You write:

The Constitution gives the federal government ultimate authority over immigration, for good reason, in my view.

Well, but this just relocates the question. If the Constitution delegates authority in such-and-such a way, what gives authority to the United States Constitution to decide the question? (I can write “Open borders and amnesty for all” on a napkin, and then write “THIS IS A CONSTITUTION FOR THE UNITED STATES” on the top of it; but obviously just writing it down isn’t sufficient to actually delegate the authority.)

If the answer is the authorization of a handful of long-dead men, who were a tiny minority of the population even at the time, then I certainly don’t see where they get the right to impose positive obligations on hundreds of millions of people today as to who should properly make decisions about whether or not to forcibly exclude immigrants from homes or workplaces.

If the answer is unanimous consent by the people currently held subject to the Constitution’s provisions, well, clearly, it doesn’t have that, any more than the particular immigration policies have unanimous consent.

If the answer is the authorization of some subset of the people currently held subject to the Constitution’s provisions (say, the majority of eligible voters or somesuch), then, again, the question is what right one group has to dictate terms to the other group, who does not authorize or consent to the terms.

Both here and in my next point, a question for you is whether a federal compact like the Constitution represents a contract, obligation, and statement of purpose that carries significant weight for you, and if so (as I provisionally assume it does), how much.

A contract between whom? If it’s a contract among individual citizens of the United States, or between each individual citizen and the government, then it is certainly nothing of the sort: I never signed it, was never asked to sign it, and have never been expected to sign it before its terms would be inflicted upon me. I expect the same is true for you. Personally, if I had been asked to sign it, I certainly would have refused, if that meant I would not be held to its terms.

If the compact is understood as a contract among something other than individual citizens — say, among the governments of the several states — then it might very well count as a contract, but then it’s entirely unclear how it gains any authority to settle political questions for either individual citizen, or would-be immigrants, unless some other compact, contract, or other relationship independently establishes an obligation by those individual people to the governments of the several states. I for one never authorized any of the several states to act as my agent, or to contract obligations on my behalf, so if they have a binding contract amongst themselves or with the federal government, then I still don’t see, as yet, how that has anything to say about who I may or may not welcome onto my own property.

Taking care not to imply that immigrants are a “bad”, there’s still the possibility that one locality’s decision will affect its neighbors willy-nilly in ways they perhaps should not have to accept.

I’m not clear on what you have in mind here. Could you be more specific what kind of effects you have in mind that people should not have to accept?

I mean, after all, suppose that all the people in my neighborhood (E. Rochelle Ave.) want to have a very welcoming policy towards would-be immigrants, while all the people the next neighborhood over (University Ave.) wants to keep them all out. If we voluntarily choose to invite immigrant guests into our homes and apartments, to rent or sell land to them, to invite them to work in our shops, etc., while the people on University choose to turn them away, refuse to rent or sell to them, refuse them employent, etc., and if the different policies in each neighborhood are consistently respected, then how exactly does our welcoming policy on Rochelle “affect … willy-nilly” the exclusionists over on University? The immigrants won’t be in their homes or workplaces or renting neighboring property. The only effect is that if people from University want to come over to Rochelle, then they will encounter the immigrants that we have invited to live and work with us. But while I sympathize a great deal with people having to deal with unwanted effects on their own property or in their own communities, I have very little idea why I should care about whether or not people in one neighborhood get their way about how other people should use their own property or what communities other than their own community ought to look like. If the question is properly devolved, then I can’t imagine how it is any of a University resident’s business how we live over here on Rochelle; let alone any business of somebody in New York or Washington, D.C. who I choose to live or work with here in Las Vegas.

Call me crazy, but “states rights” and “local polity trumps all” seem to me to often be a smokescreen for “let us mistreat people the way we want to, come hell or high water.”

I’m not defending a “states’ rights” position.

While I think that, when there are disagreements between states over immigration policy, different states should be able to enact different policies, I also think that, when there are disagreements within a state over immigration policy, different communities should be able to enact different policies, and different neighborhoods within a community should be able to enact different policies, and, ultimately, different individual people should each be able to enact different policies about the use of their own homes and workplaces. I agree that many people who have defended “states’ rights” position use it as a smokescreen for shitty treatment of other, less powerful people within their state. But that’s precisely because they stop devolving the question once they get to the level of the state. Thus, for example, defending the right of states to peacefully secede from the jurisdiction of the federal government, but then turning around and insisting on the supposed right of state governments to brutally crush any efforts by enslaved Southern blacks to peacefully secede from the jurisdiction of state governments or their local taskmasters. The problem there was too little devolution and secession, not too much.

