The Liberal Founding - Repost

This is a repost of “The Liberal Founding,” originally posted here July 24, 2012. 

JohnMH127@gmail.com

“The spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights” - (Vide infra)

Professor Charles K. Rowley:

In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. - What Is Living and What Is Dead in Classical Liberalism

To start, preliminary remarks on liberalism. The underlying propositions:

1. The liberal Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was an outgrowth of the scientific revolution of the latter half of the seventeenth century
2. In this blog the term ‘liberalism’ means Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism is substantially different from the outlook of the left, and from Marxism, progressivism, libertarianism, and conservatism (as Historian Fritz Stern writes, “Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy.”)
3. The Declaration and Constitution, recognized by scholars as representative Enlightenment documents, embody liberal principles. As Stern’s and Ferris’s notes below suggest, the Founding was an expression of the new liberal values of the Enlightenment
4. The underlying assumptions and working principles of the United States are liberal. The present tendency to use ‘liberal’ as a derogatory epithet suggests a fundamental problem for the working of our society

Timothy Ferris, The Science of Liberty:

This book argues that the new ingredient was science. It maintains that the democratic revolution was sparked—caused is perhaps not too strong a word—by the scientific revolution. … Science arose to prominence immediately prior to the Enlightenment—as would be expected if, indeed, science was the one indisputably new ingredient in the social and intellectual ferment that produced the Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions that followed. (p. 2, p. 6)

Fritz Stern was born in Breslau, Germany in 1926, and moved with his family to the United States in 1938 in response to the rising anti-semitism of the Third Reich. As he wrote in The Failure of Illiberalism:

It may be that the accident of German birth gave me an added incentive to work in this extraordinary field. It certainly left me with strong memories. I was seven when Hitler came to power; for the next five years I lived under the two faces of Fascism. ... In school I saw the smiling face of Nazism, as fellow students reveled in their uniforms, sang their songs, and prattled their litany of love and hate. I sensed their exultation and felt their cruelty.

From Fritz Stern Op-Ed New York Times September 4, 1988 (in response to George H.W. Bush’s Ronald Reagan's derogatory use of ‘liberal’):

Liberalism—one of “America's noblest traditions,” I insisted, often defined as a state of mind—had “transformed the world . . . [I]ts greatest victory has been the American Revolution; its greatest pronouncement, the Declaration of Independence; its greatest bulwark, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.” It had “stood for freedom against tyranny. At its best . . . a force for change and progress, seeking the institutional defense of decency.” [...] In America's liberal premises the world had seen “the best promise of the West.” - This, and the following, from Five Germanys I Have Known

 
New York Times ad purchased  October 26, 1988 by Fritz Stern and C. Vann Woodward:

A Reaffirmation of Principle

We speak as American citizens who wish to reaffirm America's liberal tradition. At our country's founding, the spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These principles, thus embodied, have inspired the respect of much of the world.

We regret that the President of the United States has taken the lead in vilifying one of our oldest and noblest traditions. He made sport of “the dreaded L-word” and continues to make “liberal” and “liberalism” terms of opprobrium. We are deeply concerned about the erosion and debasement of American values and American traditions that our country has long cherished.

In the past and at its best, liberalism has sought the institutional defense of decency. Everywhere it has fought for the freedom of individuals to attain their fullest development. It has opposed tyranny in all forms, past and present. Liberal policies require constant scrutiny and sometimes revision. Liberal principles—freedom, tolerance, and the protection of the rights of every citizen—are timeless.

Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out. We hope that others will do so as well.

A Committed Writer

"The citizen is lost in the labyrinth constructed by his country, ... It was not enough. It will not be enough. Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house." (As Doris Lessing wrote [NYT], "There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. ... Powerful ideas affecting our behavior can be visible only in brief sentences, even a phrase — a catch phrase.") 

Concerning a national magazine's resort to such revolutionary rhetoric, conservative Rod Dreher wrote:

Then TNC goes on to draw some sort of black nationalist lesson from his summer at French camp, culminating in this line: “Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house.” OK. Whatever. Reparations scholarships to Middlebury for all!

