Progressive liberals argue that civil rights are essential for “liberal democracy.” They see “democracy” founded on civil rights as the only political system compatible with liberalism. As explained by Paul Gottfried, a paleo-conservative who has been cast out of the liberal citadel for failing to embrace progressive notions of “good democracy,” “the consubstantiality of liberalism and democracy has become a modern religious dogma.” Human rights and civil rights are considered indispensable to that dogma.
Libertarianism rejects that dogma, because it is founded on “the absolute right of private property ownership. All else follows from that one proposition.” Private property, in its classical formulation as the right to exclude, is therefore seen as an obstacle to the inclusive ideology of civil rights and all socialist encroachments on property rights that are couched in the language of civil rights. Property rights threaten the progressive vision of democracy. Libertarians who reject civil rights are therefore considered to be populists whose goal is to undermine the good liberal democracy that we “all agreed” on. Progressives further argue that anyone who objects to their democratic ideals must surely be a “racist.” In their view, the only possible reason for libertarians to reject globalist “one world” dreams must be that they bear some sort of animus toward the diverse races that inhabit the world.
In his book Crack-Up Capitalism, Quinn Slobodian defends a socialist vision of “democracy,” aiming to reject what he calls “ultracapitalism.” He denounces “market radicals” as “racists.” One of his main targets, as David Gordon explains in his essay “Slobodian Contra Rothbard,” is Murray Rothbard. Slobodian describes Rothbard as a “radical libertarian” from “the neo-Confederate South.” Readers will be aware that Rothbard describes his libertarian system as “radical” in that it does not merely seek to explain the existing legal system but rather to reject it to the extent that it is incompatible with natural-rights libertarian ethics.
In this context, Rothbard rejected what he called “phony civil rights” as a violation of the right to self-ownership and private property. Slobodian presumes that Rothbard’s claim to defend private property is merely a sham to mask his true motivation—racism. Further compounding his crimes in Slobodian’s eyes, Rothbard defended the principle of nations by consent, which Slobodian takes to be further evidence of the same motivation—racism. Why else would anyone think people have a right to form nations by consent, other than because they are motivated by racism?
By now Slobodian’s reasoning should be clear: as he sees it, everyone who rejects his socialistic worldview is racist, and any arguments they may present are just a façade to disguise their true motivations. He relies on what is essentially a Kafka trap: disagreeing with “liberal democracy” is proof that you are a racist, and denying that is further proof that you are indeed a racist—why else would you deny being a racist? In this Kafkaesque world, denying being racist is exactly what we expect racists to do.
His case being thus proved, Slobodian deems it unnecessary to explore the reasoning of the libertarians he criticizes. The truth is that the libertarian opposition to the civil rights regime is not founded on “racism,” but on a defense of individual liberty and the rejection of state force as a mechanism of social engineering. The right to self-ownership holds that no one is entitled to use force against others to compel them to follow his own moral edicts and social ideals. The fact that one may be able to persuade a majority to vote in favor of enforcing his political ideals does not change the analysis, because if the use of force is unjustified it does not become justified merely because a majority has agreed to it.
Thus, styling illegitimate force as “democratic” does not lend it legitimacy. It merely becomes a democratic mandate for tyranny. Many who defend the principle of democracy as a way to legitimize the use of force give crime prevention as an example of why the democratic use of force is justified. After all, while liberalism is a philosophy of individual liberty, it does not follow that criminals should be at “liberty” to steal or kill. Thus, it would seem that the principle of “liberal democracy” legitimizes the use of force by the state to promote “good democracy,” because the state is (presumably) elected to power by a majority of citizens. Further, because a majority of people clearly agree that theft and murder are wrong, “liberal democrats” argue that the use of force by the state against a thief or murderer is legitimate and so it follows, by the same reasoning, that the state has a mandate to crush discrimination and “hate.” Thus, for example, progressives defend the role of the state in punishing people who “stir up hate” on social media. As reported by the BBC, when a British woman was jailed for 31 months for writing a “racist” comment on social media:
The 41-year-old childminder called for “mass deportation now” and added: “If that makes me racist, so be it.”
Judge Melbourne Inman KC told Birmingham Crown Court the sentence for these offences was intended to “punish and deter.”