My whole point, on the other hand, is not to fetishize the claims of any particular level of centralized political authority (such as state or even municipal governments), but rather that the question should be devolved downward until you reach genuine consensus on the localized question — if necessary down to the neighborhood; if necessary down to the individual property-owner.

Thus, on the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, I think that the right approach for Northern whites to take would have been, first, the Garrisonian strategy of cutting all political ties with the slaveholding states — thus allowing for the repeal of all Fugitive Slave Laws in the North, removing Northern bayonets from the Southern slavers’ arsenal, and moving the line of freedom from Canada south to Ohio. And then, second, the Harriet Tubman and John Brown strategies of aiding slaves in their efforts to escape slavery, instigating and providing aid to slave uprisings, and aiding efforts to create autonomous Maroon communities within the South. That is to say, strategies that focused on solidarity with black people struggling for their own freedom, rather than strategies which focused on white political prerogatives, or on “saving” black people from slavery through the outside intervention of a white-led, white-manned, white-controlled military engaged in a conventional war of invasion and conquest. Solidarity-based strategies like those proposed by the radical abolitionists could, I think, have ended slavery with substantially less bloodshed (and especially less collateral damage against non-slaveholding Southern whites), and with substantially more empowering results for Southern blacks who had been empowered to fight for and win their own freedom, rather than having to depend on the goodwill, ongoing concern, and military campaigns of Northern whites for it. Indeed, I think that those strategies probably could have averted the dreadful century of immiseration, dispossession, lynch law, and American apartheid that ended up following the formal emancipation, precisely because the Northern white political and military apparatus ended up dropping that goodwill and that concern, and selling out Southern blacks, in the name of “reconciliation” with Southern whites.

To return to open immigration and “undercutting legal labor markets,” I think there’s a basic problem in the way you’re framing the issue. It’s true that, under certain circumstances, when large numbers of poor immigrants move to a particular community, the average wage for existing native-born workers will tend to go down as a result of competition. But the average wage for the immigrant workers goes up from what they could have expected had they not moved; after all, that’s generally why poor immigrants move long distances to begin with. But the status of the native-born workers as “legal” residents can’t be used as part of the justification for making a legal distinction between native-born and immigrant workers, without simply making the argument circular and thus begging the question. And if we are discussing some other difference between the two — like a difference in nationality, or language, or ethnicity, I don’t see how any of those could make the standard of living among the relatively more privileged native-born workers somehow more important than the standard of living among the relatively less privileged immigrant workers. Certainly U.S. workers deserve a decent standard of living, but so do Mexican workers, and it’s not at all clear to me why the former should be able to force the latter out of the country in order to support their own standards of living at the expense of Mexican workers’ standards of living. I think there is no way to treat this sort of market dynamic as a reason for excluding Mexican workers (say) except by tacitly or explicitly accepting the nativist premise that the lives an livelihoods of U.S. workers somehow matter more than the lives and livelihoods of Mexican workers, just because the one group are from the U.S. and the other group are from Mexico. Which claim I find morally and politically indefensible.

(For myself, I’d say that the best solution is to empower all workers, regardless of race, nationality, language, ethnicity, or any of the other lines which are used to divide us. But that’s best accomplished by means of fighting unions that organize the entire working class, and by transnational labor solidarity, not by means of political gamesmanship and immigration policies which protect the wages of one group of workers only by means of screwing other, even more vulnerable and exploited groups of workers out of homes and jobs that they’d otherwise be able to get.)

Does that help clarify?

Thoreau,

Thank you for your kind words. I’m glad if you found what I wrote useful.

I understand that it’s easy to get defensive, and hard to know how to deal with the conversation, when something like the rape culture comes up. It’s natural to want to defend yourself when it seems like you’re being implicated (morally, if not legally) in crimes that you didn’t personally commit, and which you personally would oppose and condemn. What I’d want to say is that — while obviously I can’t speak for people that you’ve talked to and I haven’t — I know that, in my experience, most feminists who talk about a rape culture are much less interested in ripping on random men than they are on trying (1) to shake up a settled power and a kind of institutional inertia among the administration, (2) to make certain kinds of unhelpful responses to rape (apathy, victim-blaming, etc.) publicly unacceptable, and (3) to make it clear to their audience (sometimes men, but also, keep in mind, other women on campus) how certain sorts of danger and violence, imposed on women by a hard to identify but always present subset of the men on campus, are connected to a broader set of issues. There’s a necessary element of urgency, and impatience, and of very real and very justified anger, which may make something seem like a personal accusation when it’s not really intended as such, and would be better understood if not taken as such.

