William:

… the decentralized republicanism advocated by Jefferson ….

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

The system of rule that Jefferson advocated, and personally instituted, for black people, was not “decentralized republicanism,” but rather hereditary, personal, absolutist tyranny–tyranny of a form almost unparalleled in human history for its invasiveness, immiseration, and ruthless brutality against its unwilling subjects.

Have I been inducted into the Beltwaytarian Illuminati without having heard about it? If so, I eagerly await my imminent influx of cocktail party invites and Kochtopus cash.

ThorsMitersaw,

The declarations of states are not reflective of their citizens …

No, but they are reflective of the opinions of the state governments at the time that those state governments determined to secede.

Of course, many if not most people in many southern states at the time felt differently. For starters, many if not most people in many southern states at the time were black slaves.

The white southerners who fought as common soldiers often had very different views of the import and justification for the war than those held by their governments. But of course it was their governments, and not they, who made the political and military decisions that we’re discussing here.

Charles H.,

I agree with you that any honest review of what the secessionists said (especially what they said at the time of the secession debate, rather than when they wrote their memoirs in the 1870s) would very quickly reveal that the perpetuation and expansion of race slavery was absolutely central to the Confederate cause. However, it would be an ignoratio elenchi to follow that evidence with the conclusion that ending or limiting race slavery must have been absolutely essential to the Union cause.

When people claim that the Southern states had the “right” to secede, what they mean is that a minority– adult white male landowners– had the right to decide for everyone else what form of government they would live under, and whether their basic human rights would be recognized.

I’m sure that when many people claim that, that is indeed what they mean, but I don’t think it’s at all fair to impute that meaning to most of the writers at LewRockwell.com or the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Whatever faults they may have (and some of them have a lot), most of the people in question are anarchists, who believe that no government whatever, state, federal, or other, has any legitimate right to compel anyone’s allegiance. Their point about the right of secession is that adult white male Southern landowners had a right to determine for themselves (and themselves alone) what form of government, if any, they should live under, a right which any principled and honest believer in the principle of government by consent would have to concede they do have. The obvious and hideous atrocity of southern race slavery hardly justifies military invasion and bayonet-point Unionism; what it justifies is the (Garrisonian) strategy of embracing peaceful disunion, and then supporting southern slaves in their efforts to secede from the from the illegitimate government created by their quasi-secessionist slave-drivers.

If you’re not already familiar with it, I’d like to recommend J.R. Hummel’s excellent book, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, which ably defends the Garrisonian-disunionist position and presents a much more accurate and sophisticated libertarian analysis of the war than the stuff churned out by, for example, Tom DiLorenzo or Tom Woods.

PhysicistDave,

I think the issues at hand are a bit more complex than cultural affinities. When I see Yankees like Tom DiLorenzo running around affecting a fondness for the ol’ Moonlight-and-Magnolias, I just find it ridiculous. But when I see them actively distorting history for polemical purposes, in order to whitewash rabid slave-driving statists like John C. Calhoun, Robert E. Lee, or Jefferson Davis (cf. for example 1, 2, 2, 3, etc., not to mention DiLorenzo’s periodic attempts to portray Lysander Spooner, the author of the Plan for the Abolition of Slavery and a conspirator in an abortive attempt to rescue John Brown from the gallows, as an advocate for “peaceful” gradualist emancipation, I think there is something deeper and nastier at work that needs to be exposed and confronted.

Of course, those people who, in the name of “moderation” or “compromise” or politesse, attempt to water down or dissemble about libertarian principles on hard cases, or who try to marginalize radical libertarians for simply for making uncomfortably libertarian points — a group that intersects with, but certainly does not exhaust and certainly is not limited to — the staff at Cato and Reason deserves nothing but contempt for that kind of hand-wringing opportunism. But I don’t think it’s true that that’s the only reason that the Paulitarians and the VMI/LRC crew draw the kind of flak that they draw from within libertarian circles, or even from the Cato and Reason crowds specifically.

