That article is a quivering mass of hair-splitting and equivocation. Just because Napoleon used the work of Newton to write the most accurate artillery tables and conquer most of Europe doesn’t make Newton, or calculus, a French Republican.
In some sense, the answer is a trivial one: Buchanan was born in 1919 in Tennessee, where he spent his formative years, and as an adult he lived in Virginia, ground-zero for “respectable racism” in the decade after Brown where his political allies and many of his colleagues were segregationists. Given those facts, it would be a remarkable thing if Buchanan did not think, at some level, that black people were not as good as white people in his heart of hearts.
Is the textbook definition of prejudice. X is a member of this class. Therefore X MUST hold this attitude. How is this not bigotry?
This way better than what I was gonna rant, thanks!
Self ownership is creepy moral projection, and illogical AF.
I didn’t produce myself, and how does one even go about assigning specific values to the Incredibly Large Number of inputs (a function that continues until my death) that produce the current version of me?
I’ve never read Calhoun, I’m an automation engineer. I’ve read and listened to MacLean and I’ve read her detractors. I’ve listened to her speeches and how she claims to friendly audiences her detractors have been rebuffed.
I’ve found her detractors more convincing.
Brown V. Board to me was an unelected body chaining democracy. That 3/5th of a human in our Constitution was Democratic majority racism enforced brutally by government.
When I look at Public Choice and its three core premises of methodological individualism, behavioral symmetry, and politics as exchange I see very useful insights for the possibility of humans enjoying a better society.
I know there was a historian who wanted Professor Magness to apologize to Professor MacLean.
What I’d like is a public forum where you and Professor MacLean publicly engage Professor’s Munger and Magness. Professor MacLean has avoided her detractors in all academic settings, to me that doesn’t speak well of her belief in her case.
Really? How so? I think you’re arguing for theory over lived reality. The lived reality of the late 19th century was the high point of acualy implementation of classic liberalism and it was the high point of racism, colonialism, and worker exploitation. Classical liberalism champions markets over right.
Poverty is both local and contextual. Yes, someone not being able to afford health care, a car to get to work, and having to make choices about being able to feed their families vs. pay for necessities like utilities is real poverty within the context of our national situation. It’s not either/or.
Tell that to someone having to make hard choices about their families and having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Tell that to people being pushed out of urban environments because of the high cost of living. Tell that to people who can’t afford to go to a PCP and so they wait until it’s life or death, go to the emergency room, driving up costs for ALL of us. Tell that to people in debt because we’ve decided that public education is not necessary (or should only be available to the elites as a luxury) at the EXACT TIME that we need a more educated work force.
None of this means that we shouldn’t address global inequality. But we don’t have complete control over the global economy… and BTW, this extreme inequality has exploded since the end of the only serious political challenge to the capitalist system has ended, and the roots of this are in the earlier period of globalization that saw the global north violently extract resources that they then hoarded and used to expand their local economies. It was at the expense of the global south and was only moderated during the Cold War when the communist bloc (which had their own deeply problematic colonial world view masquerading as marxist critiques of capitalism and colonialism) was challenging western hegemony.
No, it’s not. Human beings aren’t “rational” actors. Plenty of studies have indicated that people will not act in their own eocnomic interests, but they will act according to an irrational set of beliefs that defy rationality. Racism and sexism isn’t remotely rational, yet it marks much of modern thought. Any even cursory survey of history will reveal how ideologies drive human behavior in ways that are far from rational.
“We just want everyone to have freedom to choose” necessarily: (1) ignores (and not only ignores, but hides) the fact that not everyone has equal freedom to choose, and (2) advantages the groups that have more freedom.
Or, as Anatole France wryly wrote, “The majestic equality of the laws forbid rich and poor alike to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
OH, so African Americans don’t deserve equal protection under the law and should be subject to white supremacy?
Yes. the constitution was written to enforce white supremacy and Brown V. Board was aimed at correcting that. It was justified under the amendments to the constitution passed during reconstruction. Others don’t get to deny basic rights to others because of their racist ideology.