Robin Warshaw wrote a very good book, some years ago, called I Never Called It Rape, which offers a good overview of some of the research on acquaintance rape and offers a gentle introduction to some of the feminist critique of rape myths, and the role of common norms in heterosexual dating and sexuality, in particular, and rape culture. (By “gentle” I mean it doesn’t presuppose much about your ideological or academic background. It’s an unpleasant book to read, given the topic.) It may help explain in more depth part of what I’m talking about, in one area. It also provides a good walk-through of Mary Koss’s 1985 study of rape on college campuses, which has been the object of quite a bit of ill-founded, uncharitable, and sometimes downright dishonest criticism, including an unfortunate amount of it in self-described libertarian forums.

One thing I should note is that in my post and in these comments, I’ve mainly been talking about one direction of causation: the way in which certain social phenomena may be unintended ripple-effects of the prevalence of rape and the threat of rape. But feminist who write about a “rape culture” have something to say about both directions of causation: they think that what they call a “rape culture” is not only partly the effect of rape, but also a contributing cause, in that it promotes cultural norms that partly motivate rape (and encourage rapists to justify their crimes to themselves), makes it easier for rapists to act with impunity, encourages non-rapist men to dismiss or smear rape victims and make excuses for rapists, and very strongly discourages women from speaking out about their experience of rape except in those limited cases where it conforms to a stereotypical script and serves the interest of one group of men as against another group of men. So the view is not just that rape culture is the effect of rape, but that the two are mutually reinforcing of each other.

Hope this helps.

Dain,

I don’t like being in either the position of being feared, or in the position of being depended on for protection, either.

I don’t mean to suggest that male supremacy is all a bed of roses for men. Patriarchy Hurts Men Too ™, and all that. But the reason I’m willing to endorse Brownmiller’s claim, that the threat of rape redounds to the benefit of men as a class, including (especially) those who don’t actually commit rape, isn’t because playing the role of a “protector” is supposed to be pleasant in itself. Truth be told, it is pleasant for many men, or at least ego-stroking, and a lot of men have historically been quite explicit in expressing how much emotional satisfaction they get from providing for and protecting their wife and children. But that’s not the main point here.

The more important point has to do with ripple effects, and (1) the indirect payoffs that come from assuming the social role that men, as men, assume, as well as (2) the disadvantages that restricted mobility in physical space imposes on women, as women, vis-a-vis men.

Taking (2) first, living with certain spaces or times closed off to you by the threat of physical violence, without being able to safely and comfortably walk through many public spaces in a big city, or in certain male-dominated spaces (certain kinds of workplaces, certain kinds of clubs and bars), or much of anywhere at night has direct effects on what you can and cannot realistically do with your time. The lack of freedom that comes from the realistic fear of rape, sexual harassment, and other forms of sexual aggression directly effects women’s ability to participate in civic life, in politics, and in certain kinds of work. It has direct effects on women’s prospects for business, on women’s prospects for work, on where and when and with whom they can socialize, and in any number of other ways on their economic, social, and political participation. It also has indirect ripple effects: the effects of living with constant warnings and a constant feeling of confinement, as well as the effects of having to find, please, and satisfy the Right Man in order to safely navigate everyday situations that most men have no worries about navigating. (It’s worth considering how much of stereotypical American femininity is linked, either directly or indirectly, with the threat of rape and with the need for male “protectors.”) That works to the systematic disadvantage of women, which means that it works to the systematic advantage of certain men who are, or would otherwise be, in competition for jobs, promotions, socio-political status, etc. (The connection between the traditional “protector” role and the traditional “provider” role for the male “head of household” is not accidental.)

As for (1), those indirect payoffs have largely to do with the way in which women are socially expected to defer to men, both in public forums and in interpersonal relationships, and to focus on finding, pleasing and satisfying the Right Man. How women are expected act as sexual “gatekeepers” and not to be assertive about their own sexual desires, and to have a sexual experience more or less on the man’s terms. Also with corresponding, often subconscious entitlement that men have acted on and continue to act on. Expectations used to be very strong, and quite explicit in social norms; in these days — by which I mean the last 40 years or so; the change was very dramatic and quite recent, in the grand scheme of things — we have largely shifted towards unspoken, or covert versions of the same thing. But they are still there. If you see more or less what I’m talking about in your own life and the lives of people you know, then that’s what I’m trying to point out when I endorse Brownmiller’s claim that stranger-rape serves to promote male power and male privileges over women — even, or especially, the power and privileges of men who do not themselves commit rape. If you don’t see it, then I’ll just plead that I don’t have the talent or the space to really get you to see it within the space allowed by a blog post or a comments thread. What I’d want you to take away is an some idea, even if only in rough outline, of the kind of stuff I mean when I say that non-rapist men get concrete privileges out of the violent undesigned order that arises from the violence of male rapists against women. For a fuller and more convincing elaboration of the specifics, I’d just have to point you to extended treatments in the feminist literature, starting with Brownmiller’s book itself–which, after all, only had a few short summary paragraphs quoted and discussed in the course of my post–and with other work that discusses sexism in contemporary language, media, culture, sexuality, etc. My post wasn’t really intended to give you a full panoramic view of Brownmiller’s theory of rape, let alone her whole theory of patriarchy; my aim was just to help point certain of my readers towards the right lens to use when you try to get the view.

