Half a century ago, President Lyndon Johnson decided that he would make the Democratic Party the champion of minorities and the oppressed. In doing so, he upended the party’s long history and broke with the segregationists in its ranks.
He was successful, at least in perception. Today, the Democrats are considered, by default and by self-declaration, the party most protective of minority rights and protections for oppressed identity groups. Things and people tending to binary default, it’s thus presumed that any not-Democrat doesn’t favor minority rights and protections for oppressed identity groups. But, perceptions and binary presumptions aren’t always accurate. LBJ’s approach and message was to turn government, long the source and mandator of oppression, into the vehicle for combating that oppression. And, again because things and people tend to binary default, many have come to presume that a – they/we need government to advance minority rights and b – that those not of the Democrats’ side of the political divide oppose or wish to thwart minority rights.
By most rational measures, there have been massive strides forward in civil rights, including those of blacks, women, LGBT, and other people of color. in comparing the ability of a gay person to live an open life in pursuit of happiness today to one living half a century ago, we arrive at a no-brainer conclusion.
That’s not to say that we’ve achieved a color-blind, gender-blind, and orientation-blind society. Unfortunately, those original and lofty goals are increasingly being supplanted, by people who look to bend those movements to their selfish aims, to deliberate recognition of differences and disparate treatment based on those differences, in the other direction. Those original and lofty goals, and all those who believe in them, aspire to them, or benefit from their attainment, are also being leveraged by people who want to invoke a structural change in the nature of America and her governance.
The dialogue and language of race and racism, LGBT rights, women’s rights, and identity politics overall are being systematically conflated with the progressive/far-left’s socialistic renaissance. The only way we can truly achieve equal rights and break “systemic racism,” a phrase I recently deconstructed, is by upending America’s political system, abandoning capitalism, and replacing it with yet another iteration of socialism. This upending is the aspiration of the Democratic Socialists of America, both explained on their website and lurking just below the surface of the Green New Deal that their high profile people have cornered virtually the entire clown-van of Democratic Presidential aspirants into supporting.
However, it is not socialism or big nanny government that has advanced the rights of minorities and the traditionally oppressed. It is, in fact, the very capitalism that we are told we must hate and abandon. A recent article at Cato does a spectacular job of explaining why.
A core point:
Capitalism created the opportunity for people to live autonomously.
Capitalism has done more to elevate individual living standards, by FAR, than any other form of economic activity in history. It also liberates the individual from both the family and the state, thus enabling mobility and the self-sorting that allows oppressed groups to amass strength, safety, and clout through unity. It also is at the core of the ideas and forms of thought that coalesced and codified the premises of individual liberty that are the backbone of the nation.
The Cato article’s focus is on gay rights, and it correctly points out that libertarians were at the fore of gay rights support.
Why?
Because libertarians begin all their philosophical, political, and practical arguments at the level of the individual.
Since I am neither a Democrat nor a Leftist, I’ve had many encounters where it is presumed I didn’t or don’t support the rights of minority and traditionally oppressed groups. However, I was a vocal and combative advocate for gay marriage back when Obama and the Democrats were still voicing their opposition, and some of the earliest posts on this blog voiced that advocacy. I was not alone in that regard. Visit the archives of libertarian journals and publications and you will find the same support, rooted in individual liberty and autonomy.
The basis of liberty in autonomy goes beyond just gay rights, and it flies in the face of assertions that we need socialism to undo bigotries (the current fad in woke circles). If people cannot live autonomously, they are not free to go against whatever grain the culture happens to have in a moment.
Socialism is antithetical to autonomy. It ties every individual to the State, to commit the fruit of your labor not to your own pursuit of happiness, but to the State’s economic plans, management, and vagaries, and to subordinate your goals and desires when they don’t align with the State’s. In a socialistic system, you are not granted the liberty to live autonomously, and therefore all that you would deem rights, civil or otherwise, exist only at the State’s sufferance.
The Democratic Socialists tell us that their way is different, that we won’t have top-down management, but instead everything will be owned in community and run by that community of owners. But, if that community of owners includes some bigots and racists, won’t that gum up the works? Should they reach a critical mass, won’t that actually reverse the progress of race relations? Besides, their “community ownership” bit is a lie. Nestled in their platform is the admission that, in cases where capital investment is required, the State ‘may have to’ own companies.
