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?

... 1. Whether this is true or not, the point is that this survey design is not a good way of measuring that. Rather, it is rigged to produce a predetermined

Personally, I was thinking of Diane Nash, the NSM, SNCC, and the lunch-counter sit-ins. And getting progressively more angry (at both Maddow and Paul) every time she brought them up, and he meandered about a stupid gun rights case rather than pointing out that the lunch-counter sit-ins are a perfect example of non-governmental, grassroots victories against segregation in private businesses. The first big wave of sit-ins started in 1960 and the students repeatedly won the campaigns years before federal intervention was even legally possible. Greensboro’s Woolworth’s was desegregated in July 1960; the Nashville students had already gotten all the downtown merchants in the city to desegregate in May. Because the sit-ins demonstrated, without the help of Federal antidiscrimination bureaucrats, that segregation was immoral and socially unsustainable.

If they sat around waiting for Title II to come along, they would have been waiting 4 more years. Actually, they would have been waiting a lot longer than that, because a greasy racist fuck like LBJ never would have gone for anything like the Civil Rights Act, except for the fact that the cresting social movement, of which the sit-ins were one of the most effective examples, politically cornered him into doing so.

If Rand Paul were capable of answering a question honestly and forthrightly, it would be easy to point out that the sit-ins are a perfect example of what anti-racist libertarians ought to be for; and that invoking the sit-in movement while taking credit away from them and pretending like the federal government somehow gave them the Civil Rights that they bled and died to take for themselves, is an insult to the sit-in movement.

Of course, Rand Paul’s not capable of answering a question honestly and forthrightly; as a political candidate, he answers questions politically.

I can’t speak for Rand Paul. I know that he believes in many things I consider to be stupid and immoral. But I think I can claim to have some passing familiarity with the libertarian philosophy.

Paul’s worldview — the libertarian, anti-government worldview — is that government can never be the solution. That government action is — always — the problem. That the wisdom of the market cures all.

That last bit about “the wisdom of the market cures all” sounds a lot more like what you’d like to argue against than what libertarians endorse. I know many libertarians who have overly rosy views of markets, and especially of business. But I don’t know of any libertarians who believe that individual freedom and market processes are some kind of automatic cure for all social ills. Certainly that doesn’t follow from the claims that came before it — opposition to governmental “solutions” to social problems is not the same thing as denying that social problems exist outside of government, or that anything done outside of government is, therefore, automatically OK.

It is perfectly possible to believe that government is always a problem without believing that it is always “the” problem — There’s no reason why a libertarian has to believe that every social evil derives from statism; the issue isn’t whether all evils come from government, but whether or not government is the right response. When you have a social evil, like (say) whitespread white supremacy in civil society, business and social institutions, etc., even outside of the scope of formal segregation laws, even when those evils don’t come from government, it may turn out that it’s still better to rely on non-governmental forms of social organization in order to undermine or dismantle them, rather than trying to address it through lobbying and electoral politics.

If you want evidence of why someone would believe that, well, there are many reasons, but the history of the Freedom Movement in the South is actually one of the best examples. Opponents of Jim Crow were continuously trying to get antidiscrimination acts through the legislature and to challenge segregation laws in court from 1875 until well into the 1970s (my high school wasn’t successfully integrated until 1973). These efforts at reform through governmental politics failed over and over again right up until the mid-1950s — when they were accompanied by a grassroots social movement that achieved its immediate goals by making repeated and heavy use of community organizing, social and economic pressure campaigns (marches, boycotts, strikes, mutual aid, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, etc.). What I’d argue is that the federal government’s (extremely tardy and extremely reluctant) embrace of desegregation was something forced on it by the struggles and victories of the social movement and the changes in public opinion that those struggles and victories made. Without the federal government there to stand around and take the credit, Jim Crow still could and would have been brought to its knees. By the people who did all the work and put their lives on the line to bring it to its knees — from the MIA and SCLC to CORE to SNCC to the countless local activists and organizers who risked and lost their lives in town after town all across the South. While white politicians like Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Banes Johnson, et al. repeatedly tried to tell them to stop marching, to call off public protests,to dial down local organizing and generally to stop making waves and acting like free people.

He’s perfectly okay with making life hard for those who aren’t white — as long as it’s only business, not government, making the difficulties.

I don’t know what Rand Paul thinks about that, but if this is intended as a general statement about what libertarians believe, it’s both wildly uncharitable and completely wrong.

Believing that government shouldn’t enforce a legal prohibition against segregation is not the same thing as being “perfectly okay” with segregation, any more than believing that fascists shouldn’t be imprisoned or tortured for their political beliefs is the same thing as being “perfectly okay” with fascist political beliefs. The issue isn’t whether or not segregation is morally “okay;” it’s what sort of means you ought to adopt in order to fight such a moral evil — in particular, whether those means should be coercive or consensual, and whether they should depend on politicians, judges and politically-appointed regulators, or whether they should be in the hands of communities and grassroots organization.

But the brave men and women who staged sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters weren’t just doing so to end government-led discrimination.

They weren’t doing it for the EEOC, either. I’m glad you appreciate the bravery of SNCC and other lunch-counter sit-in movements, but you do realize, don’t you, that libertarians have no problem with using exactly that kind of grassroots social pressure and direct action tactics in order to convince business owners that white supremacist policies are both wrong, and ultimately unsustainable? You do realize, don’t you, that many libertarians believe that it’s precisely because of these kind of tactics that the Civil Rights Movement had the revolutionary effects that it had, and that what’s needful is a great deal more emphasis on that kind of social activism, as a better alternative to governmental solutions?

When I look for the heroes of the Civil Rights movement, I certainly don’t see a bunch of grandstanding, Vietnam-bombing white politicians; I see the ordinary people who organized, boycotted, organized car pools to undercut segregated busses, marched in the streets, sang freedom songs, faced down government police dogs and firehouses, organized mass meetings, stood watch and faced down the night-riders in their neighborhoods, spoke out, sat in. I’ll be damned if I give Lyndon Banes Johnson credit for the “solutions” that they fought and died for.

Libertarians don’t hold that without government, markets or civil society would automatically “cure” everything, just by leaving it be. What we do hold is that if there is a problem with civil society, the thing to do is to change civil society, and that kind of change really only comes when it comes from within a culture. The right tools for that aren’t government laws and governmental force; they’re grassroots activism, community organizing, and building a culture of solidarity and disobedience.

... Criminy. Did you just get here or something? It's Karaoke night on LeftLibertarian2. Everybody sing along: o/~ ... -C

... Well, in any case econometric studies of minimum wage laws have the basic problem that the claim about the effects of minimum wages *isn't* that a minimum

... Nobody in this discussion has endorsed a mandatory minimum wage law. -C

... Well, the effect of employment *in the fast food industry* may be negligible, if demand for fast-food is price inelastic. [^1] But, supposing that it is

Like Alex, I’d find it rather odd to start describing a bunch of people who quite often spend all their time talking about Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner and Voltairine de Cleyre, or what Proudhon meant by “capitalisme” in 1860, or Nock’s approach in OUR ENEMY THE STATE or what Rothbard and Hess were writing in 1968 as “neolibertarians.” If these ideas are “neo,” how far back do we need to go to get to the old libertarianism? The Levelers? Lao Tze?

“Neotraditionalist libertarians” might be more appropriate. Also funnier.