I snark, but honestly, the idea that the enormous privilege of spending a summer studying a foreign language at a verdant Vermont college should conclude with a resolution to become even more of a militant race man is depressing. Exactly whose house will TNC be burning down as a result of the tools he acquired this summer at Middlebury? François Hollande’s? I don’t get it.

Earlier, a fellow contributor to The Atlantic, struggling to decode TNC's rhetoric, thought his crusade was an appeal to to the good will of his fellow American citizens:

The real importance of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Reparations article, which is still attracting deserved attention, is that it is not mainly about repayment in a literal, financial sense. Instead, as I understand it, it’s about a larger historical reckoning or awareness. “Truth and reconciliation,” you might call it. (Emphasis added.)

Yet TNC had already delivered a sweeping indictment of the very people to whom he was appealing: 

The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people . . . (Emphasis added)

These articles in The Atlantic are being given a lot of slack because they play the race card. Part of our bargain with ourselves as citizens of a society which supports equality and tolerance is to subject criticism of certain subjects to heightened scrutiny. But doing so can impede reasonable debate, as in the related case:

American Jewish liberals have been intimidated or censored themselves into silence, which has only made matters worse. The reason is the need to somehow credentialize yourself as “pro-Israel”, and any criticism is immediately interpreted as being “anti-Israel”. That’s essentially a loyalty test that impedes reasonable debate – and is designed to.

I don't know if an article series which includes phrases like “Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house” and “A crime that implicates the entire American people” is Communist jargon, but it crosses a line which responsible journalism should not cross (Ref. The Opinions in this Article are those of the Author and Do Not Necessarily Reflect the Opinion of The Atlantic or Its Staff).

As we saw above, a veteran journalist seemed to find it necessary to put words in TNC's mouth in order to put a positive slant on his rhetoric. Previous articles on this weblog have critiqued The Atlantic's series' "mishmash logic and language of innuendo and false equivalence." Lincoln, speaking of the advocates of slavery themselves, noted a similar rhetoric which lowers the level of public discourse:

Accordingly, they commenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind. They invented an ingenious sophism which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps, through all the incidents, to the complete destruction of the Union.

The sophism of The Atlantic's articles, correspondingly, is their implied proposition that everyone in America now—right now—is culpably burdened by antebellum slavery: “A crime that implicates the entire American people.” Blamed not only for their ancestors, but their descendants: “An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.”

“To think clearly,” said Orwell, “is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”

“The first point: language.” Lessing explained:

It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. ... the pedantries and verbosity of Communism had their roots in German academia. And now that has become a kind of mildew blighting the whole world. ... Powerful ideas affecting our behavior can be visible only in brief sentences, even a phrase — a catch phrase. All writers are asked this question by interviewers: “Do you think a writer should...?” “Ought writers to...?” The question always has to do with a political stance, and note that the assumption behind the words is that all writers should do the same thing, whatever it is. The phrases “Should a writer...?” “Ought writers to...?” have a long history that seems unknown to the people who so casually use them. Another is “commitment,” so much in vogue not long ago. Is so and so a committed writer? 

A successor to “commitment” is “raising consciousness.” This is double-edged. The people whose consciousness is being raised may be given information they most desperately lack and need, may be given moral support they need. But the process nearly always means that the pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of. “Raising consciousness,” like “commitment,” like “political correctness,” is a continuation of that old bully, the party line. (Emphasis added)

“But the process nearly always means that the pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of.” Previous blog posts have noted that Lincoln in numerous speeches and writings decisively refuted many of the derogatory assertions in The Atlantic's Reparations series (here, here and here, among others.) The Atlantic mentions none of them.

The method is dishonesty and the purpose is deception.

Lincoln: Why the Founders Didn't Abolish Slavery at the Outset

From the Lincoln-Douglas debates:

It may be argued that there are certain conditions that make necessities and impose them upon us, and to the extent that a necessity is imposed upon a man, he must submit to it. I think that was the condition in which we found ourselves when we established this Government. We had slavery among us, we could not get our Constitution unless we permitted them to remain in slavery, we could not secure the good we did secure if we grasped for more; and having by necessity submitted to that much, it does not destroy the principle that is the charter of our liberties. Let that charter stand as our standard. (Emphasis added)

Thus when The Atlantic titles an article Slavery Made America, it is at best a misleading half-truth. When the series of articles of which this is a part give no voice whatever to Lincoln's dissenting opinion, that influential publication breaks journalistic faith with the American public. When The Atlantic insinuates that the Founders were morally compromised hypocrites (see the opening portion of The Opinions in this Article are those of the Author and Do Not Necessarily Reflect the Opinion of The Atlantic or Its Staff), it slanders courageous, principled leaders to whom it, and we, owe much.