Well, no shit. And, since they aspire to eliminate the corporate form entirely, the truth becomes evident: their socialism is no different than traditional socialism. How much “social justice” have we seen in the socialist nations of history? Certainly not in the Soviet Union or Red China – or even in modern day China, with its oppression of both Tibet and the Uighurs. Certainly not from socialist hero Che Guevara, or communist paradise Cuba, which has yet to legalize gay marriage and pays only lip service to gay rights, or socialist paradise-turned-totalitarian-hellhole Venezuela.
The Democratic Socialists wave off those failed socialist states, and assert that they hold nations like Sweden and Denmark as their aspiration and model. They’re either lying, ignorant, or deluding themselves. What the Democratic Socialists propose to do has virtually nothing in common with the Nordic model, as John Stossel details. That’s the gag that’s being sold to the willing and gullible: the promise of Nordic results via the mechanism of traditional, authoritarian, oppressive, autonomy-denying socialism. They engage in blatant equivocation. Point out the countless failed socialist states, and they claim their way is not that sort of socialism. But, argue against socialism, and suddenly everything, down to police, the courts, and the military, is socialism.
Socialism of the sort they are proposing has never produced social justice, and it won’t if they manage to get into power and disrupt the system of individual rights and free-market interaction that has advanced civil rights and social justice across the decades. Their way, no matter what they say, requires or will rapidly evolve to central control and the equivalent of Orwell’s Ministries of Plenty and Truth, which carried out the functions of rationing and speech/thought control.
The Left has done a spectacular job convincing people that liberty is problematic and should be given up, by burying that aim in deceit, false narratives, revisionist history, and emotional ploys, yet it is liberty, including capitalism, that has produced the advances in living standards that have, in turn, liberated people in ways that have fostered the strides in civil rights we have witnessed across the decades. To forego that liberty, to turn to the top-down and centralized control of socialism (and if you think that this time, it’ll be different, open your eyes to the reality that all these socialistic aspirants seek, above all else, power. Power to dictate, to control, to manage, and to take. If you think that they’re not going to use that power the sam way every other power seeker in history has, you are, to put it bluntly, one of the useful idiots that politicians love to leverage).
It’s a common gag in politics: Emphasize and exaggerate a problem, and tell voters the only solution lies in foregoing liberties and granting even more power to politicians. The social justice movement may be awash in good intentions, but it has been successfully subsumed by the socialists. They’ve also managed to convince people that, by putting them in power and supporting their big-government schemes, they’ll actually be taking power away from the powerful. The smarter supporters (insofar as anyone who still supports socialism can be considered “smart”) know the truth, but are content with putting their favored people in power. The rest are at risk of drowning in their own naiveté.
There is no social justice in socialism. There’s only loss of liberty and destruction of all we cherish.
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Reading this blog triggered some very fundamental questions that took me back to my model of what holds societies together and how they change, which I first presented in a nutshell as the last paragraph of my extended comment to your blog on Whence Morality? As usual we are the slaves of our prejudices so let me first tell where I come from because in my case one of those is that I’m agnostic on God and I don’t believe there is any innate morality in us but rather we are the product of our individual pasts, and the biggest thing that jumped at me in this your latest blog is the importance of being a true individual.
I was born and was brought up in Mexico as a Catholic in a religiously weird family. My father and his family were Hungarian Jewish, his family big time but my father not so much. My mother’s side is another matter altogether. I grew up thinking she was Catholic because her father supposedly went to Church. In her later years my mother, however, expressed confusion about what she really was. When I took her back to her native Budapest she pointed to a Protestant church a block from her childhood home. Her father’s descendants insist they are Protestant while her uncle’s descendant claims the family was Jewish.
Now, add to all of that that my mother didn’t get along with my father’s family, I sense in large part because of religion, and you get a kid who doesn’t want to have anything to do with religion. Yet my Catholic upbringing left a large mark in me, as did my once being set straight by my father when I was about eight or ten. My brother and I went to a Jewish wedding with him and at the entrance to the synagogue I was told to put on a yarmulke. At first I refused saying that I was a Catholic. My father then gave me a stern but loving look saying that I was going to put it on out of respect for the people there.