I don’t know why this would be any more beneficial for males in general than would the negative actions of some blacks be beneficial to all blacks.

This is really a separate issue. The reason that white stereotyping of black people as violent or criminal — and the fear that results — is harmful to black people is that that fear is projected onto all black people, and then used by politically and socially well-connected white people to justify individual practices and large-scale policies that hurt black people (e.g. economically deserting certain neighborhoods, or the racist War on Drug Users, or increasingly violent policing and punitive imprisonment). There’s no real equivalent in the situation between men and women as depicted by Brownmiller. Firstly because the fear is not universally projected onto all men, or at least not equally onto all men. (The key move in her theory has to do with men who are seen primarily as protectors, rather than as rapists.) Secondly, because the fear of rape is not usually used to justify increased violence against men as such. (After all, it’s men, not women, who have the advantage in terms of access to economic and political resources; so women’s response, by necessity, is to depend more upon the “good” men as a defense against the bad, rather than to push through policies and practices that punish the “good” men along with the bad.)

Hope this helps.

Micha:

I have never heard it claimed that the terms “hard-working” and “law-abiding” are Southern strategy code words,

They are. They’re especially closely associated with Nixon- and Reagan-era efforts to pull in working-class, often unionized white men (“hardhats,” “Reagan Democrats,” et al.) for the Southern Strategists’ racially-charged anti-welfare and Law-n-Order kicks.

Try thinking about it in reverse, if that helps. “Hard-working” and “law-abiding” are deliberate contrast terms for “lazy,” “shiftless,” and “criminal.” These terms were all deployed with pretty clear racial dimensions during the political debates in question.

(Personally, I’m all for an anti-welfare kick; but the Law-n-Order kick has been one of the single most politically toxic positions in mainstream American politics for the past several decades. And in either case the deliberate use of racial resentments for political ends is a nasty business.)

Maybe that’s why I can’t get into thick libertarianism: it sounds like a totalitarian nightmare to me.

Yes, you got it, it’s just like that, except without the totalitarianism.

Getting criticized over the alleged social connotations of your word choice, in light of recent political history in America, is not “totalitarianism” by any conceivable stretch of the imagination. In real totalitarian states people are jailed or killed over the language that they use. Get a grip.

You may not like a particular practice, but there’s no need to use this kind of melodramatic language to describe it. Particularly not when the melodrama distorts the position that you actually intend to criticize. (There are no left libertarians who believe in government speech restrictions. If someone believes in that, they’re not a left libertarian, but rather something else.)

For what it’s worth, I suspect that part of the reason Mumia Abu Jamal personally got so much attention has to do with simple organizational dynamics.

Mumia was a Black Panther and then a well-known activist and radical journalist in Philadelphia. He was a member of a number of groups, and in contact with a number of other groups, which (out of necessity) already had well-developed mutual aid and support networks for imprisoned members. That gave him a number of pre-existing and pre-organized advocates, and, not coincidentally, he also got a good lawyer (Leonard Weinglass) with a history of making hay out of politically-charged court cases. All that, combined with his own gifts as a writer and a speaker, and his ongoing stream of writing and speaking from death row, kept his case on the radar long enough for it to be picked up and talked up at length by high-profile supporters like Rage Against the Machine. (Mumia’s history as a Black Panther also helped him out a lot here, since the anarchist revival in the late 1990s brought a lot of sympathetic attention to the Panthers and other radical New Left groups.)

As far as I know, Cory Maye had no real pre-existing support network other than his family, until Balko started writing about the case. Given the situation, frankly, the amount that Radley Balko has been able to accomplish single-handedly on this case, without any significant pre-existing network behind Cory Maye, is inspiring and nothing short of heroic.

