The British National Party gets a lesson in diversity: [Read more →]

The forthcoming issue* of Reason features an exceedingly thoughtful essay by Kerry Howley, in which she argues that libertarianism would be well-served by widening its scope and paying far more attention to infringements on liberty that are the product of cultural forces.  It’s an argument familiar to those of us versed in sociological or anthropological discourse: namely, that systematic cultural conditions can have just as much of an impact on restricting individual liberty as any expansion of the state’s power.  In the process of defending Howley’s critique, Will Wilkinson notes that a fair number of libertarians don’t really seem to get the core substance of Howley’s point:

If you think cultural products such as political ideologies evolve over time, you won’t see the content of “libertarianism” as sharply defined and fixed once and for all. To assert, as Ilya does, that “some cultural issues might well be appropriate object of concern for libertarians as thinking individuals, but not a proper focus for libertarianism,” pretty much begs the question. The claim is that these cultural issues ought to be objects of concern to libertarians because they are matters of liberty that libertarian have overlooked. Kerry’s asking libertarians to care more about the conditions under which people develop the capacity to meaningfully exercise freedom. She’s asking libertarians to not so blithely assume that social relations of exploitation and domination enforced by state power for hundreds of years are no longer matters of liberty simply because the enforcement of longstanding racist and sexist norms was privatized a few decades ago. She’s not asking libertarians to save the whales.

As you’re wondering why it is that so many commentators have had a hard time getting Kerry’s core point, I think it’s worth keeping in mind that libertarianism – as a political movement – is overwhelmingly white and male.  We tend to think of the racial composition of a political movement as just having electoral consequences, but it also has a profound effect on the core ideology of said movement.  At the risk of oversimplifying a bit, marginalized voices – racial and ethnic minorities, women, gays, etc. – are overrepresented among liberals and as such, the left that has been forced to grapple with the issues and concerns of marginalized communities in such a way as to make liberalism better equipped to deal with these issues.

It seems that insofar that libertarians experience oppression or constraints on their liberty, it is through the actions of the state rather than through culture, which makes sense. Libertarians are overwhelmingly white and male, and in a culture which highly values whiteness and maleness, they will face relatively fewer overt cultural constraints on their behavior than their more marginalized fellow-travelers.  Or in other words, a fair number of libertarians are operating with a good deal of unexamined privilege, and it’s this, along with the extremely small number of women and minorities who operate within the libertarian framework, which makes grappling with cultural sources of oppression really hard for libertarians.  After all – socially speaking – being a white guy in the United States isn’t exactly hard and that’s doubly true if you are well off.

*Has it already come out?

Using Geraldo Rivera as a barometer of Latino opinion is probably a bad idea, but there was something oddly touching about this (via):

I have goosebumps,” says Rivera, 65, born to a Catholic, Puerto Rican father and Jewish mother. He defines himself as the former. … “It finally happened. Wow. Look how the Puerto Rican community came up with someone so world-class,” says Rivera of Sotomayor . . .

Our resident attorney, the estimable Mark Thompson, has already provided some much-needed context for Sotomayor’s more controversial utterances, but I think Rivera’s point is worth expanding on. Obviously, elevating a woman of Puerto Rican descent to the Supreme Court isn’t going to magically save her ethnic community. In fact, I doubt Sotomayor’s appointment will have any material impact on the well-being of Puerto Rican (or Latino) citizens.

There is something to be said, however, for a governing class that actually reflects our diverse electorate, and appointing an otherwise well-qualified jurist who also happens to be Hispanic strikes me as a decent way to signal that there is some meaningful connection between the citizenry and its political leadership.

I also think there’s a persuasive conservative case to be made  in favor of diversifying the upper tiers of American government. Commentators of all stripes will occasionally note the growing disconnect between elites and the electorate, but this complaint is aired more frequently by observers on the Right, who decry the decline of civic and community participation, harp on the fact that fewer citizens are paying income taxes, and are generally appreciative of a dose of good old-fashioned populism.

Sometimes this tendency goes too far, but the central insight behind these criticisms is that citizens ought to retain some tangible connection to their government and their communities, that an engaged citizenry is the best way to combat corruption and safeguard liberty, and that our constitutional system would be hollow indeed without an enduring tradition of civic participation. This outlook is fundamentally inclusive, and it emphasizes the importance of getting people involved in the business of government.

This would all be a moot point if Sotomayor was under-qualified for a seat on the Supreme Court, but I don’t think anyone is seriously questioning her impressive credentials. Ceteris paribus, I think it’s eminently reasonable (desirable, even) to seek out a diverse array of candidates for high-ranking government positions. Bush, to his credit, seemed to understand this. I’m not terribly worried if Obama follows suit.

There are more than a few compelling reasons to avoid a completely homogeneous workforce, but Matt Labash’s look at sclerotic diversity industry is still pretty damning (and hilarious):

Indeed, Peggy Norris, a private-sector contract consultant who used to work on the government side in procurement, tells me that another consultant, after getting one of her clients through the 8(a) process, told her he could get her the certification as well, since she’s from West Virginia. Another 8(a) guru I found after the conference, Vincent Villa, whose website is literally 8aguru.com, says he once got a woman through 8(a) certification who claimed a sexual harassment disadvantage. “She did wear dresses you could have said were revealing,” says Villa. “And she had big tits. But so what? You shouldn’t be looking!”

So in the continuing debate between myself and Mark about the value of protesting and the intricacies of protest culture, Mark has basically conceded my point that judging protests on the basis of affecting change and cohesiveness of message alone is to misunderstand at least one element of protesting insofar as they are community building events. However, Mark notes that the near invariability of mixed messaging involved in protesting may well generate as much apathy as it seeks to mitigate.

Mark asks,

But what if taking to the streets winds up increasing, rather than decreasing, apathy in society as a whole even as it creates a sense of a passionate united community amongst the faithful? What if, indeed, it winds up destroying a nascent movement united on a single issue? I think this is exactly what happens when more and more non-germane elements are introduced into a protest.

Sure, again if the purpose of the protest in question is to unite people on one single issue and give birth to a “nascent movement” Mark’s point would be very well taken, but that’s not what I’m referring to when I talk about the community building potentials of grassroots protesting from either the left or the right.

Listen, before I dig in to what I take to be the meat of this issue, let me get a couple of things out of the way. Firstly, it is my estimation that anyone who is going to be turned off by a plurality of messaging at a protest to the extent that they come to question the very value of mass public demonstration, then odds are they weren’t generally going to be very much involved in the first place — much less susceptible to any gravitational pull of community building that may go on in these events.
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