By no means am I accusing you of personal-level racism (I have no reason or basis to think that is true) but this line in a prior post really jumped out at me:
I grew up in NC during the Jesse Helms era, and was exposed at a young age to a fairly large amount of blatant neo-Confederate propaganda which was still largely socially acceptable outside of the city limits.
The sentence above is striking in that it resonates with a running theme in the Confederate ethos which I remember very clearly: the idea that Reconstruction was severely screwed up by the ruling power of the time (Yankees) and that black people suffer for that failure to this day.
It took me a long time to realize why this theme is so common in the rural South, and why it was especially popular in that Reagan/Helms era of dawning quasi-libertarian conservatism: it’s a clever twist on the legitimate value of “personal responsibility” which seamlessly pivots into a conclusion that some people should not be allowed the protections of citizenship.
Really back up and think about the scope of that argument. It is essentially saying that not everyone should be given equal rights under the law; and that if you find yourself outside the basic protections afforded by the rule of law, well, that’s your own fault and not the fault of the people who took your rights away.
Inevitably the line is drawn to current liberal politicians doing things “just as bad as slavery” with a long lingering pause over the evils of FDR — who in that same post you said should have been executed for treason. Again, a quick and clever pivot toward violence as the solution to political enemies. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the suggestion that Lincoln should have been hanged, or FDR, or Obama. This pillar of the rhetoric is crucial because it connects past outrage to present action. Of course, not many people have very strong feelings about FDR anymore… but in the 1970s/80s he was a formative memory for older Republicans. I don’t mean to presume, but I’m guessing you’ve hated FDR since around that time.
Why was this line of rhetoric so useful to the Reagan/Helms era Republicans? Because it allows them to maintain the moral high ground on liberty AND campaign for the withdrawal of fundamental rights from certain parts of the population, at the same time. And with a little wink to a revenge fantasy that lies not-really-that-far below the surface of Southern conservatism. What’s not being said is the simplified version of the quote above: all our problems trace back to Yankees making things too easy on the Blacks. If we fix that, we’ll fix our society.
Inevitably the ethos points to a violent re-set as the “inevitable” conclusion, as a sort of cleansing event. This is strongly parallel to hardline evangelical rhetoric, which in the rural South goes hand-in-hand with political conservatism. It’s absolutely nothing to hear a rural Southern evangelical say they expect a civil war, most probably a race war, within their lifetime. It’s a built-in assumption that this needs to be prepared for.
The synchronized rhetorical messaging is intended to touch all those bases and give the recipient a warm fuzzy “these people are speaking my truth” feeling, while keeping the unsavory foundations (racism, political violence) below the surface where they can be dismissed as “exaggerations” or “maybe what some people believe, but that’s just the fringe”. That’s the whole trick of the thing — you get the fruit of the argument without having any visibility on where the roots are coming from.
I say all this because, again, I grew up hearing and largely believing this stuff, and it absolutely did lead me the direction of becoming a Libertarian in my early political years. So having had these thoughts in my head for a time, I recognize the flavor of your comments.
For me, the path out of that line of thinking was connected to two key realizations:
- Organized Libertarianism exists for the simple and disappointing purpose of pressuring the GOP to give tax cuts to corporations. The proof is in the actual work they do, especially when they go hard. It always connects back to corporate tax cuts in the end.
- “Personal liberty extremism” cannot include advocating for the withdrawal of citizenship from a portion of the populace just because they fall out of favor with the government. If anything, that’s a radically authoritarian philosophy wearing a flimsy libertarian mask (which again, Reagan era conservatism).