This may not entirely explain why Mumia in particular got so much more attention than even other Leftist “political prisoners” in similar circumstances (e.g. Jamil Al-Amin, or Leonard Peltier). I expect that part of it is just that these cases come and go in popularity, and Mumia’s came in at a time when the radical and anarchist Left had (for other reasons) was making a momentary and unusual flash appearance in pop culture. Before Mumia’s case was The Big Thing, Leonard Peltier’s case had been The Big Thing, but the people supporting him didn’t have much media presence. After Mumia’s case was The Big Thing, other cases became The Big Thing in leftist activist circles, but by then the post-9/11 regimentation of popular culture was going on, and things in the media were settling back down to the old permanent war-footing pattern, which required erasing the radical Left.

As far as the “murkiness” of the case goes, personally, I’ve never made any serious attempt to find out whether or not Mumia Abu Jamal shot that cop. Reason being that I don’t care. I’m not Mumia’s priest and I’m not his lawyer either, so my only concerns in this case are (1) that the State shouldn’t murder him in retaliation, no matter what he may or may not have done; and (2) that if he did shoot a cop in an attempt to defend his brother from getting arrested, he was probably justified in doing so. Of course, that’s an argument that you can’t make in court these days, so understandably, but unfortunately, most of the people lined up behind him exhaust a lot of time and energy on arguments that are really, morally and politically speaking, irrelevant.

Constant,

I agree with you that any value other than non-aggression could, when combined with the notion that it is O.K. to use the State to enforce values other than non-aggression, lead to aggressive actions or policies. Anti-racism included.

You also don’t have to convince me that government-imposed antidiscrimination policies are harmful. I think everything unjust is (therefore) harmful, and that they’re harmful in other ways besides the fact that they’re unjust. (Although we might disagree on the exact details as to why, I don’t think we’d disagree in a way that matters for this discussion.)

However, I think that there is good reason to say that a belief in natural orders of superior and inferior social rank, based on race, are more conducive to aggression than a belief in social equality among people of different races. It could quite easily be argued that it takes a bigger inferential step to get from “Racism is a social evil” to “The government should make specific policies to force people not to promote that evil” than it takes to get from “White people are naturally superior to black people and should be in a socially dominant position to them; black people who are not submissive are vicious and dangerous” to “The government should make specific policies to enforce white dominance.” I don’t think that in either case the premise logically necessitates the conclusion (without auxiliary principles), but an independent belief in the propriety of the State as a means of social change has more of a leading role to play in the first case than it does in the second case.

For what it’s worth, I also think that there are other reasons why racism is vicious and not merely foolish. The precise reasons why generally depend on what we’re discussing (prejudiced attitudes or beliefs? exclusionary actions? antagonistic actions? etc. etc. etc.). Part of the issue here is that I think there are things that are naturally classed as examples of racism, and not easily divorced from the fact of the perpetrator’s racism (for example, racist harassment, slurs and insults) which I regard as vicious, and which are very widely regarded as vicious. I don’t know whether Arthur means to deny that acts like these are vicious (if not, why not?), or whether he means to say that they are vicious, but should not be classified as a part of racism. So I’m asking him to clarify what he means to say about cases like those.

I might prefer to have a female secretary. If this is not as legitimate as preferring to marry a woman, why not?

I don’t know what you mean by “legitimate.” Are you asking me whether or not this is within your rights, or are you asking me whether or not it’s morally licit for you to do?

If the former, then certainly it’s within your rights. You have a right to prefer all kinds of things. If the latter, well, reasonable criteria for a good romantic partner for you are presumably different from reasonable criteria for a good secretary for you, and I suspect that the former allows a lot more leeway for unargued idiosyncratic preferences than the latter does. While nobody has a right to force you to go along with somebody else’s judgement about what criteria are the reasonable ones, it may very well be the case that they have good reason to suggest that your own understanding of the matter is mistaken, ignorant, foolish, or even vicious. (After all, you might have reason to change your own mind at some point; and if you can have good reasons for differing with your past opinion, then other people could have had those good reasons, too.)

As for whether such a preference really is mistaken, ignorant, foolish, or even vicious, I suppose it depends on what your reasons for having that preference are. Most of the historical reasons that men had during the 20th century for preferring women (as such) over men (as such) as secretaries have been fairly sleazy. But any serious discussion of a preference like that will require more details than just its existence.

For what it’s worth, while sexist hiring practices are a serious concern for those who are concerned with gender equality, there are a lot more issues involved than just that, many of which go well beyond exclusiveness in terms of who you want to associate with at your job or on your own property.

Arthur B.:

Racism is at best stupid not immoral.