It is not prejudice. It is establishing a probative obligation: How much evidence should be required to support a particular claim? When I argue that Buchanan was a segregationist, I am not making that claim in a vacuum. It is simply the case that most men of Buchanan’s background would not be free of racial prejudice. Therefore, we should not be surprised to find he was indifferent to the rights of African American citizens. And we find that his actions of the 1950s and early 1960s are perfectly in line with our expectations.
MacLean’s critics, on the other hand, seem to think that making such a claim is an EXTRAORDINARY thing. That it should require a mountain of evidence. That we should go into our investigation thinking that Buchanan, a white southerner embedded in a segregated institution, in a state where virtually EVERY white public figure supported segregation was somehow opposed to the practice. That, when he argued for private schools that he was completely unaware that this was just the policy that was being pushed by segregationists and that it might aid their cause. Seems ridiculous to hold such a belief prima facia.
This is not, of course, the end of MacLean’s (or my) argument. Merely a starting point. If, indeed, he was not a segregationist, produce direct evidence to that effect: produce the papers or the speeches or the letters where Buchanan is speaking out against segregation. Thus far, there are no such documents. Whereas their is ample evidence that he was fine with continued segregation.
If the Newton/Napoleon example is supposed to inform our understanding of the parallels between Calhoun/Buchanan I don’t see how it does so. Again, I suggest you take up the issue with the public choice theorists who originally drew the parallels rather than MacLean. Once you have dispatched their arguments, then you can address MacLean’s argument.
I thought it evident that everyone today would think Brown V Board was the correct decision and should have been settled as Brown V Board was, only in 1776, (or before).
In this day and age I honestly didn’t think I or anyone needed to say first that Brown V Board was the correct decision.
Since it seems we need to, Brown V Board was the correct decision and it was very long overdo. Then the next is still true that the error was not corrected by democracy. It was correctly by unelected officials (Supreme Court) chaining democracy.
Learn this one weird trick to win any argument with a leftist!
Look, I’m not a Stalinist, I’m not a Maoist. I’m not going to defend them. Myself, I prefer Adorno as an interpreter of Marx.
Suffice to say I’m not going to concede that every time Marx’s ideas are implemented, there is a catastrophic body count, and where there is a catastrophic body count I will argue that the so-called Marxists are not Marxist.
For instance, there is a Cuban body count-- but not that’s not even close to catastrophic. Given the proximity of that slender island to the continent spanning U.S, a country that has sworn to destroy Cuba for half a century, the paranoia and its minimal body count become understandable.
Now the Vietnamese implementation of Marxism certainly had a catastrophic body count, but those bodies are from a brutal and sustained US and French attack. Chile just thought about Marxism and ended up with a massive body count, again from a right reaction largely directed from outside that nation by the “good guys” (and the “Chicago Boys”). This list is far, far from exhaustive. And this very incomplete list is about some commies and other leftists, not sufficiently capitalist who were murdered directly by capitalists.
On top of those, there is a huge body count that results from the structural violence of capitalism itself-- indirect murder: systemic poverty and the numerous killing pathologies that accompany it.
And then we have the crucial question about c20. In which column do we account for the humans the Nazis killed. I’m going to guess that you want to put them somewhere else on our morbid spreadsheet. I’m not. Adorno puts the dead from the Nazi reich firmly in the capitalist column for utterly compelling reasons. I agree. It was a capitalist enterprise, eagerly supported by capitalists, and, significantly, not possible without capitalists. (see also many others incl. Octavio Paz).
So bring up Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and on and on. They are monstrous. There is no profit, though, for the capitalist to get into a pissing contest about body counts, because I have some body counts I want to talk about as well. Those body counts are still growing.
I can’t get that pithy, but I’ll give it a (very simplified) try using the case under discussion of ending segregation in education.
The traditional progressive statist approach was for the federal government to set a nation-wide standard on desegregation based on Constitutional and case law and, if necessary, impose it (e.g. sending in the National Guard to escort kids into Little Rock High). It’s a problem involving public education throughout the nation, so they argue it’s appropriate for the government to step with its laws and its interpretation and enforcement powers thereof to remedy it if the racist locals won’t comply.
