The grand idea of Civil Rights for everyone enjoys almost universal uncritical adulation in the United States. Part of the reason for this is that people who oppose the law – either explicitly or implicitly through their behavior – will quickly discover that their property rights have been severely restricted. The term ‘civil rights’ is really a program of the restriction of rights which creates certain conditions under which the state can seize or redistribute property, whether it happens to be corporate or personal. A corporate, government, or nonprofit leader must terminate an employee who can be shown to be discriminatory against protected classes of people.
The racist is a boogeyman that’s popular to hate. Anyone who can proclaim that they don’t discriminate immediately enjoys a warm feeling of being on the good side of society.
‘Racism’ tends to be portrayed as a universal evil that has been overcome by the march of rational philosophy, much like how the development of sewer systems and indoor plumbing made it so that people no longer dump feces on the streets (except in contemporary, high-tech San Francisco).
The triumph of theory over reality
There’s a logic to the way that these ideas progressed in America. For one, it was only natural that a republic which formed itself around the repudiation of the rights of kings eventually repudiated the rights of the people who formed that republic. The republic formed around an outburst of rage motivated by abstract Lockean philosophy rather than some Venice-like aristocratic council. That the state first coalesced around the colonial quasi-aristocracy didn’t matter nearly as much in our contemporary understanding of America as does the fulminating of the patriots in favor of the God-given rights of man and against the rights of kings.
The early America began in an egalitarian revolt in theory, even if the practice involved the rule of landed semi-gentry. Part of what made it digestible to Americans was the fact that there was so much land to go around: people who would be bums in the old world could secure a plot on credit. Sometimes hucksters sold the same plot to tons of people without any of the people involved actually seeing it – and that helps to explain how the franchise began to expand.
No one gives a lick about your property rights
Property requirements to gain the vote quickly lost salience as the pioneers blazed their trails into new territories. Properties that would be the envy of any European nobleman could be had by anyone with the grit to settle it.
The American project made revolt profitable for an extended period of time. To see permanent classes of leaders forming and solidifying makes Americans feel uncomfortable – particularly intellectuals, who need to agitate people towards action to stay busy.
To say that some people are naturally subjects – and others, their rulers – seems to be a repudiation of the freedom which is supposed to be the birthright of all Americans. If you have to tear up some property rights along the way, who cares? Keeping the rebellion alive has always been more exciting than anything else.
Civil Rights is sort of a replay of the Reconstruction period, which was both supposed to raise the South back up after its destruction while providing for African-Americans to exercise their votes and participate in the broader republic as full citizens. As the decades went on, it became the leading opinion to view Reconstruction as a failure and segregation as a compromise policy that prevented conflict from boiling over in what was the only racially diverse region in the country.
The ‘Negro problem’ was a strictly regional issue until technological change and government policy encouraged African-American migration throughout the country – suddenly creating diversity-related conflicts in cities that had never known them before in addition to the typical social problems generated by the transition of rural populations to industrial life.
Expropriation as a means to the end of equality
Equality begins as a spiritual proposition – that all men are morally equal in their capacities. This tends to bleed over into other realms also. If people are morally equal, shouldn’t they be materially equal, also? Why shouldn’t we downplay the other differences between them? If the law treats all men and women in the same way, with no special privileges for anyone (in theory), then really we must all put ourselves in servitude to the egalitarian ideal.
Woodrow Wilson wrote about the condition of Blacks in the south after Reconstruction in volume five of his history of the American people:
“Their masterless, homeless freedom made them the more pitiable, the more dependent, because under slavery they had been shielded, the weak and incompetent with the strong and capable; had never learned independence or the rough buffets of freedom.”
We could say the same about Americans as a people today – and of all people touched by modern ways which insulate people against the cruelty of nature.
It’s popular among figures like Glenn Beck to cherry-pick quotes from Wilson to portray him as a ‘racist,’ and to then call him bad for that reason, but he was a man of his time. Historians across the political spectrum tend to heap abuse on him for other reasons also, but this fact of shifting opinion in and of itself is worth noting. The head of Princeton and the first internationally significant American president could articulate an opinion at length in the early 20th century that would result in the expulsion of a Princeton undergraduate today.
This is, again, one of the obligations which we shoulder to keep the civil rights of ‘racial minorities’ (soon-to-be-majorities) aloft. There’s an accounting to rights in the same way that there are credits and debits in regular accounting – they are never provided for freely, despite all the speechifying to the contrary.