So you say. But why do you say this? I can think of lots of examples where racism has led people to do incredibly violent things, which I think that you would clearly agree to be vicious. I can also think of lots of examples where racism has led people to do things that, while not violent, were extremely cruel. Do you mean to claim that that’s not immoral? Or to claim that the cruelty is immoral but not the racism which produced and justified it? Or something else again?

The only reason there are historical problems with racism in the US is because of forced integration through slavery (forced for the slaves that is) and then forced integration through the end of segregation (for the rest).

Your account of the history of racism and the law in the United States has an interesting lacuna. Specifically, the period from roughly 1865 – 1965.

For a hundred years of U.S. history black people and white people were forcibly segregated, partly through the use of contractual exclusions made on the market, but mostly as the result of government segregation laws. The connection between the existence of those laws and the prevalence of white supremacism among white people, especially among politically powerful and well-connected white people, was probably not entirely accidental.

However, I might also note that, as an account of “racism” in general, your explanation is somewhat lacking. There are more races of people in the U.S. who have been subject to racism, in its various forms (especially white supremacism) than just black people. The history of white prejudice and oppression against black people is a very important part of the story about American racism, but people of American Indian, Irish, Polish, Italian, Chinese, Filipin@, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Mexican, Central American, Arab, etc. etc. etc. descent have all suffered from racist prejudices, racist exclusion, and at times racist violence, whether at the hands of mobs or at the hands of state, local, or federal government agencies. But it’s very rarely the case that any of these histories involved “forced integration” of any kind prior to the mid-1960s. Therefore, I conclude that American racism and the “historical problems” associated with it probably have at least some explanatory conditions other than what you call “forced integration.”

No I don’t understand why women might want to be treated “equally” with men. Women and men are not “equal”, in fact they are not even commensurate, the whole concept of equality is meaningless here. The closest thing to what you describe would be : treated without regard for the gender… I don’t see why.

Semantically speaking, “equality” is not just used to refer to position within a quantitative range (as in “equal portions”). It’s also often also used to refer to the lack of a particular difference or distinction (as in “treat me like an equal,” or “equal opportunity,” neither of which makes any claim about comparative quantities of treatment or opportunity). So if a woman or a group of women demand equal treatment to men, then what they’re likely talking about, in perfectly good English, is treatment which doesn’t make a distinction based solely on her or their sex.

As for why a woman or a group of women would want that, well, honestly, who cares whether you “see why” or not? Presumably those who are making it have their own reasons, which many of them have explained at length in conversation, in articles, in films, in music, in books, etc. If you have some specific case against those reasons as they have been presented, it would help to explain what you’re taking issue with and why, by engaging with those arguments rather than just playing dumb. If you acknowledge those positions, but have some specific reason to go on insisting on making sex-based distinctions in how you treat other people, whether or not they want you not to make those distinctions, then it would help to explain what are your own reasons for insisting on making those distinctions nevertheless.

William,

You may or may not be aware of this, but many active slavers, among them John Taylor of Caroline, described slavery as an “evil” while simultaneously opposing, both in their words and their deeds, all immediate efforts to end it. “Evil” is a word which has many shades of meaning, and in the 18th and 19th centuries it was far more commonly used than it is today to refer not only to deliberate acts of wickedness, but also to more generally bad conditions such as hurricanes, earthquakes, or general ignorance and folly. Many anti-abolitionists and slavers viewed slavery as an “evil” in the latter sense (in that they would rather be rid of it, but did not believe that white slavers had any immediate moral obligation to stop enslaving the black people that they held captive). Robert E. Lee, for example, was of this school of thought (the letter in which he famously described slavery as a “moral and political evil” was actually a letter primarily devoted to denouncing abolitionism as a doctrine and Northern abolitionists as a group). So was John Taylor of Caroline. So was Jefferson, at times, although at other times he made hypocritical gestures towards a more anti-slavery position. It is either pure ignorance, pure folly, or pure chicanery to try to represent this position (which recognizes no moral obligation to stop enslaving actually existing slaves, and which explicitly prefers the indefinite continuation of slavery unless and until all black people could be ethnically cleansed from their life-long homes in the American South and forced to foreign colonies in Africa) as an anti-slavery position. Real abolitionists in the 19th century were quite familiar with this position (since it was the official position of the American Colonization Society, an organization of which John Taylor of Caroline was an early supporter and officer), and they denounced it furiously. (See, for example, William Lloyd Garrison’s Thoughts on African Colonization.) As well they should have, since the position is, first, racist rubbish, and, second, quite clearly calculated to ease the consciences of squeamish slavers rather than to free those held in bondage. Those who sentimentally wished for slavery to end, somehow or another, in some far-off day which they perpetually deferred in the name of some other goal that justified their keeping slaves in the meantime — as, for example, with John Taylor of Caroline and his dreams of a Negerrein Virginia — no more count as anti-slavery for those idle remarks than George W. Bush counts as anti-war for having said (in his speech announcing the Iraq war) that war is terrible and he longs to live in peace.

