing of the 1880’s in libertarian circles a few months back?

Myca, I’m not sure whether you meant the “in libertarian circles” to modify “such a kerfluffle,” or to “modify “the eulogizing of the 1880s.” If you meant the latter, then I think this is an extremely uncharitable description of what actually happened. I hope you’re aware that within libertarian circles Bryan was repeatedly called out and heavily criticized for his claims. (See, for example, the responses by Kerry Howley, Jason Kuznicki, Will Wilkinson, Jacob Levy, et al.) If anything, the kerfluffle started amongst libertarians who were calling Caplan out, and then spread outward from there. It’s not like all the libertarians were sitting around having all having a big 1880s Nostalgia Party and then some progressives showed up to criticize what they were doing.

Of course, it’s certainly true that Caplan is one of many in libertarian circles who have said some really shitty things about gender. But I don’t think that libertarian circles are unique in having men in them who have said some really shitty things about gender. I notice that that seems to be a really common problem in a lot of dude-heavy political circles, and something that just has to be handled through critique, through calling people out, and through working to change the internal culture of the circle, pretty much wherever you go.

Jack Squid:

As it relates to the situation in the US… a large state army is so much better than many private armies.

This end of the debate is pretty far off the topic. But this is really too much.

“So much better” for whom? Not for Afghans. Or Iraqis. Or Vietnamese people. Or ….

The United States Army killed several million people just over the course of the past couple centuries, most of them innocent civilians. (This included both wars of conquest and imperial “interventions” abroad, and also wars of extermination against Native Americans within U.S. territory.) This would be completely impossible for them to have carried out without a huge, standing military apparatus, a big tax base to finance their repeated incursions on behalf of U.S. business interests, overt imperialism, superpower geopolitical maneuvering, and genocidal racism. Maybe you think that without the U.S. government’s military apparatus, things would have somehow been even worse than that. If so, I think you ought to give an argument for that position; and you ought to recognize that hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, 4,000,000 dead Vietnamese, etc. have a pretty compelling counter-argument to offer.

Tyro: Yes, actually, libertarians do have a problem with that. Remember what happened to the blacks staging the sit ins at the lunch counter? They were ARRESTED. by the GOVERNMENT.

Right; but who told you that libertarianism means never being willing to put yourself in a position where you might get arrested?

I don’t think that the arrests were violations of the individual rights of the protesters arrested. (Business owners have a right to have people removed from their property.) That doesn’t mean that I think the business owners or police were acting morally by doing so. (In any non-totalitarian legal regime, there are many things that are within your rights to do which are profoundly immoral. things to do.) And it doesn’t mean that I don’t support the protest. Civil disobedience often means deliberately exposing yourself to the risk of arrest. In this case, the point of the protest was to corner the business owners into a position where they had only three choices: (1) do something obviously immoral, by having peaceful people hauled out of the restaurant by the police for no good reason; (2) run their racist lunch-counter out of business by leaving those seats occupied without selling any food; or (3) change their racist policy, by serving the would-be black customers. There is nothing in libertarianism that says you’re obliged not to put asshole property owners into sticky situations like that.

Tyro: The question for Rand Paul is this: he obviously believes in the sanctity of business owners to refuse to serve blacks. Would he be willing to pull the trigger to start shooting at blacks who refuse to recognize that right of the business owner?

Well, that’s an absurd question, if it’s intended to have any real-world application to the sit-in protests. Why do you think that a libertarian would believe that shooting a sit-in protester is a proportional response to an obviously nonviolent person refusing to leave the premises?

Ampersand: So, if it was legal for Mr. Lunch Counter Owner to have a “no Jews allowed” sign, would libertarians say that he should legally be allowed to have such a rule, but he has no right to call the police and ask the police to force any Jews who refuse to leave, to leave?

See above. My view is that an anti-Semitic lunch counter owner has a right to put up the sign, and a right to have the police force you out of the restaurant if you don’t get up and leave. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be willing to stage a sit-in anyway. Nonviolent civil disobedience often means being willing to risk arrest.

Civil activism before the 1950s had a number of victories … Antislavery activism, antilynching activism, voting rights…

Amp, I made a statement specifically about campaigns against racial discrimination (esp. residential, educational, business, and hiring discrimination) from 1875-1955. Not about all anti-racist activism broadly prior to Montgomery and Brown. You seem to have interpreted this as a statement about “a century of anti-racist activism and progress”; it’s not. I’m well aware of the abolitionist movement, and the anti-lynching movement, and the voting-rights movement, although we may differ somewhat on what we think the most important and effective parts of those movements were. I’m also aware of older efforts that challenged segregation ordinances and segregated business specifically, prior to the mid-1950s, and which did so through methods of grassroots organizing (for example, some of the NAACP’s campaigns, the BSCP, etc.). But the victories on that front are few and far between (perhaps you could name some that you have in mind? I’ve got the desegregation of war industries and of the military, and that’s about it), and I don’t think it’s ignorant, or erasing anything, or even particularly controversial, to argue that something important and distinctive happened in the 1950s and 1960s, compared to what had happened before, which radically changed the social and political landscape. My view is that the main difference was the explosive growth (in size, scope, and intensity) of a mass social movement that was willing to use confrontational tactics to directly oppose segregation. Do you have a different view of what made the difference? If so, what?

