So Rand Paul, newly minted Republican candidate for Senate from Kentucky, is currently the object of a firestorm around his comments that he didn’t approve of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His logic is lifted straight from the Goldwater-era opposition to the law, which is to say: racism is bad, but so is government telling people who they should or shouldn’t do business with. Civil rights law to prohibit discrimination in institutions, good; law to prevent private discrimination, bad, which is “the hard part of believing in freedom.”
There’s ideological consistency there, and it’s not a position that’s in and of itself grounded in racism. I don’t think you could say with a clear conscience that Rand Paul is a racist, because he’s not making an argument grounded in racism or white supremacy. I’m trying to unwind the logic here, which seems to be: there shouldn’t be any laws permitting discrimination, but there shouldn’t be any laws prohibiting discrimination either. Be that as it may. It’s the standard true-believer libertarian line: if you have problems like this, the free market will resolve them, because it’s not in your economic interest to discriminate against customers or to do things that will alienate your customers; therefore any business person who wants to turn a profit will certainly serve one and all on equal footing.
Which, simply put, is horseshit.
There was every economic incentive to discriminate in the Jim Crow era, law aside. Look at the logic:
1) Majority population hates minority population, or at the very least wants them segregated.
2) Business could make money serving minority population, but would alienate majority.
3) Business could make MORE money serving majority population and foregoing minority trade.
4) Business segregates, leaving minority-run business to handle minority trade.
5) PROFIT!!!
The Deep South had a hundred years for the invisible hand of the market to punch Jim Crow in the nuts. It didn’t happen. It will never happen, because this is a fact and it is indisputable: nobody, but NOBODY, responds only to purely economic incentives. It may be cheaper for you to send your kids to the public school, but if you’re sufficiently bigoted, you’ll pay extra out of your own pocket to send them to the local white-flight academy for an education substantively no better. Hell, I pay more just to have Doc Martens that are made in Northumberland instead of some Chinese sweatshop, even though the marginal quality is largely indistinguishable and I could save a huge chunk of change by doing otherwise. Any economist would tell you I’m not rational, and I would reply by saying that I don’t live in economics, I live in reality.
Rand Paul and his fanboys would have you believe that government can’t change people’s minds. That the right thing to do is sit and wait until people come to their own realization that they should change their beliefs. But most of all, what it boils down to is this: racism is less of a threat to society than government intervention against racism. It’s the libertarian ethos in its purest form: I got mine, so fuck you.
Is Rand Paul racist? No. Is Rand Paul’s articulated belief compatible with the real world? Hell no. Is this the sort of person who belongs in the Senate? Not my call.
Your move, Bluegrass State…