GT 2008-02-05: Rapists in uniform, in which an Ohio county sheriff declares that when a woman is thrown in jail on a bogus “disorderly conduct” charge, having a gang of cops, including two male officers, pin her down and strip search her over her screams of protest, and then leave her naked in a freezing-cold cell for six hours, counts as “us[ing] reasonable force to … protect prisoners in their custody.”

<a href=”http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/02/10/the_conservative/>GT 2008-02-10: The Conservative Mind (second Sin Fronteras edition), in which we’re reminded that they’re not against immigrants; they’re just against illegal immigrants!

GT 2008-02-13: Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism, in which your humble blogger appears in print.

Joel,

Oy. I’m afraid you’ve hit on one of my linguistic pet peeves.

An argumentum ad hominem is the fallacy of evaluating an argument based on features of the person advancing it, rather than on its own merits.

If somebody were saying, “Ron Paul is a nasty racist. Therefore, his argument for the gold standard must be bogus,” then that would be an argumentum ad hominem.

On the other hand, if somebody says, “Ron Paul is a nasty racist. Therefore you shouldn’t vote for him for President,” then that’s not an argumentum ad hominem. The issue here isn’t an argument, but rather whether somebody personally ought to occupy a particular political position. Details about the history, personality, and character of a candidate for political office are certainly salient to whether or not you should vote for them, since presumably when you vote for someone you are (inter alia) relying on them to do at least some of what you want them to do while in office, and whether that trust is well-founded depends in part on what sort of person they are.

So while the allegations that have been made against Ron Paul are certainly personal attacks, they are not “ad hominem attacks.” Ad hominem arguments are never cogent. But personal attacks may be uncalled-for or called-for, as the case may be, depending on whether the allegations made in the course of the attack are well or ill-founded.

As far as the allegations that have been made against Ron Paul’s history and character go, I think they’re a pretty mixed bag, but certainly the video doesn’t respond to any of them. Plenty of cornfed military veterans and doctors from Texas have been nasty racists, too. If it’s supposed to be showing that he’s not an ogre, then it seems to me that it’s just evading the issues that have been raised in favor of talking about something else, and then capping it off with a note of adulation that borders on the surreal.

I will say that I have played the video several times nevertheless because I like the old-timey music in the background.

Lopez: Aren’t you saying that a good percentage of movement libertarians are as unreasonable as white supremacists?

Sure, on at least some issues, many if not most movement libertarians are at least as unreasonable as white supremacists are on issues of race.

For what it’s worth, I’d advise keeping minarchists, just to take one example, at arm’s length to much the same extent that I’d advise keeping paleocreep white supremacists at arm’s length. Even if white supremacist in question were professedly an anarchist, I prefer not to rely on the virtue or intelligence of people who demonstrate obviously stupid and evil ideas in other domains. And even if the minarchist were right-on on just about everything except for minimal statism, I prefer not rely on people whose political program will sooner or later involve shooting me.

Libertarian outreach by whom? By me in particular or by libertarians in general?

If the former, then I would find libertarian outreach to leftists much more palatable for me to do than libertarian outreach to white supremacists, because I know how to talk to state leftists in a way that some small number of them will find convincing, whereas I don’t really know how to talk to white supremacists in general, let alone statist white supremacists in particular, and I think it would be extremely unpleasant to learn.

If the latter, then I have much weaker preferences, because I think generally if people are going to do outreach they should specialize in what they are best at. But I would suggest that outreach to state leftists may be more likely to succeed in the long term than outreach to state white supremacists, because both of them tend to share the common cognitive or moral vices of statists (majoritarianism, legalism, constitutionalism, contempt for private property rights), but the state white supremacists tend to add some peculiar vices of their own on top of that (e.g. violent racism or xenophobia). Turning state leftists in an anti-state direction tends to produce anarchists, whereas turning statist white supremacists in an anti-state direction tends to produce paleocons at best.