The Opinions in this Article are those of the Author and Do Not Necessarily Reflect the Opinion of The Atlantic or Its Staff

Earlier this year The Atlantic published the following assertion:

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. ...

What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

The article does not contain the kind of caveat expressed by the title of this post. The Atlantic editors do not caution that the above opinions are not necessarily their own, or those of the magazine. Yet Wikipedia currently asserts:

The Atlantic is an American magazine, founded in 1857 as The Atlantic Monthly in Boston, Massachusetts, now based in Washington, D.C. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine and quickly achieved a national reputation as a high-quality review with a moderate worldview—a reputation it has maintained for over 150 years. (Emphasis added)

For American citizens there could be no greater attack on the principles of liberty, justice, and equality than the above passage. What is celebrated while "scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July" are the noble principles which this country proclaimed to the world on that date. What is celebrated is the greatest document in the history of liberal democratic government, the Declaration of Independence.

The author proceeds by innuendo and insinuation. He does not openly state that the principles of equality, liberty, and freedom from tyranny are negated by his litany of American sins. Instead, he casts cowardly aspersion on public-spiritedness, "integrationists," and democratic dispositions, if not on the very idea of principled action itself. How could the editors of The Atlantic be comfortable with this?

The very first post on this weblog, The Liberal Founding, contained a response to a similar critique of American principles by none other than the President.* The response began:

We speak as American citizens who wish to reaffirm America's liberal tradition. At our country's founding, the spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These principles, thus embodied, have inspired the respect of much of the world. - Historian Fritz Stern, refugee from Hitler Germany

Dr. Stern and a number of other signatories continued:

We regret that the President of the United States has taken the lead in vilifying one of our oldest and noblest traditions. He made sport of “the dreaded L-word” and continues to make “liberal” and “liberalism” terms of opprobrium. We are deeply concerned about the erosion and debasement of American values and American traditions that our country has long cherished.

In the past and at its best, liberalism has sought the institutional defense of decency. Everywhere it has fought for the freedom of individuals to attain their fullest development. It has opposed tyranny in all forms, past and present. Liberal policies require constant scrutiny and sometimes revision. Liberal principles—freedom, tolerance, and the protection of the rights of every citizen—are timeless.

Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists.

The author given platform by The Atlantic's hapless editors found it necessary to trash the Declaration (and by implication the Constitution) in order to construct an argument for "reparations." Be not afraid. This American Scripture** continues to have "the respect of much of the world ... [because] Liberal principles—freedom, tolerance, and the protection of the rights of every citizen—are timeless."

A closing note concerning language and propositional assent. The author of this article in The Atlantic is apparently summering in France (or not: "Je vais retourner en aout."). Question: Does "white guilt" apply to the French? Certainly, if there is something uniquely evil about white folks that causes them, alone, to commit slavery, then it applies equally to the French, the Afghans, the Iranians, and so on around the world.

The problem is that attributing unique evil to a given race is classic racism. If this is what The Atlantic's editors meant when they published an unexplained reference to "white guilt," they have, according to standards articulated by Atlantic contributor James Fallows(***), violated the principles of responsible journalism. Fallows recently observed, concerning another article:

I’m sure that fakery has occurred. But the claim that it has is as serious as they come in journalism. It goes at our ultimate source of self-respect. As when saying that a doctor is deliberately misdiagnosing patients, that a pilot is drunk in the cockpit, that a lifeguard is purposely letting people drown, you might be right, but you had better be very, very sure before making the claim.

As when tossing out an unqualified reference to "white guilt."

In How to Think Straight: An Introduction to Critical Reasoning, Anthony Flew cited the Marquis de Vauvenargues:

“Obscurity is the kingdom of error” and “For the philosopher clarity is a matter of good faith.”