For my father respect was far and away the biggest value by a very long shot. Growing up in Mexico we had live-in maids. Failure to respect them as members of the family was a cardinal sin. In the upper classes that was common but when you got to the middle class maids were treated horribly. I mention this only because when I came to the U.S. I couldn’t understand discrimination of any kind other than economic. Even when I was a manager at the World Bank my secretary, who was also Mexican, used to tell me that I was very naive.
Okay, are we capable of being truly individual? I don’t know but I don’t think evolution prepared us to be except in a last stand fight for survival. Indeed, I think that at every turn evolution took away our potential to be truly individual. I base that on my model of sustainable social change, a model that is a best effort product of a lifetime trying systematically to understand why some societies function better than others. I did that not only through books but by working all of my life in emerging economies throughout the world helping them to do better.
Crucial to that model is that societies require not just an evolving set of rules but a more rigid set of basic rules or anchor that can serve as a guidepost to the continuously growing and changing number of rules that result from change itself. As I noted in Whence Morality, my model then tries to figure out how to best manage change as a process. Since my basic training is in chemical engineering, I’ve broken down successful change into seven dynamic Unit Operations, a concept I took from ChemE. These are (1) change, which inevitably requires new rules no matter how simplistic they may seem; (2) reconcile differences; (3) relieve stress; (4) discard failure and obsolescence; (5) learn, modify, readjust; (6) refine new rules; (7) homogenize, train, educate. `
As an engineer I think you can appreciate how even the simplest changes and consequent rules can sometimes lead to other major and very complex behaviors and changes. Just look at the butterfly effect in the weather and I’d venture that all change leads to similar effects in all systems except that it is tamped down by the older rules, particularly the more rigid ones of the anchor in a society. For that change and those new rules that do survive, if the group itself is to survive it needs to get all of its members to learn, accept and adopt (adapt to) the new rules, what I call the homogenizing step or process.
Thus far the only people I’ve known to be able keep their individuality in those circumstances are very strong and very smart survivors.
One last thought is about the pace of change. It used to be slow enough that the homogenizing could happen from generation to generation in school. Big changes now happen to the same generations even as they are absorbing past change. That can be really tough and easily manipulated unless you have a strong anchor, i.e. a strong set of values, something that is also being lost not necessarily because of the loss of the traditional anchor (religion, Constitution) but because of the loss of the role model and teacher in the home.
As if that is not enough, enter social media as a potential new homogenizer but one that we are told daily, at least on Fox News, can be easily manipulated to get just about any result those in control want. This is where I go get an aspirin, no, better yet, a tranquilizer. I didn’t touch on it but if you go back to the seven dynamic steps of my model, the two most immediate steps or consequences of change are the need to reconcile differences and relieve the stress that the change and consequent differences created. I think that may be when people are most open to manipulation and likely to believe the first explanation they hear.
There’s a mountain of psychology that points out and supports your closing point, that peopel are “likely to believe the first explanation they hear.” Moreso, people are predisposed to defending the first opinion they express, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It’s born of tribal evolutionary predilections, which make us horrified of public ridicule, which itself can be born of seeming foolish in rushing to a public opinion and then changing your mind. Group pressures are powerful and substantial, and serve positive evolutionary purposes.
But, I always come back to the individual, in no small part because our consciousness is itself individual, and therefore the individual is the fundamental unit. Yes, it can be quite challenging to be an individual that stands apart from the pack, and it’s quite often the case that doing so is a bad idea, both for the pack *and* for the individual. Nevertheless, there are times when the pack does things that harm the individual, especially in modern life, where survival until procreation is no longer a challenge.
It’s also illustrated in the converse. When has a society where its members have subordinated themselves, socialism-style, had greater success than one that elevates individual rights and liberties? The more rigid and structured a society, the more ability (and incentive) it offers those who can get to the power side of that society to leverage personal gain at others’ expense.