I am, of course, also well aware that grassroots civil action can attempt to change laws. If laws ever do change in a positive direction, it’s virtually always because of grassroots civil action. But my point is that grassroots civil action can also aim at achieving goals directly, by means other than legislative change. And that the actual historical record of activism against Jim Crow offers a rich history of doing exactly that. Those who claim that without federal antidiscrimination laws, the Civil Rights Movement never would have changed anything are the ones erasing the history of what the Civil Rights Movement actually accomplished prior to 1964, and what they would have gone right on accomplishing with or without the weak face-saving political maneuvers of the Kennedys or LBJ.

Jeff Fecke: Nobody — certainly not me — is denying that ultimately, direct action by people was what led the government to act to secure rights for African-Americans. But the fact is that without the EEOC, integration would be a long, long, long way from where it is today.

But, see, the point is that I deny that assertion. I would argue that the EEOC (and the federal antidiscrimination bureaucracy more broadly) has been largely irrelevant to the process, and is especially irrelevant today, for the reasons that BroadSnark mentions above.

The Civil Rights Movement won a lot of major victories without the help of Title II and Title VII. Including those “brave men and women who staged sit-ins.” My position is, first, that it’s profoundly misleading to act as if libertarian principles are somehow against that kind of social activism (they’re not; in fact, one reasonable understanding of libertarian principles would call for a lot more of that kind of social activism). And, second, that the most important victories were won in the streets, not through lawsuits, and that many of them were won well in advance of anything like the federal Civil Rights Act. Without the Civil Rights Act, what would have happened is not just Segregation Forever; rather, segregation would be dismantled by the conscious social and economic activism that was already dismantling it in Montgomery, Greensboro, Nashville, and throughout all the rest of the South.

shermhead:

You do realize, don’t you, that without government backed forms of redress, like being able to sue businesses who discriminate against African Americans in any way, the Civil Rights Movement would not have been able to change anything?

This is both ignorant and patronizing. Local antidiscrimination fights repeatedly managed to win desegregation during the late 1950s and early 1960s without the help of Title II, Title VII, or any other form of federal antidiscrimination law. The sit-in movement that both Maddow and Jeff Fecke keep sanctimoniously bringing up had already “changed something” by summer 1960 (the Greensboro Woolworth’s counter was desegregated due to pressure from the sit-in campaign in July 1960; the Nashville Student Movement won an agreement from downtown business owners to desegregate the entire downtown business district in May 1960). If they sat around waiting for the federal Civil Rights Act to be able to “actually change anything,” they would have been waiting four more years. Or, actually, they would have been waiting a lot longer than that, since it was their own victories, and the victories of the cresting social movement, of which they were a key part, that radically changed the political and cultural landscape in such a way as to make the Civil Rights Act even politically possible.

That all of the activism would have been for nothing if said businesses could just go blithely along their way, discriminating in hiring or selling of goods/services, until there was a legal means to keep them from doing so?

I just wrote a long passage all about the power of social pressure campaigns like sit-ins and boycotts through which the Freedom Movement actually achieved real-world goals, against the opposition of white business owners, during their campaigns throughout the South. If you think that the businesses facing the sit-in movement “could just blithely go along their way,” then I think you have a funny idea of blitheness. If you think that “legal means” are the only means by which social movements can hold racist businesses accountable, then I wonder why you think that.

You do realize, don’t you, that since the end of the Civil War African Americans could participate in society as equally as their former slave owners but they were kept from doing so by de facto and “on the books” laws that were designed to disenfranchise them?

I don’t know what this lecture is intended to teach me. I’m quite familiar with that historical background. Did you think from my previous message that I was somehow cool with Jim Crow statutes or the terror campaigns of the KKK, WCC, and other similar white supremacist terror cults?

And without legal redress they would still exist today?

This strikes me as confused. I didn’t say anything against the prospect of using legal means to take segregation laws off of the books, or to suppress private violence. What I suggested is that there are other means, besides legal means, for dealing with a distinct but related problem — the problem of how to address discrimination by private businesses when it’s not enforced by a segregation ordinance or vigilante violence. My suggestion is that that sort of problem ought to be addressed by different means. Specifically, grassroots organizing, rather than legal prohibitions.

Not to mention what Buttercup rightly brings up, that discrimination in businesses continues today, based on someone’s genitalia and not just the color of their skin. Your understanding of libertarianism, Rad Geek, has no direct correlation in the real world.

I have no idea what you mean by this. If you mean that my suggestions about resisting private discrimination through social and economic pressure campaigns, rather than through legal prohibitions, have not been tested in the real world, then you’re mistaken. I specifically cited historical examples of important campaigns that were won through these means. If you mean that my understanding of libertarianism doesn’t represent the real history of racial politics in America, then of course you’re right — but criminy, when did I ever say that historical racial politics in America were libertarian? The whole point was to criticize white supremacy from a libertarian standpoint, and to suggest that libertarian principles support the kind of social activism that the sit-in movement engaged in. If you mean that my understanding of libertarianism doesn’t reflect the way things are now, of course you’re right. The way things are now suck, and part of the point of my politics is to try and change that. If you didn’t mean any of these things, then what exactly did you mean?