Libertarians and Diversity (or lack thereof)

The forthcoming issue* of Reason features an exceedingly thoughtful essay by Kerry Howley, in which she argues that libertarianism would be well-served by widening its scope and paying far more attention to infringements on liberty that are the product of cultural forces.  It’s an argument familiar to those of us versed in sociological or anthropological discourse: namely, that systematic cultural conditions can have just as much of an impact on restricting individual liberty as any expansion of the state’s power.  In the process of defending Howley’s critique, Will Wilkinson notes that a fair number of libertarians don’t really seem to get the core substance of Howley’s point:

If you think cultural products such as political ideologies evolve over time, you won’t see the content of “libertarianism” as sharply defined and fixed once and for all. To assert, as Ilya does, that “some cultural issues might well be appropriate object of concern for libertarians as thinking individuals, but not a proper focus for libertarianism,” pretty much begs the question. The claim is that these cultural issues ought to be objects of concern to libertarians because they are matters of liberty that libertarian have overlooked. Kerry’s asking libertarians to care more about the conditions under which people develop the capacity to meaningfully exercise freedom. She’s asking libertarians to not so blithely assume that social relations of exploitation and domination enforced by state power for hundreds of years are no longer matters of liberty simply because the enforcement of longstanding racist and sexist norms was privatized a few decades ago. She’s not asking libertarians to save the whales.

As you’re wondering why it is that so many commentators have had a hard time getting Kerry’s core point, I think it’s worth keeping in mind that libertarianism – as a political movement – is overwhelmingly white and male.  We tend to think of the racial composition of a political movement as just having electoral consequences, but it also has a profound effect on the core ideology of said movement.  At the risk of oversimplifying a bit, marginalized voices – racial and ethnic minorities, women, gays, etc. – are overrepresented among liberals and as such, the left that has been forced to grapple with the issues and concerns of marginalized communities in such a way as to make liberalism better equipped to deal with these issues.

It seems that insofar that libertarians experience oppression or constraints on their liberty, it is through the actions of the state rather than through culture, which makes sense. Libertarians are overwhelmingly white and male, and in a culture which highly values whiteness and maleness, they will face relatively fewer overt cultural constraints on their behavior than their more marginalized fellow-travelers.  Or in other words, a fair number of libertarians are operating with a good deal of unexamined privilege, and it’s this, along with the extremely small number of women and minorities who operate within the libertarian framework, which makes grappling with cultural sources of oppression really hard for libertarians.  After all – socially speaking – being a white guy in the United States isn’t exactly hard and that’s doubly true if you are well off.

*Has it already come out?

Weak Become Heroes

Via Sociological Images is this pretty awesome “pro-capitalist” propaganda cartoon from 1948:

The Miller Center of Public Affairs (my employer) is holding a conference on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and as such, I spent most of my Monday night at a work-related dinner with prominent IR scholars and Cold War historians.  Most of the folks at my table taught at large universities, and unsurprisingly, they spent a fair amount of time discussing/complaining about how hard it is to really make undergraduates understand the fear and paranoia that defined the early Cold War era.  Although they generally agreed that it was an exercise in futility (my protests didn’t really have an impact), the professor sitting next to me did acknowledge that he had found some success by simply giving his students a brief economic history of the Soviet Union, from its creation in the early 1920s to the end of the Second World War.  As the professor explained it, if you do that, it’s actually very easy to see why U.S. policymakers were terrified of the Soviet system and it’s implications for the rest of the world.

In less than a generation, the Soviet Union – formerly a poor, agrarian society – ballooned into an industrial powerhouse with the military might to successfully stop* what was then the most well-equipped and well-led army on the planet.  What’s more, the Soviet Union’s command economy didn’t seem to have a negative impact on growth rates.  Indeed, the Soviet economy grew briskly for a good portion of the early post-war period, convincing many American elites – even industrialists – that at least for developing countries, the Soviet approach had real merit**.  This is why you see cartoons like the one above – at the time, most of the available evidence supported the idea that the Soviet system was a reasonable alternative.  And since the Western world was only a few years removed from the almost total collapse of capitalism (as well as the prospect of left-wing revolution) it was important to impress upon people the benefits of capitalism and the deficiencies of Soviet-style command economics.

*Americans mythologize the Second World War in such a way as to almost completely discount the contributions of the Soviets/Russians.  In fact, calling them “contributions” doesn’t come close to doing the Russians Soviets justice; Germany unleashed the vast majority of its military might against the Soviet Union, sending nearly 80 percent of its combat divisions to rampage across Russia.  The Soviet Union fought and destroyed the vast majority of said divisions -4.3 million German soldiers were killed or wounded on the Eastern Front – at an unfathomable cost to itself.  Wikipedia puts Soviet military casualties at approximately 10.5 million and Soviet civilian casualties (within postwar borders) at 15.7 million.  Or, put another way, if the Soviet Union hadn’t joined the war effort, its safe to assume that most of Western Europe would have ended up as part of a greater Germany.

**There is a reason why large, developing countries like China and India aligned themselves with the Soviet Union – the command and control thing really did seem to work.

Update: Edited for clarity.

It’s a hard knock life, for unions

E.D. has a new post up at his True/Slant digs asking why John McCain hasn’t done much to participate in the health care debate.  I don’t have much to say about the main substance of the post, but this bit did stick out to me:

Sure, there are plenty of obstacles to disrupting the status quo.

For one thing, big labor opposes just about any move toward killing the status quo, because it gives them quite a lot more bargaining power. Employer-provided benefits, sheltered from income taxes, are good for the unions. They’re good for big businesses, too, or at least they were until health care costs began to spiral out of control.

Taking on “Big Labor” is pretty fashionable around these parts and that’s understandable: most of the Leaguers are on the right side of the spectrum, and for reasons I still don’t entirely understand, hating on unions is a conservative past-time.  But in the interest of fairness, I think it’s worth pointing out that unions have good reason for wanting to maintain their bargaining power: for almost thirty years, they’ve been left to the mercies of employers and forced to deal with a federal government that was mostly cavalier about enforcing labor law.  Indeed, one of the conservative fruits of the Reagan revolution was a crippled Department of Labor that either didn’t have the resources to address labor law violations or routinely ignored them.  What’s more, with private sector union density at a historically low 7.6 percent, unions no longer have the power to resist the pressure of employers and contend with a neglectful federal government.

With that in mind, I don’t know why anyone is shocked and scandalized to see unions oppose policies which would cost their members health care benefits and thus reduce their bargaining power, even if those policies are ultimately good for unions and their members.  Unions don’t have much of a reason to trust the government, and they especially don’t have much of a reason to trust a bill that has the support of companies and organizations that are openly hostile to unions.  Is their opposition dangerously short-sighted? Yes.  But contra E.D., it isn’t particularly sinister.

links for 2009-11-03

• The Effects of School Desegregation on Crime
  One of the most striking features of crime in America is its disproportionate concentration in disadvantaged, racially segregated communities. In this paper we estimate the effects of court-ordered school desegregation on crime by exploiting plausibly random variation in the timing of when these orders go into effect across the set of large urban school districts ever subject to such orders.
  (tags: political_science)
• Two biographies of Ayn Rand. – By Johann Hari – Slate Magazine
  Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?
  (tags: politics conservatism philosophy)