This is the necessary context — that is, the context of John Taylor of Caroline’s actual thoughts about the nature of the “evil” in question and what if anything ought to be done to “alleviate it” (short of “wholly cur[ing]” it), and what all that actually meant in practice for the many black people whose slave-labor he himself was living off of while he wrote those lines — that your isolated use of that single quotation, and your frankly outrageous attempt to paint this active slaver as being anti-slavery, omits.

As for your accusations of plagiarism, I thank you for quoting the passages that you claim to have “caught” me plagiarizing. I’ll be happy to let the reader judge whether what I wrote could fairly be described as “plagiarizing” either of the other passages that you mention here.

William:

What is being argued, though, is that the late 18th century system of Jeffersonian republicanism in the U.S. (though indeed marred by the imperfection of slavery) …

Chattel slavery was not some minor “imperfection” marring a fundamentally humane system. It was the central organizing principle of the law and daily life in Jefferson’s Virginia. It was a crime against humanity that sustained a thoroughly hideous cannibal-empire filled with self-satisfied thugs and posturing hypocrites, who lived on the blood and labor of their fellow creatures, and who passed law after law to protect their neo-feudal economic system and fortify their prison camp plantations at government expense. In Jefferson’s Virginia, this legal cannibalism devoured the lives, property, and labor of three hundred thousand souls, about 40% of the entire population of the state. A conversation about early American politics that ignores such plain facts or marginalizes them as “imperfections” in a basically worthwhile system (rather than what they were — the ghoulish essence of the system itself) is bullshit. And bullshit conversations like that ought to be stopped.

Me:

You forgot to add an important qualifier. What you no doubt meant to say was “the decentralized republicanism advocated for white people by Jefferson.”

William:

Of course such a qualifier was hardly “forgotten” as I had acknowledged Jefferson’s fault on slavery from the outset and readily contextualized that grievous fault aside his better characteristics long before you got here. So you return to the slavery canard not to inform the discussion, that discussion already being informed of it, but rather for its conversation-stopping shock value.

No, the reason that I return to chattel slavery is that to describe Jefferson’s slavocracy as “decentralized republicanism” is to carelessly spread an absurd lie. What Jefferson actually believed in, and actually practiced, was decentralized republicanism for white men, patriarchal tyranny for white women and children, and a hereditary, invasive, absolute tyranny accountable to none save God alone for all black people regardless of age or gender. You may as well describe the Roman Catholic Church as a democracy, because, after all, the Cardinals all get to vote on the Pope.

William:

First, by means of comparison between Hamilton’s “views” and Jefferson’s “practice” it appears that you intend to cast the latter as comparatively more offensive.

No, I don’t intend anything of the sort. As I’ve repeatedly said, I consider Hamilton to have been perfectly loathsome, and to be directly responsible for all kinds of political rot. I can’t speak for anyone other than myself, but I’ve never claimed that Jefferson is “worse,” from a libertarian perspective, than Hamilton. I don’t even know how that kind of global comparison would be made — each one was clearly much worse than the other in some respects, and much better than the other in others, and I neither know, nor much care, how you’d make those different respects commensurable with one another to make the comparison.

The reason for linguistically leaning on Jefferson’s practice is that, in addition to being a slaver, he was also a posturing hypocrite, especially on this issue, so the preferences manifest in hisd eeds sometimes need to be stressed over his idle words, when it comes to assessing his character or his legacy.

William:

Second, why the need to constantly qualify Hamilton’s faults …

I don’t.

William:

Why is it not sufficient to fault Hamilton as Hamilton for things he did in and of themselves?

It is.

