Comments Elsewhere

Roderick: “Well, I guess the first question is ambiguous. If the question is whether racism and bigotry are logically incompatible with libertarianism, then no, I don’t think they are. But I do think racism and bigotry tend to undermine libertarian attitudes (or vice versa); I also think racism and bigotry are wrong for some of the same reasons that statism is wrong. (But then I accept the Socratic unity-of-virtue thesis, so I think just about any two things that are wrong are wrong for similar reasons….)”

I think this is all correct; it might also be worth adding that there are at least some historical cases (and I think also some contemporary ones) where racism and bigotry have been directly connected with specific violent political orders, in more or less the same way that statist propaganda and ideology are connected with state aggression. (Think of the connexion between slavery or lynch law and the and public proclamations of white supremacist beliefs.)

In contexts like that it’s still true that you can be a bigot without endorsing a violation of rights (many white Southerners in the 1950s would be aghast at violations of Jim Crow racial etiquette but did not support Klan or WCC-style violence), but the connexion between the bigoted beliefs and the systematic violations of rights—and so the way in which the bigotry is corrosive to libertarianism—is in some important sense even more direct than just sharing a common (or analogical) fallacy.