The Atlantic article claims that "white supremacy" is "fundamental" to America, and insinuates that principled Americans such as Fritz Stern are wrong in their faith that it is "freedom, tolerance, and the protection of the rights of every citizen" which established the nation and continue to shape it. The article's mishmash logic and language of innuendo and false equivalence further this unprincipled objective. Thus do the media, today, "undermine American democracy."


(*) The post erroneously refers to then presidential candidate George H. W. Bush rather than Reagan. 

(**) Pauline Meyer's book, American Scripture, about the Declaration. "The spreading ideas of natural rights and individual liberty distinctively altered politics, economy and society."

(***) Fallows is the author of Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy.

Did You Feel Guilty When You Celebrated the Fourth This Year?

No. You didn't. And the guy who conducted the "Reparations" faux civil rights campaign, in the pages of The Atlantic, is summering in Paris.

In The Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates announces: 

What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

Coates' "White Supremacy" / "Reparations" series of articles appeared to be in the great call-for-renewal tradition of the suffragists and of Martin Luther King's campaign to end Jim Crow. Au contraire. It was civil rights theater. Civil rights spectacle. Designed to increase the circulation of The Atlantic, and to solidify Ta-Nehisi Coates' standing as a premiere print-media commentator.

Americans got it. They humored him. They watched his puff-ball televised "interview" with Jeffrey Goldberg. They responded in the hundreds to the comment site set up by The Atlantic. And they had the grand hot dogs, baked beans, cherry-bomb-detonating Fourth they usually do.

And that's a good thing. There's much to be said for the wised-up, ironic response to egregious dastardy. Very little that is good, constructive, and bettering about "this good free country of ours," escaped the wide swath of destruction, wreaked by Mr. Coates' campaign to seek justice for the "crime that implicates the entire American people."

This is how Coates, by implication, invalidates his nation's inspiring founding:

One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.

By contrast, Lincoln, in his letter to Henry L. Pierce, noted the universal character of the Founders' principles:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. (Emphasis added)

One of the great glories of being human is that the good men do lives after them, while the evil is oft interred with their bones.* Lincoln was stirred by the poetry of the Founding; Coates is deaf to it. All he sees is the Founders' personal flaws. Our wisdom literature is profound when it says, "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest; ... if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."

That is how you get a better world. That is why I am glad we Americans went right ahead and celebrated the Fourth, even though Ta-Nehisi Coates said we shouldn't.

And to what purpose Coates' reckless act of destruction? By his logic we would be hypocrites to celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday.**

"Ben," one of the commenters, noted:

The article's prognosis doesn't follow from its diagnosis. Given that ... African-Americans were systematically denied economic participation and security, and that that oppression continues to happen in ever-changing forms in the present day, the solution is: . . . a national dialogue? About coming to grips with America's past? So we don't have "a la carte patriotism" anymore?

No. What is needed to combat what the article documents is for African-Americans to meaningfully participate in the day-to-day political economic life of the US. But that would require an analysis of political dynamics and economic institutions which the article is completely silent on. What forms of economic organization for African-American workers that would allow capital accumulation without having to go through multi-national institutions that are racist and, in any case, constructed to steal as much as possible from the non-elite? What kinds of political behavior, both inside and outside the electoral system, would be most likely to get that system to change in favor of more equitable treatment?

Calling for a national dialogue and an honest accounting with America's past, with George Washington the slave owner, is not about answering the above questions. It is treating cancer with prayer.

I suspect Coates knows this. And I don't want my hunch on why he didn't publish that article to be true.

From a previous post:

J. D. Vance: "Coates cherry-picks data to score emotional points instead of carefully building an argument for reparations."

Coates' intent is apparently to fix the blame rather than fix the problem. Vance again: "There’s no talk, however, of what to do now, how reparations would help, or why we ought to focus on settling an old score instead of charting a new course. ... But it must be said: breaking hearts is far easier than healing them." (Emphasis added)

Ta-Nehisi Coates' Reparations series bore little resemblance to our nation's civil rights campaigns. It was more like trolling.

America, your ironic response to someone who threw "white guilt" in your face was wise and good. May you still be able to recognize, and honor, a real civil rights campaign when one appears.