In either case, I’m not sure what this has to do with the question of whether racism or majoritarianism is (1) more offensive, or (2) more dangerous. I’d rather have dinner with a polite absolute-monarchist than with a very rude individualist anarchist. Not because I think that rudeness is worse than absolute monarchy, but rather because other factors enter into my decisions about who I should dine with. Similarly, decisions about who you should reach out to in your propaganda are not necessarily decided solely based on whose deviations from your position you consider to be the least dangerous or destructive.

Kennedy,

In that is it any more offensive or dangerous than a reverence for majoritarian democracy?

Maybe more offensive; probably not more dangerous. How offensive a particular view is, on the whole, depends on a lot of factors, not merely how dangerous it is to individual rights. Vices aren’t crimes, but they are vices, and sometimes a vicious attitude merits taking offense.

Nobody gets atwitter about advocacy of democracy, so why should racism be any more alarming?

I don’t know what counts as getting “atwitter” or what domain you’re quantifying over when you say “nobody.” Most libertarian writers that I know are fairly contemptuous of majoritarian democracy. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three libertarians whose criticism of Ron Paul (Micha Ghertner’s, Wendy McElroy’s, and Brad Spangler’s) has specifically revolved around how the campaign promotes the myth that freedom can come about through majoritarian democracy.

As for Long, as far as I know, his position is not that racism is somehow worse or more alarming than political majoritarianism. The claim is just that racism is objectionable from a libertarian standpoint, not that it’s more objectionable than something else.

Kennedy,

Here’s the article from the Ron Paul Political Report. The passage about the Rodney King beating in particular starts about a third of the way down: Los Angeles Racial Terrorism.

Along the way the Mystery Writer also tries to poison the well by mentioning that a couple months later the cops caught Rodney King picking up a prostitute (so what?) and that when he tried to get away, he allegedly came close to running down one of the poor ol’ vice cops who so righteously “intervened.”

One of my favorite parts of the article, along the way, is when we’re referred to the testimony of “expert Burt Blumert” as to the role of commie splinter sects in the rioting. Not an “expert” on anything in particular, mind you; just an “expert,” ’cause he’s Burt Blumert. Goes to show that, in some ways, the LRC writing style hasn’t changed much in lo these many years.

Taylor:

However, if I remember right, he tried to argue that racism isn’t really congruent with libertarianism because it violates the NAP somehow.

This is certainly not Roderick Long’s position.

His position is that racism is (1) objectionable in its own right (as irrational and collectivist), and also (2) objectionable from a libertarian standpoint. (1) is a good enough reason to criticize racism; something doesn’t have to be criminal for it to be open to criticism as foolish or vicious. But he also argues (2), not because racism per se violates the nonaggression principle, but rather because of tensions between the two on levels other than that of logical entailment.

Specifically, Long thinks that racist collectivism tends to interfere with the correct application of the non-aggression principle, that racist ideology will tend to causally undermine the implementation of libertarianism in the real world, and also that racism is logically incompatible with the broader underlying principles that justify the libertarian theory of justice. So the claim is that a libertarian could be a nonviolent racist without being inconsistent; but she could not do so reasonably, which is something different.

For details, cf. Politics Against Politics, in both the post and in the comments.

Racism per se is not incompatible with libertarian principles, but a police state is. Which is what the Mystery Writer happened to be promoting, at least as far as the Negroes are concerned. More or less all of the nastiest remarks directed against black folks in the late-80s/early-90s race-baiting articles were made in the context of articles directly calling for more aggressive and violent tactics by urban police forces.

If I recall correctly, the article from 1992 that’s attracted so much notoriety (for the crack about welfare checks, and for the estimation that 95% of black men in D.C. can be considered “semi-criminal or entirely criminal,” whatever that means) also included, amongst other things, a charming extended passage defending the police beating the hell out of Rodney King.