Societies do evolve, and they do craft new rules as they go along, but there’s a difference between society and the organic rules that arise, and government and the entrenched, distortable, and hard-to-change rules that are imposed. Major changes in government rules are typically born of and lag major changes in society. Would the Civil Rights Act have come into existence but for a society that demanded it?
The crux of the article lies in the assertion that social progress is not a product of big, powerful government, but rather a product of the social evolution enabled by liberty.
I agree with all that you have to say. The model of social change I created is obviously regulated by a number of key characteristics or properties. You touch on all of them but a key one, the constraining role of structure, you do by arguing the converse while I think it has to be brought up front and center. You write:
“[The individual as the fundamental unit] is also illustrated in the converse. When has a society where its members have subordinated themselves, socialism-style, had greater success than one that elevates individual rights and liberties? The more rigid and structured a society, the more ability (and incentive) it offers those who can get to the power side of that society to leverage personal gain at others’ expense.”
The key question is how much structure. What’s the best balance between structure and elevating the individual, especially individuals looking to survive? A while ago I wrote that,
[start old comment]
Western societies are the result of evolution that probably bifurcated after man came out of Africa 50,000 years ago, at which time societies were very egalitarian. The more northern climates may have led to people with self-control and individual responsibility more developed than in the more hierarchical models of the southern climates. I must stress, however, that when I write of one or another trait, it is just a matter of emphasis of certain elements of an otherwise very well balanced complex system of social traits. Central to my model of change are moving balances. Different societies will have different sets of internal sub-systems each with different balances.
The people who migrated to southern climates somehow evolved to organize and produce larger hierarchical civilizations. On the other hand, in the northern climates, people developed larger doses of individuality and self-control, coupled with an also more developed ability to reconcile differences through compromise. The tendency seems also to have been for communities to remain smaller and better connected.
The northern climates may have bifurcated even further. I hypothesize that more adverse conditions and harsher climates furthest north made survival of even medium sized groups more difficult. Small groups with highly innovative individuals stood a better chance of survival, leading after many generations to even sturdier more individualistic self-controlling people. These smaller groups may have been much more connected; recent social capital data and differences therein identified by Robert Putnam are highly suggestive.
The result of these bifurcations is suggested also by the difference between North and South American traits. At a gross level, this may explain why the former tend to be more self-starting than early southern cultures prone to wait for orders to flow down the hierarchy. Britain gave America its dissenters. Spain sent soldiers to colonize, and even before they arrived indigenous populations were very hierarchical.
An interesting case of a people with individualistic self-controlling traits that thrived for many centuries is Venice. This city state was originally isolated with many very small islets in a swamp. These were reclaimed by small groups working on their own islet to make it stable, a little bigger, and inhabitable. It was a tough struggle, with many small connected groups, each improvising and innovating.
Then when they took to the seas each ship was a relatively independent small group of people again improvising and innovating. A fascinating bit of history is told by historian Frederic C. Lane in Venice: A Maritime Republic, where he describes how the crews of each ship functioned as fairly independent mini democracies! Even when they went to war in large coordinated fleets, each ship captain still had to exercise a lot of initiative and independent action to survive.
[end old comment]
Since then I’ve ventured further and ascribed the success of the West to the individualism that Christianity and particularly Protestantism emphasize. Protestantism has some very rigid rules but by emphasizing the role of the individual in interpreting the Bible and earning Heaven through hard work it developed a good balance between group and individualism.
The further south one goes Catholicism with its even more rigid structures takes over. Venice seems to prove the point by exception. In Venice the ruling merchants, and note that no single one of them ever dominated, always made sure to keep the Pope at arms-length. I’m still fascinated by how they kept the Pope’s representative in what was then the furthest island in the Venetian archipelago—more recently the Basilica of St Peter of Castello, which I highly recommend to the visitor who has a few days on his hands.
So, yes, I agree with your “assertion that social progress is not a product of big, powerful government, but rather a product of the social evolution enabled by liberty,” but I think that without an enabling set of rules that in the West are found in the Judeo-Christian religion we would have had less social progress.
Socialism and Unions, both idolized by the left. When I read the democratic Socialist ideas of that the workers will own the factories (farms, etc.) it reminds me of unions, and how they were going to organize.
Of course when I think of Unions one word comes to mind.
Hoffa.