As Slobodian sees it, the majority of people in a “liberal democracy” see racial discrimination as wrong, therefore, the state is entitled to use bayonets to enforce racial integration. He has the Mises Institute in his sights for rejecting such use of force, because, as he sees it, rejecting the use of force as a means of social engineering is nothing but a disguise for promoting racial separatism:
Its director was Rothbard’s kindred spirit and closest partner, Llewellyn “Lew” Rockwell Jr., both a radical libertarian and an advocate of “racial separatism.”
Rockwell’s unwavering defense of individual liberty and freedom of association is interpreted by Slobodian as “a fixation on race.” The state forcing races to mix, for example, by busing white children to black-majority schools to enforce racial integration, is not “a fixation with race” in his opinion, that is just the exercise of the liberal democratic will. But, of course, anyone who objects to sending federal militia to escort children to schools against their will and that of their parents must surely have “a fixation with race.”
State race-craft is deemed essential to liberal democracy, and therefore, the motives of anyone who objects to race-craft are inevitably suspect. Ron Paul—whom Slobodian describes as a “politician and coin dealer” who “trafficked in similar themes”—is also denounced for opposing the tyranny of civil rights. Slobodian does not mention Ron Paul’s lifelong commitment to liberty, no doubt because he presumes that to be nothing but a mask for “trafficking” in racial fixation. It should come as no surprise that Ludwig von Mises, by the same reasoning, is also guilty of the same crimes. According to Slobodian, Mises should also be seen as a racist. In their article “Misrepresenting Mises,” Phillip W. Magness and Amelia Janaskie explain how Slobodian arrives at this interpretation:
Slobodian (2019a, 379) alleged that “race theory has an ambiguous place in Mises’s work,” an allegation that encourages modern-day racists to claim inspiration from the free-market economist. Slobodian repeated and elaborated upon the charge in an article for Contemporary European History (CEH), stating that “libertarians who scour [Mises’s] writings to validate their divergent positions on migration can claim fairly to find confirmation of both sides of the argument.” One side of the story, he continued, derived from Mises “the realist, who saw race as a quasi-permanent category of global social organisation. Despite his liberal principles the Habsburg polyglot never became the radical anti-racist” (2019b, 155)
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Elsewhere, Slobodian (2018b) extends the argument into modern politics by blaming Mises and so-called neoliberals for inspiring anti-immigration and race theory arguments which, he says, “attained popularity among Alt-Right and Trumpian political movements in the 2010s.”
Slobodian’s strategy, in depicting his ideological opponents as racists, relies on not bothering to explain their philosophical position—presumably, because he thinks it is merely a mask to hide racism, their arguments do not merit analysis. By such omissions he creates the impression that—in the absence of any reason as to why libertarians reject civil rights—we can only assume the reason to be malign. As Magness and Janaskie explain,
By omitting pertinent context, Slobodian’s use of excerpts from Mises’s work results in an interpretation of Mises’s position that is factually incorrect and often opposite of Mises’s actual position.
While classical liberals do not all share the same ideological, philosophical, and political beliefs, and there are many classical liberals and left-libertarians who agree with progressives on civil rights, there is much scope for debate within the classical liberal philosophical framework as to whether the antidiscrimination political principle is a “right.” Many schools of liberalism would agree that force may legitimately be used against thieves and murderers but would differ on the appropriate punishment or the appropriate role of the state in crime prevention. They would agree that theft and murder are crimes but would differ as to whether “discrimination” is the moral or ethical equivalent of theft or murder when it comes to justifying the use of state force.
To those who regard the concept of “rights” as merely anything the democratic process designates as a right, anything could in theory be a right, and therefore, they recognize a “right not to be discriminated against.” But from the natural-law libertarian perspective, the right to life, and the right to private property, are not treated as rights merely because citizens agreed to label them as such.
Not everything that one would desire in life is a “right”; something does not become a “right” simply because a majority of people wish to enjoy such an entitlement and wield state force to back up their desires. The converse is also true, that rights of self-ownership and private property would not cease to be rights if a democratic majority agreed to abolish them or to reclassify them as mere privileges enjoyed by citizens under license from the state. Within this philosophical framework, civil rights are “phony rights” because they represent the illegitimate claim by social engineers to dictate the political ideals according to which other people must live, and the assertion of power to back up their illegitimate claims by use of state force.