Where there is no vision, the people perish. - Proverbs 29:18


(*) Apologies for egregious misquote of Shakespeare. - Act 3, Scene ii, "Julius Caesar"

(**) Wikipedia mentions: "A tape recording of several of [Martin Luther] King's extramarital liaisons, excerpted from FBI wiretaps . . ."

An Open Letter to James Fallows

Mr. Fallows:

You recently wrote:

The real importance of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Reparations article, which is still attracting deserved attention, is that it is not mainly about repayment in a literal, financial sense. Instead, as I understand it, it’s about a larger historical reckoning or awareness. “Truth and reconciliation,” you might call it.

In other words, the value is the moral case—that America has not, as you imply in the following paragraph, "attempted to face its past." But what Coates means by asking Americans to recognize the implications of their history rejects Lincoln's view, which is that that history is of a nation "conceived in liberty." In the video of his reparations debate with Jeffrey Goldberg, Coates at one point says, "You're responsible for the heritage." His discussion of the case for reparations asserts (contra Lincoln, as we shall see below) wasn't just an inescapable historical circumstance which existed at the founding, and alleges "white guilt":

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. (Emphasis added)

In the guise of historical reckoning—as if we didn't know that many of the Founders had slaves—Coates asserts that this fact invalidates the principles Lincoln praised:

Lincoln, in his letter to Henry L. Pierce, noted the universal character of the Founders' principles:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. (Emphasis added)

Coates, by contrast, seems to believe that this is hypocrisy:

The Civil War—the most lethal conflict in American history—boiled down to the right to raise an empire based on slaveholding and white supremacy. What had not yet clicked for me was precisely how essential enslavement was to America, that its foundational nature explained the Civil War's body count. (Emphasis added)

This is well-known invalid inference. To believe that the character of the person—in this case, the Founders—presenting the argument invalidates the argument (as when Hitler dismissed Relativity as "Jewish science") is classic ad hominem.

This is an example of the first way in which Coates' reparations articles constitute terrible journalism: Argument by fallacy.

A second is numerous passages so convoluted that they demonstrate no conceivable point. They "work" for Coates because his readers, for the most part, seem to accept his insistence that they support one of his themes, such as that "Slavery Made America". An example from that article:

The first 200 pages or so [of James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom] show that the War was about not only the perpetuation of "African slavery," but its expansion. McPherson quotes directly from the mouths of secessionists who have no problem laying out bondage as their primary casus belli. McPherson shows the essential place enslavement held in the economy of the South and in America at large. Thus the conflagration that follows does not appear out of thin air. ...
Conservatively speaking, 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the Civil War, two percent of the American population at the time. Twenty percent of all Southern white men of military age died in the War. Until Vietnam, more people had died in the Civil War than all other American wars combined. An interest which compelled that amount of death and suffering must be something more than vague disagreement over a "way of life." (Emphasis added)

Coates' implied conclusion—that the above passage shows that the tragic Civil War body count reveals that "America at large" wanted the "perpetuation" and "expansion" of African slavery—is crackpot.

He doesn't reject Lincoln's explicit statement, in the Second Inaugural Address, that America entered the war to prevent the expansion of slavery:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

He ignores it. (This weblog has documented other instances in which Coates ignores Lincoln's arguments here and here.)

This is the third (and final, for today) example of Coates' flawed journalism: Untrustworthy evidence.

In The Case for Reparations Coates documents criminal exclusion of African Americans from middle class home ownership in Chicago:

The devastating effects are cogently outlined by Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth:

Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the “self-fulfilling prophecies” of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable.

Coates draws two sweeping generalizations from this. One, which we'll discuss below, is that this applies nationwide. There aren't more liberal areas where middle class blacks live in middle class homes in middle class communities (responsible journalism would call for this to be supported by the various independent nationwide surveys which exist). Coates' evidence, as he published it, is anecdotal.

