Classical Liberals and Libertarians Have Been Consistent Champions for Minority Rights

    

First, we would like to thank Ikeda, Morel, Parham, and Sandefur for their responses and their engagement. Each of them focused on a particular classical liberal thinker and discussed the ways in which they promoted individual liberty. Our hope is to extend this work to more and more under-appreciated figures. We truly believe there is a classical liberal anti-racist tradition in this country and that an emphasis on individual rights leads classical liberals and libertarians to promote liberty for minority groups.

Ikeda challenges us to ask why classical liberals and libertarians have lost their “fervor” for promoting “racial equality” and asserts that our view that the commitment to individual liberty translates to condemning all forms of collectivist oppression is more “a wish than a statement of fact.” Ikeda also mentions his own experience as a Japanese classical liberal, whose parents suffered through internment and who is often the only person of color in room after room of libertarian and classical liberal scholars. In response, we argue that libertarians boast an outstanding record on behalf of minorities in recent times. However, this legacy has been obscured by the movement’s small size, and the more prominent use of neutral language when solving the underlying policy issues themselves. This means that for attracting minorities who have experienced state oppression, we have a marketing problem.

Nevertheless, some parts of our movement, such as the Acton Institute for the study of religion and liberty, have developed highly diverse audiences, both by reaching out to the international freedom movement, and by forging connections with American minorities via shared concerns such as effective poverty alleviation. As Jonathan Haidt might remind us from his insights in The Righteous Mind, liberty is a foundational moral value, but we are motivated by other foundations as well, including care and sacredness. These successful outreach efforts can serve as a template moving forward.

Furthermore, we can also share Ikeda’s concerns insofar as a certain subset of the liberty movement seems to have created a pipeline to the alt-right. As far as we can tell, the distasteful vitriol of this group is almost entirely traceable to the work of Hans Hermann Hoppe, a man deeply out of step with the rest of the liberty tradition. But perhaps a more trenchant concern ought to be the 20th century tendency towards a kind of philosophical anorexia. The liberty movement will best safeguard its inheritance if it remains deeply connected to its substantive philosophical roots.

We have already noted the many classical liberals involved in the long Civil Rights Movement. Post-New Deal and post-WWII, classical liberalism had become fairly obscure among the public. However, just as Moorfield Storey not only co-founded the NAACP but served as its president until his death, the few classical liberals involved in the Civil Rights Movement itself also happened to be absolutely pivotal to its launch. For instance, TRM Howard was an ardent classical liberal who, in the 1950s, was one of the most prominent activists for Black civil rights. He supported and protected Emmett Till’s mother during the trial of her son’s murderers and when Till did not receive justice, Howard traveled the country arguing that Black Americans needed to March on Washington to secure equal rights and justice. He was invited by the relatively unknown Martin Luther King Jr. to speak to his congregation in Montgomery, Alabama. There, Howard’s passionate remarks inspired Rosa Parks to take a stand. In short, classical liberals were present throughout the struggle for Black civil rights even if many of them are no longer household names.

Later, libertarians joined with many in the Civil Rights Movement to oppose the Vietnam War and the draft, which disproportionately affected Black men due to their underrepresentation in groups excepted from the draft, such as university students. In fact, libertarians carved out a distinct identity from conservatives in the debates over the Vietnam War. Libertarians “believed that the war in Vietnam was so heinous, and the draft so threatening to national liberty, that they could no longer stand as a part of the largest pro-laissez-faire capitalist youth organization in the nation.” As such, they walked out of  the 1969 Young Americans for Freedom Convention. Free marketer Milton Friedman was central to ending military conscription in the United States, and also referred specifically to disparate effects on Black Americans in his discussions of the perverse effects of the minimum wage. Furthermore, in Friedman’s school choice efforts, he explicitly noted the importance of integration and argued that educational freedom would ultimately promote it.

Classical liberals and libertarians were also influential in the struggle for women’s rights going all the way back to the 18th century, such as the sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké’s famously Lockean and individualist arguments for the equal rights and responsibilities of women. 20th century libertarianism may be one of the only major political movements in history to base its entire founding on female thinkers: Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, and Isabel Patterson, the three “mothers of libertarianism.” It was the ideas of individual liberty, equality before the law, and the right of each individual to pursue their own ends that inspired second wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. With the general obscurity of classical liberalism in this period, most women’s rights activists didn’t identify as libertarians, but many of the ideals they promoted were derived from the classical liberal intellectual tradition.

In the case of gay Americans, those who placed individual liberty as their highest idea led the way. The Libertarian Party embraced gay marriage in its first (1972) Presidential platform and throughout the 1970s libertarians called for an end to anti-gay laws across the United States. Other libertarians argued for decoupling the state from marriage altogether, an approach that also promotes the legal equality of heterosexuals and homosexuals.  According to David Boaz, this should come as no surprise. After all, as F.A. Hayek argued in 1960, “private practice among adults, however abhorrent it may be to the majority, is not a proper subject for coercive action for a state whose object is to minimize coercion.” For comparison, both the Republican and Democratic Parties still opposed gay marriage as recently as 2008.

Libertarians were far ahead of the curve in forcefully advocating for an end to the War on Drugs and the carceral state. In fact, they did so long before these became topics championed by the left. We know that drug laws disproportionately affect Black Americans—specifically Black men. While Democrats and Republicans were passing bipartisan legislation to establish mandatory minimums, classical liberals and libertarians were calling for drug liberalization.

While it’s absolutely true that the glory of classical liberalism is its neutrality between citizens, it’s also true that those who have suffered historical exclusion from liberal institutions -- whether ethnic groups, women, or sexual minorities -- need to know that classical liberals will fight for their equality before the law. Therefore, we understand Ikeda’s push-back in light of some disturbing developments in the last few decades. We do not have space here to litigate it, but please see the work of Phil Magness on the influence of Hans Hermann Hoppe. We will just briefly say that Hoppe created a novel (but, we would argue, unsuccessful) argument for property rights from Habermasian discourse ethics; holds extreme anti-immigration views that are incompatible with a free society; has defended the Germans in WWII; and has used disturbingly ethnocentric language on many occasions. His popularity through his association with the Mises Institute has recently led to an almost complete breakdown of the Libertarian Party, led by the so-called “Mises Caucus,” in spite of the fact that these activists disagree deeply with Ludwig von Mises’s own, quite cosmopolitan, perspective.

But underneath that troubling subset of the movement, we see a deeper weakness. 20th century libertarianism simplified the anthropologically rich, Scottish Enlightenment ideas of liberty down to something much thinner: a formulaic appeal to the non-aggression principle. This departure from the wisdom of the classical liberal heritage around the role of human sociality and virtue has perhaps set up the movement for the way it’s been co-opted in recent years. Hopefully, this aberration in the liberty movement will undermine itself, returning us to a wiser and deeper tradition of liberty that has the substance to withstand empty philosophical fads.