What prevented America from ‘progressing’ faster
For a long time, American leaders were rightfully frightened for their skins – all the way up through the world wars and the mutual destruction of the old world. Before this, the balance of power put a brake on how far the egalitarian revolution could progress domestically. The country needed to remain at least somewhat unified to avoid a rapid destruction by the economically and technically superior nations across the Atlantic.
Rights, in the classical way of thinking, always come with reciprocal obligations to the institution which grants those rights. Contemporary democratic thinking, in contrast, tends to view the expansions of rights as a sort of zero point energy device which magically generates new goods without any costs. The Civil Rights regime does have real costs – namely, that it forces the host population to give up their freedom to associate freely and dispose of their property in the way that they might otherwise wish to.
This must make the country weaker and incapable of protecting itself from entropy, as the network of allied institutions within that country can no longer freely adapt to changing conditions. They must instead adapt themselves to the ever-more-demanding requirements of the permanent revolution.
It also obligates the state to continually raise funds to attempt to shield the weak and incompetent, who tend to multiply from that protection. The people who pay for that shielding receive some secular beatification as compensation, but ultimately, the policy must prove to be unsustainable.
The unsustainable lasts until it doesn’t
The most likely way that this ongoing Civil Rights revolution will fail will be a repetition of the last time it failed – the attempt to equalize civil conditions resulted in a spread of mass vagrancy and banditry in the Reconstruction South.
Eventually, the remnants of the Confederacy and others re-asserted order. Something precisely similar is unlikely to happen because of the general democratization of the American character. In some ways, the rise of the Drug Warriors resembled the old rise of the KKK in that it both furtively fought against the consequences of the revolution while also gaining temporary support among American elites from around the country.
The contemporary backlash against the drug war also resembles the backlash against the KKK and its institutional descendants as the political situation changed. The confusion around this is also explained by the avoidant pop history around Reconstruction. The enormous human suffering and mass death by the hundreds of thousands among freedmen in particular tends to be mostly ignored by curriculum-forming standardized tests like the AP US History exam.
Lynching tends to be taught as a phenomenon of racist evil rather than of an understandably broader phenomenon of the breakdown of state authority amidst an economic collapse that caused central governments to lose legitimacy and effective authority. Whereas early progressives encouraged their followers to understand and respect the ante-and-post-bellum South in order to shore up support for their national ambitions, the New Left inheritors of the progressives decided to return to older Republican traditions while repudiating the conciliatory attitude of their predecessors.
There’s also often something profoundly dishonest about advocates for civil equality as opposed to advocates for Black separatism like Marcus Garvey or Malcolm X. Advocates for equality tend to be happy to agitate distant populations against their distant enemies, regardless of what the negative consequences are for the people that they’ve used as their tools or the targets of their cowardly way of making civil war.
New York liberals are never going to visit modern Ferguson in the same way that Reconstruction-era Republicans were never going to head down to Charleston except as carpetbaggers accepting plush government jobs. The destruction of flyover cities using proxy mobs bought and paid for by established foundations is just plausibly deniable terrorism of a distinct and recognizable pattern in American history.
Discrimination fights entropy; non-discrimination embraces it
What’s also possible is that the decay of Western nations will just be corrected by some combination of economic failure and military invasion. Although military invasions of advanced nations are supposed to be impossible in the age of mutually assured destruction, it’s entirely possible that effective defenses against such weapons will be developed by America’s competitors and deployed by surprise.
That Americans tend to discount such a thing as impossible (owing to a hoary international relations theory) – whereas it was considered a distinct possibility through the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush I, and Bush II years – and developing a first strike capability was a priority – just makes it more likely to happen.
That this seems to be entirely outside of public awareness when people are happy to rattle the saber at China and Russia is both understandable and dismaying. That people consider how well Android devices render advanced Javascript frameworks to be more important ‘technology’ than, say, missile defense, just goes to show how much more seriously people take their fantasies over unpleasant realities.
This also has to do with the way that the American government staffs itself and operates – equality is a useful argument against hiring based on merit or returning many large bureaucracies to the private sector. The moral patina of goodness that comes from what has come to be the progressive mode of hiring – ironically similar to the machine-based political systems that the early movement agitated against – helps to make it all go down more smoothly.
Because contemporary elites (in contrast to past generations of American leaders) tend to view their government as invulnerable, it makes them reckless, stupid, and willing to provoke domestic conflicts – often out of boredom and decadence rather than any readily identifiable pecuniary interest. The slow wing of the progressive movement, embodied by the GOP, similarly excuses these radical outbursts. And what you excuse and permit, you get more of.