However, Wilkinson’s original post was about Thomas Jefferson. It was not about Alexander Hamilton at all. My post was about Thomas Jefferson. It mentioned Alexander Hamilton only to explain what a dangerous creep I think he was. Wilkinson’s kind notice of my post was, again, about “Thomas Jefferson’s loathsomely anti-libertarian credentials.” It is only the people trying to apologize for Jefferson who keep insisting on dragging Alexander Hamilton into the discussion, apparently in order to try to change the subject from Jefferson’s anti-libertarian positions to something else — e.g., Hamilton’s Caesarianism, or European monarchy, or the United States Constitution, or just about any damn thing other than the original topic. I responded to some of these comparisons, initiated by you and not by me, by pointing out that American chattel slavery is actually a salient issue in the comparison you’re trying to make, not something that can be waved or set aside, and now, for my trouble, I am told that I ought to be faulting Hamilton as Hamilton rather than comparing him to somebody else. This is really too much. If you want to know my views about Alexander Hamilton or George Washington or the U.S. Constitution or the Whiskey Rebellion or slavery in New York or slavery in the Caribbean or central banking or the Civil War or the Ludlow Massacre or any number of other things, I’ve written about them all, on their own, elsewhere, and I’d be happy to discuss them with you, on their own, in a forum other than this one, but for here and now you should not be surprised that my focus is on Jefferson, not Hamilton, in discussing an article on Jefferson; and you also should not be surprised that if you insist on inserting a comparison with Hamilton into the discussion, I’ll urge that you consider the crime of slavery if that’s one of the salient issues in the comparison. I certainly will not waste my time “faulting Hamilton as Hamilton” in a discussion that’s about something other than Hamilton’s many follies, vices, and crimes.

William:

And that is why I make the claim that decentralized republicanism is a lesser evil than monarchy or other autocracies.

For what it’s worth, I agree with you about this. What I deny is that Jefferson advocated decentralized republicanism, if either the term “decentralized” or the term “republican” means anything at all. What he actually advocated, and practiced, was a form of brutal autocracy for everyone other than his fellow white men.

William:

If you doubt that ask yourself this: is a child inherently marked with evil character if, by pure chance of his birth, he happens to inherit the plantation of his slave-owning father?

No. However, if, as an adult, he continues to spend the rest of his life enslaving those people, even though he had decades in which to legally emancipate them, or simply to treat them as free men and women (by letting them come and go as they pleased, work or not work on what they chose, distributing his unearned lands to the people his father had forced to till, and generally treating them as his equals rather than his servants), and did nothing of the sort for his long life, and continued to live his life of idleness on the backs of his victims and their forced labor–well, then, that certainly does indicate very deep and grave vice in that man-stealer’s character.

William:

But he also advanced in goodness, even on slavery, …

Well gosh, William, that was mighty white of him. But the only way that a slaveholder can “advance in goodness” that matters more than a tinker’s cuss is to stop holding innocent people as slaves. Jefferson didn’t do that. And that’s important.

William:

He called the agrarian trades morally superior to manufacturing based on the fact that manufacturing interests at his time were using the government to subsidize their own existence and tax their competitors abroad.

As opposed to Southern “farmers,” who never sought favors or subsidies for their interests from the United States government.

I don’t know whether you actually intended to endorse this view of Jefferson’s, or merely to explain it. But whether you do or not, it’s worth noting that this is just another example of Jefferson’s posturing hypocrisy. And it’s certainly true that the Southern slavocracy went on for the next three-quarters of a century demanding and getting more and more privileges and protections from the state and federal governments (gag orders, fugitive slave laws, etc. etc. etc.) through the same processes of political back-scratching and log-rolling; something that Jefferson somehow failed to predict.

William:

I’m no expert on Jefferson’s correspondences, but I do know of his influence on the most prominent follower of his agrarian model, John Taylor of Caroline.

Another Virginia slaver and “colonizationist,” who wrote that the abolition of slavery without forced exile for the freed black people, would bring “miseries on both their owners [sic] and themselves, by the perpetual excitements to insurrection,” and that “the blacks will be more enslaved than they are at present; and the whites in pursuit of an ideal of freedom for them, will create some vortex for engulphing the liberty left in the world and obtain real slavery for themselves,” and who had the shamelessness, after a life of man-stealing and useless slave-driving parasitism, to dare to assert that free black farmers, when not forced into exile from their homes, are “driven into every species of crime for subsistence; and destined to a life of idleness, anxiety, and guilt.” Perhaps less of a posturing hypocrite than Jefferson, in the sense that he was rather more explicit and consistent about his belief that the “evils” he condemned were to be remedied by ethnic cleansing, not by emancipation, and, if that wasn’t available, the lesser-evil alternative in his view was for “well managed” slaves who were “docile, useful, and happy,” and a slave-lord “restrained by his property in the slave, and susceptible of humanity.” Taylor is widely considered to have been an important step in the ideological transition from the older Jeffersonian “necessary evil” defenses of slavery to the later Calhounian “positive good” arguments.

You’re making things harder on yourself by bringing up John Taylor of Caroline, not easier.