The L/libertarian “public choice theory” advocate says that’s top-down tyranny (one emerging from a democratic system’s outcome in the three branches, but still…), and instead proposes an alternate desegregation scenario where all individual members of the public will be given equal opportunity by the state to make rational and self-interested choices in what he sees as the free marketplace of education (for example, giving out vouchers in Virginia to be applied by individuals to make school choices based on perceived quality and value). While everyone participates in this market on a supposedly even footing (even if they have nothing else in common) not everyone will win in it due to the nature of markets. This means that politicians taking this approach are inevitably going to end up shafting some minority of citizens (losing sometimes is the price we pay for participating in what’s supposed to be a fair system).
If all that talk of “free” markets and supremely rational actors and every-bloody-thing being an economic transaction sounds familiar, that’s why Cory characterises it as the “bedrock” of modern Libertarian thought. You can read the article he posted to find out how that voucher approach worked out in this case (the shocking spoiler: not very well for black people in Virginia in the 1950s and 60s).
That’s what sparks the truly interesting question: why did Buchanan’s followers attempt to link “public choice” with an historical figure so despised and discredited by decent Americans? I have my own theory for the earlier ones based on the timing, the opportunistic recognition by movement conservatives of an emerging affinity overlap between two groups, and the fact that Lee Atwater hadn’t yet come into the picture with his less harsh framing strategy. I guess that, at the time, they just couldn’t envision a future where Calhoun’s name would be wiped from a building at Yale and where monuments to racist traitors against the Union would be removed from the country’s public squares. That still doesn’t explain why Tabbarok and Cowen would make the same linkage in 1992, though.
I find this interested as a (small l) libertarian of the left wing persuation*. I don’t have much issue with the broad strokes of Public Choice Theory, all else being equal, but when filtered through a right wing lense it can be abused to justify all sorts.
What troubles me is the way it gets applied to one portion of the state (parts which rightists dislike) but fails to get applied to other parts of the political sphere. For example, the intersection of business and regulators, or even the politics of business.
One of the biggest cons of the right has been to persuade people that the current state of affairs is somehow natural and just, and that change of that can only be the result of malign manipulation - this is just another example of that.
this means I despair over most of the people to whom the label libertarian is applied - they tend to look like shills for corporate concerns at best, or racists/sexists/etc who think that ‘private property’ means that they can build a society to exclude those they dislike.
B-7, I-23, N-32, G-56, O-72? . . . we have a BINGO!
Sure. . . I get it. . . the Soviets (and Stalin in particular) did so many things wrong, both morally wrong and foolishly/inefficiently wrong, but the basic tenets of Communism are morally sound from the simple notion of “civilization”, whereas Libertarianism is some kind of twisted version of “the law of the jungle.”
And Solzhenitsyn wanted to bring back a theocratic monarchy too. I love his writing, and he said some profound things, but he’s not exactly perfect. Dismissing Marx’s ideas because the Soviets fucked it up so badly is not much different than dismissing the United States Constitution because for the first 80 years of it’s existence slavery was legal.
I don’t know where to ask this so… why was my comment deleted? I left a comment here which, as far as I know, did not insult any person or any group, and didn’t even disagree with the consensus on this thread. And yet I find it is just… gone. Why? Is there anyone to ask?
Was it a reply to the troll who had all his posts eaten? If so then those usually get deleted too as they otherwise sit there without any context or use at that point. I have a small sad my reply to him got eaten as it amused me but I don’t mind it that much.
ETA on your profile you can do a download of all your posts and that will download even your removed posts.
Ahh! It was in the chain. I was, in my (I admit occasionally annoying) usual manner agreeing with a reply to the troll but disagreeing with their argument (I felt that it was underselling how strong the argument for abortion-on-demand was). That must be the reason.
For one thing, Marx himself predicted that an attempt at a proletarian revolution in Russia would result in a “new Prussia”, an expansionist authoritarian empire. And Russia didn’t change much between the days of Karl Marx and the revolution of 1917. His theory was that a true communist revolution could only thrive in a context with at least basic democratic institutions. And it wasn’t the case in China, either.