“Because contemporary elites (in contrast to past generations of American leaders) tend to view their government as invulnerable, it makes them reckless, stupid, and willing to provoke domestic conflicts – often out of boredom and decadence rather than any readily identifiable pecuniary interest…” That’s a great sentence that gets to the root cause of so many problems.
Two volumes that can be read very profitably along side this article are Frederick William Turner’s “The Frontier in American History” and Dr. E. Michael Jones’ “Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing.”
Frederick *Jackson Turner. I was thinking of Frederick of William Maitland for some reason, who should also be studied deeply.
Thanks for the suggestions for the readership.
Just a by-the-by on the SF public defecation issue; the obvious solution – public toilets – didn’t work because the disability rights lobby demanded they all be enormous. Consequently they became whorehouses and shooting galleries. (Introducing attendants has helped, apparently. I note that the new mobile toilets are also quite a bit smaller.)
I didn’t know that. That makes it extra funny.
I’m aware that there’s a widespread habit of public defecation in places like India and Black Africa (just go to Google Image Search and have a look), but… when did SF become a “shithole”?
Rights are generally a bad idea. Even good rights, like the right to bear arms, are suspicious. If the state upholds minimal necessary justice and coordinating laws, but otherwise leaves you alone, you can do in that framework what you want; own what you want; say what you want; live the lifestyle you want; organize in a way you want; associate with whom you want; hire who you want; enforce such local, congregation and/or community rules and norms as you want, practice the religion you want, prefer whom you want, etc. There is no need for rights. Rights are a legal sleight of hand of the state. State says it gives you something, but in reality it takes away from citizens. When state gives you the right to bear arms, it takes to itself the ownership of gun ownership issue. What one owns and gives, one can later restrict, regulate, define, arbitrate and take away. These hang over the heads of citizens like the sword of Damocles. Many rights, like human rights and civil rights, give material, monetary, psychological, occupational, educational etc. entitlements to various selected and favored goups. What the state gives by them it has to take away from disfavored groups, take away money, resources, work, education, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, etc. State says it gives us right to life and liberty. And from whom the state protects us? From itself, from its looming tyranny. Hows that for a deal? If I say in similar manner to you, “Sir, if you dont let me regulate your life and liberty, I will tyrannize you, imprison you, kill you, oppress you, etc.”, would you grab such offer? Would you be grateful to me for your life and liberty rights?
Again, states gives us in its overconfidence human rights. I have been always been effortlessly human without state giving me humanity. Human rights imply, and we have seen that happen numerous times in practice, that those who resist various interest groups advocating self-serving state and municipal spending programs with the pretext of human rights, stigmatize their opponents to be non-humans, outside humanity or monsters. They also refer to “binding international human rights treaties, which oblige us all to do as we advocate”, etc. It is then hard to resist such rights whatever happens to be advocated with them. When human rights card is used, people tend to shut up, conform, truckle and/or agree, whatever they think inside.
Rights are thus ultimately the rights of bureaucracies, manipulative and stealth ways of maintaining and expanding the power of bureaucracies, and the interest groups connected with them in inside or outside.
But the citizens could have one true right, the right to restrict, prevent and veto the state, when it tries to expand into their lives, colonize every aspect of their lifeworlds, expropriate more and more of their property, restrict their lives and freedoms more and more, etc. Here the flow of power would be reversed from from-state-to-citizen to from-citizen-to-state. It is necessary to design this kind of legal system so that it doesnt paralyze the required minimal functions of the state. Here the states ambition, greed and hunger for power is pitted against the citizens security, freedom, interests, social needs and property. These balance each other. Atomized citizens cannot monitor and regulate the state coherently and efficiently enough, so it would be done by citizens interest groups. These citizens power rights would require a lot of thinking and planning, and when applied in practice, advance with trial, error and adjustment. Citizens power rights would work only when education and media is not in the hands of the state. Citizens power rights would allow citizens to change their minds about state expansion; if they would have allowed first the state to expand, and later noticed it has expanded too much, they could roll-back the state where it was originally. Citizens power rights would restrict also the amount of legislation and require normal language in new laws and old laws, so that the understanding of laws is not restricted only to legal experts who understand the special legal language.
This is a framework of an idea to think about, not a final ‘product’.
Note: The motivations of US founding fathers have likely been good when their planned their rights, but as times goes by, bureaucratic right policy has almost automatic propensity to develop to the negative directions I described.
The initial republic was very limited. The post-1830s government was really a different thing entirely.