The Rand Paul Gaffe And Liberal Injustice

A POLITICAL gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. So when GOP senate candidate Rand Paul discussed with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow “his belief in a limited government that should not force private businesses to abide by civil rights law” the media’s gaffe alarm went off.

The fact is that liberals have got us trained. You’d think that the whole point of non-discrimination laws is to stop the government from discriminating on the basis of race or sex. If private businesses discriminate, it’s ugly, but it’s not unjust. But when governments do it you get Jim Crow. Or political correctness.

Under liberal instruction, in today’s America, private businesses must not discriminate against protected groups, but governments may flexibly discriminate in their favor—as the mood takes them.

Now Ramesh Ponnuru at National Review has come out and agreed with the liberals. Segregation in the South was “a deeply rooted social system with many facets that blurred the private-public distinction,” so ingrained that it needed a root and branch reform and that included banning private discrimination in restaurants.

Maybe he is right. Maybe in 1964, the United States government needed to make a huge gesture, to send the US cavalry charging into the South and bring its flashing sabers down on the defiant evil of racial segregation.

And, of course, Ponnuru acknowledges, modern conservatism has its original sin to atone for, that conservatives like Bill Buckley were slow to understand the moral necessity of confessing and repenting of America’s original sin.

The trouble is, of course, that liberals didn’t stop with the applying the Civil Rights laws against the Jim Crow South. They banned private discrimination on everything that liberals care about—gender, class, and gays.

Every American know that they’d better watch their step, on racism, sexism, classism, homophobia because the government can wreck your life if you put a foot wrong.

Some Americans imagine that, with Obama, we have turned the corner on race. Dream on. Liberals are never going to give us absolution on race. Or on women, gays or any of their protected group Americans. Liberal political power issues out of the moral and cultural power they have acquired as champions of the oppressed.

Modern liberalism started out championing the workers. That’s how we got Social Security and Big Labor. Of course liberals were a bit late to the parade; workers had been organizing themselves for a century. Then liberals championed African Americans and we got the Civil Rights Acts. A bit late again. African Americans had been working to defeat Jim Crow since the beginning of the 20th century.

Somewhere along the line, liberals realized that they could generalize this approach to politics. They could champion all self-described oppressed groups, and win their eternal gratitude at the ballot box. If a group wasn’t already organized then they’d astroturf it with ACORN and well-trained community organizers.

Today, fifty years later, liberals have utterly betrayed the noble principles of the Civil Rights era. Out of the monstrous injustice suffered by African Americans they have created a monster of liberal injustice, a government run amok discriminating in the most corrupt and cruel manner imaginable.

It is the destiny of modern conservatism to stand against this liberal monster and raise the cry for justice.

Let us return to first principles. It is government that needs to be forbidden to discriminate not private citizens. The reason is obvious. Discrimination is to a politician what mother’s milk is to a baby. When politicians aren’t discriminating in favor of their supporters they are creating dividing lines to demonize their opponents.

For now, conservatives do not have the power to reverse the injustice of liberal race laws. The only weapon we have is shame, just like lawyer Joseph Welch when he shamed Sen. Joe McCarthy all those years ago. “Have you no sense of decency liberals, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Is their dealings with Sen. McCarthy, liberals understood the power of shame. So why can’t they be content with shaming private businesses that discriminate against their favorite client group du jour?

The answer is power. What is the point of power unless you use it? What’s the point of cultural power unless you convert it to law, so that you can smite your opponents with the power of the state.

We are seeing this power lust in the developing train-wreck of the BP oil spill. The first priority for the Obamis seems to be criminal proceedings rather than cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico and the wetlands of Louisiana.

The conservative approach to politics is different. Conservatives believe that most social problems should be solved not be government action but by social pressure. Better to shame a businessman into serving African Americans than throwing him in jail.

Maybe in his clumsy way, Rand Paul has fired the first shot in the great battle of the next generation. It is the battle against cruel, corrupt liberal injustice.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

mysql close