The other global generalization, which Coates bases on the above flawed evidence, is that adopting middle class values and middle class behavior would have no benefit:

One thread of thinking in the African American community holds that these depressing numbers partially stem from cultural pathologies that can be altered through individual grit and exceptionally good behavior. (In 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, responding to violence among young black males, put the blame on the family: “Too many men making too many babies they don’t want to take care of, and then we end up dealing with your children.” Nutter turned to those presumably fatherless babies: “Pull your pants up and buy a belt, because no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”) The thread is as old as black politics itself. It is also wrong. The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the wake of the grim numbers, we see the grim inheritance. (Emphasis added)

Coates offers no support whatever for his absolute assertion that better behavior will never bring a better outcome. He just says it.

As for the previous item, a claimed nationwide racist housing policy, one of Coates' "arguments" was:

What are the roots of our housing policy? White supremacy. What are the roots of white supremacy in America? Justification for enslavement.

Argument by extreme. Jonathan Chait was likewise perplexed by this characteristic tendency to pick one extreme or another, denying the middle, where things usually lie: "I was clarifying that Obama (and Bill Cosby) see the culture of poverty as a part of the problem of poverty, as opposed to its entirety, as Ryan sees it, and also opposed to zero percent of the problem, as Coates sees it."

Does anecdotal evidence refute anecdotal evidence? No, but one falsifying example refutes a claimed universal. At a meeting in Salem, the state capital of Oregon, the speaker, a civil rights activist from the East, asked the audience where black people lived in their town. The audience was puzzled. Finally someone said, "No particular place. They live everywhere, like the rest of us." The speaker, surprised, paused, then said, "Keep them there."

Free Speech in a Nation Conceived in Liberty

Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a Massachusetts law requiring a 35-foot buffer between abortion protesters and those entering an abortion clinic violated the First Amendment right of freedom of speech. Time Magazine reported:

The court objected to the notion of buffer zones in part because such broad perimeters “burden more speech than necessary” by excluding “petitioners” (“not just protesters”) from public sidewalks, streets, and other public thoroughfares, “places that have traditionally been open for speech ac­tivities and that the Court has accordingly labeled ‘traditional public fora.’”
Buffers zones deprive petitioners “of their two primary methods of com­municating with arriving patients: close, personal conversations and distribution of literature. Those forms of expression have historically been closely associated with the transmission of ideas,” the court wrote.

But the nation which enjoys a formal right of freedom of speech was also "conceived in liberty," and liberty means freedom from coercion if it means anything at all.

The Court slighted the unalienable right of those seeking a particular form of lawful medical care to do so without harassment. Dahlia Lithwick:

Right now, the commentary is pretty predictably split between those who believe that the rights of “peaceful sidewalk counselors” were vindicated, and those who believe those counselors are actually pro-life bullies. The court opts for the gentle counseling characterization, without acknowledging that it was the extreme conduct of the latter group that led to passage of the law, and that, realistically, in the absence of the buffer zone, both types of protesters will be greatly emboldened. I guess from here on in, you won’t know whether you are being intimidated or “gently counseled” until after it’s happened. (Emphasis added)

I have another objection to the way the Court thinks on this issue. Freedom of speech is the right to get the message out. To publish it. It does not include the right to make somebody listen. There's a guy who stands on a corner downtown proclaiming that the city police are communists. I avoid him. It's a free country.

Speech works by the substantiveness of its evidence and the cogency of its argument. Liberty works by the right to be left alone unless one is breaking the law. As On Liberty argues (about page 3), liberty is not only political freedom, it is freedom from "social tyranny.": 

Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

Those who oppose abortion have gotten their message out in every conceivable way and made every argument available to their case over the decades since abortion ceased to be illegal.

It is appalling that the Court thinks they also have the right to get up in the face of people who already bear the burden of a painful decision.

Reparations: Ta-Nehisi Coates' "White Guilt" vs Liberalism and the Unencumbered Self

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

In the video of his reparations debate with Jeffrey Goldberg, Coates at one point says, "You're responsible for the heritage." Continuing to harp on blame, his discussion of the case for reparations alleges "white guilt":

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. (Emphasis added)

Coates "logic." If membership in a constructed group is ascribed to a person, that person is responsible for what that group did in the past. Another example:

The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people . . . (Emphasis added)

It is true that scripture (in some places) supports this "reckless dispensation of guilt"*, which blames descendants for a situation which they had no part in bringing about:

Exodus 34:6-7 - And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, [7] Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, ... that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.  (Emphasis added)

But as has been said earlier in these articles, this sort of illiberal thinking belongs to a reactionary interpretation** of religion (Instead, says Ezekiel below, I will judge you ... every one according to his ways), not to public or political reform.

