Is the Libertarian Party racist?
Mutually respectful reasoned discourse is the way
In “Why The Rage Against The War Machine Rally Is #AntiWarSoWhite,” published in the Black Agenda Report on February 8, 2023, Jacqueline Luqman maintained that she would not join with people who are racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic in the February 19 “Rage Against the War Machine” rally, which called for ending the war in Ukraine.
I also had reservations about the rally. Not because ideological centrists considered deplorable by the radical Left are participating, but because the organizers expressed opposition to what they call the Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. I do not view the Russian military operation as an invasion. I am in agreement with those anti-imperialists throughout the world who view the Russian operation as a legitimate defense against U.S./NATO imperialist expansionism. Russia has a right to defend itself against Western imperialism, as do all nations of the world.
However, although I personally am not in agreement with the way the issue is framed by the rally organizers, I do not share Luqman’s divisive hostility. If a politically-effective unified force with respect to ending the war in Ukraine can be formed from diverse ideological sectors, it would be a good thing. Following the attainment of peace in Ukraine, I would continue with my modest but persistent efforts to deepen understanding of Western imperialism and the role of Russia in cooperation with China and emerging formerly colonized nations in the construction of a more just and politically-stable world-system.
In today’s commentary, I focus on Juqman’s claim that the Libertarian Party is full of racists, which she implicitly defines as people who want to deny the rights of blacks and cannot accept black persons as speakers or influential persons in the organizations of civil society. She writes that “racists have taken the libertarian creed of freedom to associate with no federal oversight on freedom to exclude people of color.” With reference to recent changes in the Libertarian Party platform, which current Party leaders see as necessary for clarification in the context of the emergence of the “woke” ideology, Luqman writes that “allegedly freedom-loving Libertarians sound hauntingly like rights-stripping bigoted Republicans.”
The Platform of the Libertarian Party
Let us look at the Libertarian Party Platform. It begins with an emphasis on individual autonomy and individual liberty. It is the perfect expression of modern individualism, standing in contrast to the emphasis on the social organism in traditional Catholicism and on solidarity in modern socialism. As is logical, as the platform notes, governments throughout history have operated in opposition to the philosophy of individualism, regulating the lives of individuals and the fruits of their labor. In contrast, the Libertarian Party maintains that governments ought not violate individual rights to life, liberty, and property. “Individuals are inherently free to make choices for themselves and must accept responsibility for the consequences of the choices that they make.”
In accordance with these principles, the Libertarian Party maintains that sexual orientation and gender identity should have no impact on laws pertaining to marriage, child custody, adoption, and military service. It maintains that parents have the right to raise children according to their own standards and beliefs. And it maintains that laws with victimless crimes, such as those pertaining to recreational drug use and contractual transactions for sexual services, ought to be repealed. Looking further at the platform, we see that the Libertarian Party would virtually eliminate government as we know it. It advocates the eventual repeal of all taxation, and it calls for the privatization of education, health care, and retirement planning.
These principles shape the Libertarian Party’s concept of economic liberty. The Platform states:
Libertarians want all members of society to have abundant opportunities to achieve economic success. A free and competitive market allocates resources in the most efficient manner. Each person has the right to offer goods and services to others on the free market. The only proper role of government in the economic realm is to protect property rights, adjudicate disputes, and provide a legal framework in which voluntary trade is protected. All efforts by government to redistribute wealth, or to control or manage trade, are improper in a free society.
Such a conception of the economy constitutes an impractical idealism, rooted in a failure to see the necessary role of the state in promoting the development of the national economy. The libertarian view is based, in the first place, on the historic colonial denial of American culture, which was blind to the role of colonialism—including state support for missions of conquest—in driving the spectacular economic ascent of the United States from the time of its founding to the middle of the twentieth century. Not seeing the foundation of the U.S. ascent in conquest and colonialism, there emerged the widely-held perception in American culture that the U.S. ascent was driven by a market that was for the most part free and by individuals acting in a relatively unconstrained economic environment.
Furthermore, the libertarian perspective idealistically assumes the best in the market. It does not take into account the lessons learned from the ascent of the Robber Barons, who forged the concentration of banking and industry on the basis of illegal and unethical methods of trade during the second half of the nineteenth century, provoking an anti-trust movement among the people. In the early twentieth century, President Theodore Roosevelt received not-fully-deserved credit for being a trust buster. Later, in the presidential electoral campaigns of 1912, ex-President Roosevelt and New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson put forth similar comprehensive programs designed to control the big banks and big industry, but at the same time giving them space to pursue commercial interests to the benefit of the national economy. In 1913, President Wilson was able to attain congressional support for an economic package that possibly would have attained the necessary balance of business interests and national interests, if it had been implemented. However, the new laws were brushed aside by the First World War, as big industry seized the power advantage that war always gives industrialists, who play a vital role in the production of arms and military supplies. The hopes of the people, formulated by the imperialist and scholar Theodore Roosevelt and the former academic Woodrow Wilson, were deferred, never to be revisited in the American political context. (See “The robber barons and monopoly capitalism: The origins of US imperialism in Latin America,” June 25, 2021).
In response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was able to form a coalition of politicians, intellectuals, labor unions, and a significant sector of the people in support of a different kind of economic reform package. Although it effectively resolved serious problems in the short term, the New Deal program was seriously flawed with respect to the long-term development of the national economy, as the Cuban economist Ernesto Molino has explained. In the first place, it was based on state deficit spending to finance social programs of direct support for the people. Deficit spending can be a sound strategy, if the borrowed funds are utilized to increase productivity; but if they are used to give direct benefits to the people, they will have the effect of increasing the demand for goods without increasing the supply, thus giving rise to inflation, preventing an increase in the standard of living.
In the second place, the New Deal continued the imperialist policies of the USA toward the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean, thus basing the economic recovery of the United States in the superexploitation of the labor of other lands, attained through violations of the sovereign rights of nations. This solution could not be sustained in the long term, inasmuch as the peoples and nations, as is logical, formed movements that sought to sever economic ties that were disadvantageous to them. They today endeavor to construct an alternative world economic order, based in respect for the sovereignty of their nations, leaving the USA by the wayside.
Neoliberalism, launched by the Reagan Revolution of 1980, tried to correct only one of the defects of the New Deal, namely, its unsustainable financing of social programs through government deficit spending. Neoliberalism left intact, indeed it reinforced and strengthened, the previous negative tendency of inattention to the productivity of the national economy, by facilitating the channeling of profits toward financial speculation. In the words of the Cuban economist Osvaldo Martinez, neoliberalism created a “casino economy,” replacing the real economy.
The libertarian view is a reaction to the negative experience of big government in twentieth century capitalism. As noted above, the limitations of big government in the USA were significant, a consequence of the fact that state policies had been shaped by the particular interests of the elite combined with concessions to popular demands, without concern for the long-term development of the national economy. However, the libertarian view does not take into account other examples in the world, successful examples of intelligent and scientifically informed state intervention in the economy, forged particularly during the last fifty years by the nations constructing socialism today, such as China, Cuba, Vietnam, and Korea. The myopic approach of the Libertarian Party renders it powerless to formulate real and practical solutions to the problems confronting the U.S. economy.
The idealist and impractical conceptions of the Libertarian Party condemn it to permanent political powerless. Although the people of the United States have limited understanding, they know enough to know when an alternative political proposal is half baked. It is not surprising that the Libertarian Party has a following among only a small fraction of citizens, where it likely will remain, unless it reformulates its understanding of the relation between the state and the economy, in accordance with the concepts being taught to humanity at the present time by the nations with the most dynamic and structurally sound economies. (See “China models a new type of socialism: The most advanced example of a new socioeconomic formation,” June 10, 2022; “The advance of socialism in Vietnam: The Doi Moi policy renovates socialist construction,” July 5, 2022; and “Realist pragmatism in socialist Cuba: Cuba’s socialist-oriented mixed economy under state direction,” July 29, 2022).
An ideological reformulation by the Libertarian Party could involve greatly expanding the scope and implications of the constraint that libertarian ideology places on the rights of property holders, namely, that their activities cannot “harm or infringe upon the rights of others.” But such a reformulation is not a likely development. Perhaps, on the other hand, the members of the Libertarian Party do not wish to make a reformulation that would enable the taking of political power. In the context of the confusions and bitter divisions that exist in the United States, the Libertarian Party no doubt functions as a personally meaningful political activity for its members. It perhaps is more of a social club than a true political party.
U.S. Foreign Policy
The Libertarian Party has a decent approach to foreign policy, a characteristic it shares with traditional American conservativism. The Libertarian Party accepts the development of military forces sufficient for national defense against aggression, without seeking to police the world. Its platform declares: “American foreign policy should emphasize peace with all nations, entangling alliances with none. We would end the current U.S. government policies of foreign intervention including military and economic aid; tariffs; economic sanctions; and regime change.”
The Libertarian Party’s proposed foreign policy is based on rejection of U.S. foreign policy since the 1980s. It does not, however, put forth an analysis that would be the basis for an alternative approach to foreign affairs.
Let us recall basic facts relative to U.S. foreign policy today. As it turned to neoliberalism, the Reagan Administration continued with an imperialist policy toward the world, which had been the constant U.S. foreign policy since the beginning of the twentieth century. Reagan intensified imperialism, through “low-intensity war,” a form of military intervention that was designed to more actively attain imperialist goals through the support of proxies, with limited direct intervention by U.S. troops. As is logical, this approach led to an increasingly conflictive and confrontational world-system, inasmuch as the neocolonized nations increasingly sought to block imperialist interests and to restructure the terms of trade in a form less disadvantageous to their national interests.
The September 11, 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City provided an ideological pretext for the USA to respond even more aggressively to the resistance emerging from the formerly colonized peoples. During the last two decades, the United States has launched endless wars of aggression in pursuit of particular political-economic objectives, as well as unconventional warfare against recalcitrant nations, including the imposition of economic sanctions, in Latin America and the Caribbean and the Middle East. These dynamics have recently culminated in U.S./NATO aggression against Russia and a New Cold War with Russia and China.
It is this aggressive turn that the Libertarian Party rejects. But the Libertarian Party fails to understand these dynamics from a perspective rooted in objective truth and empirically based in the experiences of humanity during the last century. It fails to formulate an alternative approach to foreign policy based on cooperation with the nations of the world and the development of mutually beneficial trade, joining with emerging formerly colonized regional powers in this endeavor. Such a new approach to foreign policy could advance the interests of the people of the United States, inasmuch as it could serve as the basis for the development and expansion of the U.S. national economy, which has been undermined by New Deal policies, by over-reliance on the military following the Second World War, and by the post-1980 turn to neoliberalism and financial speculation.
Rights and Discrimination
Luqman dismisses as “typical racist drivel” assertions to the effect that black people get preferential treatment. She counters such “racist” assertions by correctly observing that economic inequality between blacks and whites persists. Her counter observation has a certain logic, because if persistent racial inequality were caused by white intransigence, then imposed programs of affirmation action would rectify it to a certain extent. This was roughly the situation in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was to be expected, in that attitudes cultivated for two centuries were not going to change overnight.
However, an untold part of the American story is the significant transformation in racial attitudes in the half century following the reforms of 1964 and 1965. This is a fundamental fact verified by empirical attitudinal studies as well as the everyday experience of all Americans. Although subtle ethnocentric forms of racism persisted, and blatant racism did not completely die, the social customs of 2015 in the USA with respect to race were nothing like what they were in 1965. Those who claim that there is systemic racism today are almost always referring to events and customs prior to 1965, in accordance with post-modern epistemology, in which facts and realities are constructed rather than understood.
In the current post-1965 racial situation in the USA, it is not unreasonable to raise questions about preferential treatment for blacks with respect to education and employment. It is not unreasonable to ask, Is white racism a causal factor in persistent economic racial inequality? In addressing the question, other possible factors can be identified as more important. Above all and in general terms, there has been insufficient attention, by the nation as a whole and by the black community, to the socioeconomic development of poor black neighborhoods. Black demands have focused on affirmation action, the treatment of blacks at colleges and universities, the presence of black personalities in the public sphere, and the conduct of white police in the black community, all issues that are important to the black middle class. Meanwhile, by the 1980s, the black sociologist William J. Wilson identified the phenomenon of the outmigration of the black middle class from the traditional black neighborhoods, creating separate black middle-class neighborhoods, and turning the traditional neighborhood into a lower-class zone without middle class role models and with abundant social pathologies. (See “The causes of racial inequality in USA: A look at historic, economic, and cultural factors,” January 14, 2022).
I am unable to forget what a black community organizer said in a Bill Moyers documentary in the 1980s. “There are not people in white hoods running around here. We are destroying ourselves.” I personally am an advocate of important concepts formulated by Malcolm X, and I ask: What became of the concepts of black control of the black community and the development of black-owned businesses in the community?
Questions of this kind are increasingly raised by black conservatives today. To be sure, when a white person expresses them, a hidden racist agenda could be present. However, an accusation of racism, based on speculation concerning motives, ought not be used to prevent or end a conversation. Reasonable dialogue is the necessary road, focusing on the validity of ideas, not the attacking of persons. This is fundamental to the construction of a democratic society.
At the same time, there are reasonable grounds for questioning the wisdom and the virtue of the Libertarian Party platform on rights and discrimination. It declares:
Libertarians embrace the concept that all people are born with certain inherent rights. We reject the idea that a natural right can ever impose an obligation upon others to fulfill that “right.” We uphold and defend the rights of every person, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or any other aspect of their identity. Government should neither deny nor abridge any individual’s human right based upon sex, wealth, ethnicity, creed, age, national origin, personal habits, political preference, or sexual orientation. Members of private organizations retain their rights to set whatever standards of association they deem appropriate, and individuals are free to respond with ostracism, boycotts, and other free market solutions.
It seems to me that this section on rights and discrimination is a problematic formulation, and the root of the problem is the Libertarian Party’s extreme notion of individual autonomy and the Party’s incapacity to imagine a state controlled by the people and/or acting on behalf of the consensual will of the people. I would insist that if there is a natural right to something, then all members of the society having a moral duty to respect that right; and the society, for its own wellbeing, ought to take some steps in regard to persons who do not respect the consensually-defined natural rights of others. In the world of libertarians, individuals can take coercive measures (like a boycott) against persons who violate the natural rights of others; but the state cannot take such action, even though, in practical reality, the state may be able to do so far more effectively.
The section’s clause on private organizations introduces a host of problems. Is a private school or a religious hospital a private association? Can they deny persons access on the basis of their race? If so, is the state unable to intervene? I would insist that, rather than assuming that members of the Libertarian Party are motivated by bigotry, it would be better to seek open and honest dialogue on these questions, assuming their decency and integrity as citizens, which is amply evident throughout the Libertarian Party platform.
And it would be useful for both sides to make distinctions. Skin color variation among humans has evolved because of different levels of exposure to sunlight in different geographical regions, combined with extensive human migrations during the last 200,000 years. Even though it is highly visible, correlated with cultural differences, and played a central political role in the previous colonial epoch, skin color is a secondary characteristic, not related to individual intelligence or capacity, as is evident in today’s world, characterized by the visible presence of black persons with evident capacities in a variety of fields of human endeavors. Clearly, any consideration of race or color has no place or function in a democratic society.
But questions of sexual preference and gender transition are another matter. These are not incidental evolutionary byproducts elevated to serve a global political project, but moral choices that can be reasonably interpreted as violations of the traditional teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Such questions belong to a category different from race and color, and it confuses the people and subverts reasonable discussion when these separate categories are merged into one, as is commonly done by the Left. If a religious hospital refuses to perform an abortion or a gender changing procedure, this is a category different from refusing to provide health services to persons on the basis of race or color.
Religious persons should not be dismissed as bigots for raising questions and doubts concerning societal tolerance and societal celebration with respect to conduct that for centuries has been considered immoral. Of course, gay/trans people should not be refused entrance to a hotel, for example. But this does not mean that anti-traditional personal moral conduct should be tolerated in all settings, including settings characterized by the presence of children. The limits of tolerance should be reasonably discussed on a basis of mutual respect; and it should be understood that opposed bands shouting at one another is not discussion.
It also would be useful to make a distinction between ethnocentrism and racism. When Americans of European descent formulate proposals for the nation on the basis of their experiences, as the Libertarian Party has done, they are acting in accordance with universal human tendencies. Ethnocentric perceptions, based on the experiences of one’s own social group, are invariably the starting point of all human understandings. A more correct understanding can subsequently be formulated, by taking seriously further relevant questions that one discovers through personal encounter with persons, writers, and leaders of other social groups. For this reason, exceptional leadership involves taking the people beyond their collective experience to appreciation for the lessons learned in other cultures and lands. The great leaders of the Third World anti-colonial revolutions, for example, drew from the philosophical principles of Western democracy, the writings of Marx and Lenin, and the example of the Russian Revolution to redirect national liberation formulations toward the necessary road.
As is evident, the Libertarian Party has not done this. But neither has most of the radical black Left, which has reconstructed the American narrative on the basis of selections from their lived experiences, without seeking an understanding based of the experiences of others groups in the nation and in the world. Both the Libertarian Party and much of the radical black Left are ethnocentric. They ought to listen to each other, although it is unlikely that they ever will. The Libertarian Party, at least, has a civil tone.
In contrast, black conservatives, I have found, have moved beyond ethnocentrism to a more correct and universal understanding. Their fundamental conceptions are based on the lived experiences of the black community and, at least to some extent, on the historic formulations of the African-American movement. But at the same time, they seek an understanding that takes into account the founding principles of the American Republic and the historic conceptualizations and hopes of the people’s movements that sought to deepen the Republic’s understanding of and implementation of the concept of democracy.
In today’s world, characterized by a neocolonial system in disintegration and by anti-systemic movements formed by the neocolonized, the method of cross-horizon encounter (see “The quest for the true and the right,” April 13, 2021) would lead to consciousness of the insights emerging from the anti-neocolonial movements of the Third World, led by the nations constructing socialism. We all would benefit from expanding our understanding on this foundation, and seeking mutually-respectful dialogue on this basis.
P.S. The turnout for the The Rage Against The War Machine Rally
The Venezuelan news outlet TeleSur reported this past week that hundreds attended the Rage Against the War rally in Washington on February 19. If accurate, it would not represent a mass turnout. In my view, organizing demonstrations with small turnouts is not an effective strategy; it only confirms that the cause has a limited following. I believe that a more intelligent strategy would be the formation of informal people’s schools, which would educate leaders for a more advanced stage of struggle.
A free subscription option is available, with capacity to read, send, and share all posts. A paid subscription ($5 per month or $40 per year) enables you to make comments and to support the costs of the column; paid subscribers also receive a free PDF copy of my book on Cuba and the world-system.