The first post in this weblog asserted that America was founded on liberal principles. According to Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy, one of the meanings of "liberty," and a principle of liberalism, is "the unencumbered self.":

I REJECT the notion of racial kinship. I do so in order to avoid its burdens and to be free to claim what the distinguished political theorist Michael Sandel labels "the unencumbered self." The unencumbered self is free and independent, "unencumbered by aims and attachments it does not choose for itself," Sandel writes. "Freed from the sanctions of custom and tradition and inherited status, unbound by moral ties antecedent to choice . . ." (Emphasis added)

Sandel, arguing for collectivism instead of autonomy, continues: The unencumbered self reflects a deracinated liberalism that "cannot account for certain moral and political obligations that we commonly recognize, even prize" — "obligations of solidarity, religious duties, and other moral ties that may claim us for reasons unrelated to a choice," which are "indispensable aspects of our moral and political experience."

For reasons unrelated to a choice. This is the antithesis of the free American spirit, with its characteristic lack of servility.

Kennedy argues that Sandel's theme (which essentially parallels Coates' theme) promotes "identity" at the expense of the liberty of the single person:

Sandel's objection to those who, like me, seek the unencumbered self is that they fail to appreciate loyalties and responsibilities that should be accorded moral force partly because they influence our identity, such that living by these attachments "is inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are -- as members of this family or city or nation or people, as bearers of that history, as citizens of this republic." (Emphasis added)

Curiously, such particularist arguments for "identity" resemble Hegel's line of reasoning in support of German nationalism:

The self-consciousness of one particular Nation is the vehicle for the ... development of the collective spirit; ... in it, the Spirit of the Time invests its Will.  Against this Will, other national minds have no rights: that Nation dominates the World.

Lincoln, in his letter to Henry L. Pierce, noted the universal character of the Founders' principles:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. (Emphasis added)

Coates, by contrast, seems to believe that this is hypocrisy:

The Civil War—the most lethal conflict in American history—boiled down to the right to raise an empire based on slaveholding and white supremacy. What had not yet clicked for me was precisely how essential enslavement was to America, that its foundational nature explained the Civil War's body count. (Emphasis added)

The skidding logic of this passage is prime Coates-think. Somehow, what the South wanted in the 1860s (and the North sacrificed its sons to oppose) becomes what the Founders really intended (and Lincoln's disagreement is so trivial that it need not even be mentioned, much less refuted).

Jonathan Chait was likewise perplexed by this characteristic tendency to pick one extreme or another, denying the middle, where things usually lie: "I was clarifying that Obama (and Bill Cosby) see the culture of poverty as a part of the problem of poverty, as opposed to its entirety, as Ryan sees it, and also opposed to zero percent of the problem, as Coates sees it."


The Harsh Illiberalism of The Case for Reparations:

Fritz Stern explained the title of his The Failure of Illiberalism:

It seems to me that the character of Imperial Germany after 1878 can best be caught in the term "illiberal." [[I am using the term as the dictionary defines it: "Not befitting a free man . . . not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, or liberties of others; narrow-minded." The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1967)]] - Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism, p. xvii

Coates, in his unsupported, sweeping, use of such terms as "responsibility," "crime," and "guilt," exemplifies the illiberal mindset, which is "not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, or liberties of others." Such bad writing, when making a case for reparations, was a fatal error.


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(*)Frederick C. Crews, Follies of the Wise, quoted in Tikkun, 1994

(**)Eze 18:25ff:

Yet ye say, The way of the Lord is not fair. ... Again, when the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.
Because he considereth, and turneth away from all his transgressions that he hath committed, he shall surely live, he shall not die. ... Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways, saith the Lord God. Repent, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions; so iniquity shall not be your ruin. ... Cast away from you all your transgressions, whereby ye have transgressed; and make you a new heart and a new spirit: for why will ye die, O house of Israel?
For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord GOD: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye.