My Family, My Country, My Self

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

The Open Borders movement, which seeks to remove all barriers to immigration, has recently been working hard to gain attention and credibility.  Consider this argument from economist Bryan Caplan:

What would you think about a law that said that blacks couldn’t get a job without government’s permission, or women couldn’t get a job without the government’s permission, or gays or Christians or anyone else? So why, exactly, is it that people who are born on the wrong side of the border have to get government permission just to get a job?

He’s saying, of course, that denying someone a job because they’re from another country is as unjustifiable as rejecting them because of their race, gender, religion or orientation.  At first glance, it almost seems plausible.  There are plenty of practical arguments in favor of increased immigration – for example, that it would raise both American and world GDP – and some seem persuasive, though some are controversial.  But what’s fascinating about Caplan’s pitch – and what makes it representative of much Open Border thought – is that it makes a moral case against restricting the flow of individuals across borders: it calls any such restriction unjustifiable coercion.  The University of Colorado's Michael Huemer claims that border control clearly violates every would-be immigrant’s human rights; it represents the violent power of the state infringing the right to sell one’s labor wherever there’s an employer willing to pay for it.  According to Caplan, Huemer and others, no country anywhere on Earth has the right to restrict immigration at all.  It sounds quite implausible, even ridiculous, right?  It completely violates our normal intuitions about the nature of sovereign states.  Well, in this case, intuition is correct.

Imagine an extended family that, through a somewhat unusual set of events, includes both whites and blacks, Christians and Jews, men and women (of course), straights and gays.  Now imagine the rich patriarch of this family is a terrible bigot and distributes his largesse (in gifts, in cash, in jobs, etc.) only to the straight, white, Christian men of the family.   Obviously, he’s being unfair to the others.  It’s immoral to discriminate against anyone simply because they’re black, Jewish, female, or gay.  Now imagine the patriarch has a change of heart, discards his bigotry and gives freely to everyone in the family, regardless of race, religion, gender or orientation.  Yea, fairness is achieved!  Oh, but he never gives to anyone outside the family.  Is that immoral?  It might be a little stingy, a little ungenerous, but is he violating the rights of non-family-members?  Clearly not.  Here’s the point: there’s nothing wrong with favoring those with whom you have a special bond.  Being outside the family is different than being black, Jewish, female or gay.  You’re allowed to love and nurture family members more than non-family members.  You’re not just allowed to love them more, of course, you’re required to.  Isn’t that the point of a family?  To love everyone the same is to not really love anyone.  Generosity can be global, but commitment must be local.

And what applies to families applies to countries, too.  Imagine a remote, undeveloped country, call it Aggressia, ruled by a belligerent tyrant who invades and terrorizes his small, poor, defenseless neighbor, Miseria.  Let’s stipulate that the invasion will not affect the rest of the world in any substantial way: neither country has any important natural resource, there’s every reason to believe that the tyrant won’t invade any other countries, etc.  Would you advocate sending the American military to kick Aggressia out of Miseria?  Almost certainly not.  You would feel terrible for the people of Miseria, you would probably applaud if America sanctioned the invaders or isolated them diplomatically, but you would strenuously resist placing Americans in harm’s way for sake of Miseria.  The world is a messy place and we can’t fix every problem (neo-conservatism notwithstanding).

Now imagine that Aggressia hasn’t invaded Miseria but instead manages somehow to invade and occupy the state of Maine.  But you live in Arizona, and let’s stipulate that the occupation of Maine doesn’t affect you or anyone you know in any material way; we have good reason to believe they won’t invade any other states or hurt the United States in any other way.  Let’s say you’ve never been to Maine or ever even met anyone from Maine.  From your point of view the invasion might as well not have happened.  Now, in this scenario would you advocate American military action to expel the invaders?  Hell, yes!  You might even grab your firearms (you do live in Arizona) and drive to Maine as quickly as possible to join in the fight!  But why?  Why would you be willing to risk your life for Maine but not for Miseria?

The answer is obvious: you love your country, and you love it more than other countries.  You are committed to it in a way you’re not committed to any other.  It’s yours.  The people in Maine matter more to you than the people in Miseria.  Your concern, your tax money, and your protectiveness flow to your fellow Americans more generously than they do to those in other countries.  There’s nothing immoral about that.  Some people take it too far, of course.  They turn patriotism into chauvinism or jingoism or nativism.  They consider America politically and morally superior to other countries in some essential way.  They care about foreigners very little or not at all.  Such people give patriotism a bad name.  But you can be a patriot and still be a generous humanitarian, just as you can love your family more without loving humanity less. You can care about all your fellow humans, you can feel you owe all of them your sympathy and your material help (when practical), but still feel a special bond and obligation toward America and Americans.  Despite what cosmopolitans and pacifists think, patriotism is not a species of immorality.  How can you call that Arizonan immoral when he’s rushing off to Maine to fight for strangers?

But the Open Borderers ask:  If there’s nothing wrong with being choosy with one’s loyalties then why was it wrong in the bad old days for white employers to favor white workers over black ones?  Why are patriotic special considerations justifiable when racial ones are not?  Here’s Huemer again:

We do not cringe to hear that American businesses should hire native-born Americans rather than immigrants, any more than Americans three generations ago would have cringed to hear that white-owned businesses should hire white people in preference to blacks. Naturally, nationalists may attempt to devise explanations for why nationality is different from race, and why nationalism is really justified. This is not the place to attempt to argue that point. I would like simply to put forward for consideration the thought that perhaps we have no right to feel ashamed of our ancestors, and that our descendants may feel about us the way we feel about our ancestors.

(Actually, no one today would defend hiring a native over a legal immigrant, but Huemer seems to mean that no one objects to favoring American workers and products over foreign ones.)   To Huemer, attaching one’s primary social loyalty to one’s country is arbitrary.  How is it any better than attaching it to one’s town, or one’s profession, or one’s race?  Wouldn’t it be much better if we attached it to humanity as a whole and avoided all this petty squabbling?

The answer is that some distinctions between people are arbitrary and some are not.  If a group of people share the same physical and social space with a dominant majority, are citizens of the same state, are part of the same national culture, but differ only in skin color, then it’s not morally justifiable to discriminate against them.  Racial differences are not relevant to loyalty.  National ones are, mostly for practical reasons.  Democracy, individual liberty and broad affluence need something like a culturally homogenous modern polity to nurture them.  Modern individualism requires state protection.  Moderation of capitalist excess requires a reasonably robust regulatory and social insurance state.  Modern capitalism itself requires a reliably enforced legal framework.  And modern politics demands national loyalty, as does the common defense.  Part of the problem with those old-time racists was that they wanted it both ways: they expected blacks to fight equally in war for a country that didn’t otherwise treat them equally.  They embraced patriotism when it benefitted themselves but not when it benefitted the racial other.  Eventually America expanded patriotic blessings to include blacks; that seems a happier ending then if they had abandoned patriotism and group loyalty altogether.

But all of this is fairly obvious.  So why don’t the Open Borderers see it?  Mostly, it seems, because of their general animosity toward the sovereign state.  They tend to be extreme libertarians and anarcho-capitalists; they oppose almost every intrusion of the state into economic affairs, or any affairs.  To them, borders between sovereign states are merely artificial constrictions on the flow of goods and labor.  If a poor man from Tijuana wants to work in San Diego for wages lower than the American minimum wage but higher than his wages at home, then stopping him at the border is a cruel deprivation of his human rights.  And if more immigration brings down the wages of some Americans (how much is unclear) then that’s too bad, that’s just how the free market works:

The Americans who lose from immigration are those who are very low-skilled, who also don’t speak very good English to begin with, and also don’t own real estate. It's a quite small group. If you’re a real nationalist who cares about all Americans, then you should favor immigration because only like 5 or 10 percent of Americans are losing.

Oh well, only 15 to 30 million Americans would be screwed by open borders; that’s OK because they’re the poorest and least educated, so we shouldn’t feel so bad.  It’s not like we as a people have any responsibility to them.  Besides, the state has no collective authority; state regulation of the marketplace is no different than inhuman barbarism:

If we rely on the analogy between states and clubs, then the state could require citizens to cut off their left arms, refrain from expressing political opinions, refrain from voting if they are female, and so on. Whatever the law requires, one could propose that abiding by that law is a condition on membership in the civil society. Thus, the state may demand that anyone who wishes to retain their citizenship should follow these laws.

That’s right, there’s no philosophical middle ground between stateless freedom and abject totalitarianism.  The Open Borderers do get points for ideological consistency; they drive their libertarian principles to the farthest logical conclusions, undisturbed by pragmatism, charity, or any other apparent consideration.  Put another way, they’re fanatics. Only under the strain of such ideological extremism is imposing a minimum wage equal to forced amputation and a nation protecting its demographic integrity equal to immoral coercion.

Such a radical stance makes the Open Borders movement a natural ally for the Global Citizen movement, which seeks to neuter or abolish the sovereign state altogether. Both groups make dubious arguments against patriotism, and both would radically weaken the state (though some Open Borderers do maintain some minimal commitment to the state).  And both groups think of citizenship as little more than an easily acquired and easily surrendered legal contract; here’s Nathan Smith of openborders.info:

As for “the view that citizenship in an actual country is merely arbitrary or contingent,” this isn’t so much a “view” as a plain fact. I’m a US citizen because, by accident of birth, I was born a US citizen.

Actually no, that’s wrong.  Citizenship is a legal status, of course, and therefore can be changed; but it’s a superficiality, a technical legal expression of an existential fact.  Smith is an American, not because he was a person who could have been born anywhere but just happened to be born here; he is an American because he is the person that America created.  America forged Smith.  To confuse citizenship with national identity is to confuse a marriage license with a marriage.  Post-modern life sees all social relationships as incidental choices, but such a view leaves no room for real connection. But we are all born with commitments, connections and obligations and these are not so easily abandoned or absolved, nor so easily acquired.  It is this unavoidable condition of human existence – that we are products of unchosen social contexts – that is the source and justification for all group loyalty, for better or worse.  I love my country because I love myself.

But the constricted ideology of the Open Borders movement essentially misunderstands the sovereign state and its constituents; it sees patriotism as meaningless, economic regulation as totalitarian, and national belonging as just one of many contingent, arbitrary choices one may tenuously adopt.  To be honest, though, there is definite appeal to that libertarian vision of a world without borders or states.  In many ways it’s a world to be devoutly hoped for.  It would presumably have no widespread wars, less poverty, more education, less irrational hatred.  Imagine there’s no countries.  But it doesn’t withstand closer scrutiny.  A world where countries have been replaced by many diffuse loyalties is one without any real commitment or sense of community.  It’s a world without any protection against capitalist exploitation.  It’s a world with no protections for workers, consumers or the environment.  It’s a world where cultural and local and individual distinction all blur into the broad materialist, consumerist haze.  And it’s quite possibly the world toward which we are heading.  You may rejoice in its arrival or you may grieve, or both.  But what you cannot do is deny the right of nations to resist its dull triumph.

The Perils of Purity

St George and the Dragon by Raphael

George Orwell repeatedly condemned the leftists of his time and place – 1930’s England – for their thoughtless and irresponsible rhetoric: their unreflective pacifism in the face of the fascist menace, their self-deluded justifications of Stalinist brutality, their blithe dismissals of patriotism and middle-class virtue.  Orwell’s insight was that they spoke irresponsibly because they knew they would never achieve any real political power.  Power may corrupt, but marginality breeds recklessness.  And power and marginality distort judgment for the same reason: they insulate one from public accountability.  They both alienate.  Keep that dynamic in mind when you consider the ongoing struggle between the GOP establishment and the Tea Party insurgency.

The Tea Party has lost most of the battles recently, with establishment candidates winning primary elections in Kentucky, North Carolina and Georgia, but the Tea Party forced a runoff in Mississippi (which they just narrowly and bitterly lost).  And on June 10^th one of the pillars of the establishment, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor unthinkably lost his primary race to David Brat, an unknown, hard right economics professor.  Many on the right heralded Cantor’s defeat as a win for the people against the powerful, as David slaying Goliath.  But it was the conservative grass roots that sent Cantor – who is quite conservative – to Congress to fight the right fight, and now they perceive him as a big-government sellout?  In the last few years the Tea Party has successfully moved the Establishment to the right, and there is now precious little programmatic difference between the two.  As John Nichols of the Nation perceives, both rival GOP primary candidates in Mississippi “oppose abortion rights and marriage equality, support restrictive Voter ID laws, promise to oppose minimum-wage hikes, rip ‘Obamacare,’ the IRS, the EPA and OSHA and trash ‘entitlement’ programs.”

But if the fondest desire of both groups is to curtail the welfare state and reduce the national debt, why do Tea Partiers hate their own leaders so?  It’s seems the conflict is largely symbolic and temperamental.  That is, the Establishment sees the national debt and the welfare state as complex realities to be prudentially and incrementally blunted and reduced, while the Tea Party sees them as monsters to be slain.  The grassroots hungers for a crusade.  They love Republican Senator Ted Cruz because he tried to kill Obamacare by shutting down the government and threatening debt default; and they hate Eric Cantor because he buckled and voted to end Cruz’s threat.  But the Establishment doesn’t understand; they want the same things, so why does a mere difference in tactics elicit such acrimony and demand such purity?  Erick Erickson of redstate.com has an answer:

What the circle of jerks in Washington sees as a conservative quest for purity, many of those in flyover country see as fighting against out of touch, entrenched elements in their party who’ve grown far too cozy with lobbyists and Wall Street. The conservative fight in Mississippi, Virginia, Texas, and elsewhere is mocked and ridiculed by a left-leaning and establishment-oriented press when, in reality, it is overwhelmingly a response to a Washington that has grown out of touch. Yes, the grassroots want more conservative members of Congress, but they want them because they believe the people there are in the pockets of special interests and the politicians have abandoned their core beliefs for cash and connections.

That is, Cantor only pretended to want what Cruz wants.  He tried to hoodwink the base with slogans and dishonest ads, but he was more interested in a profitable career of accommodation and obeisance to Wall Street money and Washington power.  But the Tea Party is finally hip to that game.  The GOP pretends to be fighting against the federal Leviathan but only the conservative base really wants to slay the monster.  They pursue purity not out of temperamental indulgence or ideological dogmatism, but out of necessity.  Only the chaste heart, nurtured on the common sense of the common folk, inspired by the love of Constitutional freedom, eager for battle against aristocracies of privilege and power – only such a knight in shining armor can resist the Whore of Babylon that elite America has become.  Purity isn’t the Tea Party’s goal, it’s their weapon.  Righteousness – and the ideological clarity that flows from it – protects them.

It does seem the Tea Party is more serious than the Establishment about ending the welfare state.  But Erickson is kidding himself that purity is merely an instrument for conservatives.  Purity has always been at the heart of American conservatism.  No one can yearn for crusades who isn’t dazzled by his own purity.  To the conservative common folk, America has been corrupted and polluted by sexual license, godlessness, illegal aliens, liberals, the welfare state, etc.  The failure of the Bush administration and the successes of the Obama administration have convinced them that the Republican Party is complicit in that corruption.  What’s the point of a Republican Party if it can’t stop Obamacare?  The Tea Party, as the more perfect distillation of those conservative impulses, is predicated upon the notion that sufficient purification is the solution to all our problems, that purity can be won only by the pure.  Thus their infamous aversion to compromise and conciliation; compromise only pollutes good with evil.  It is the American essence itself that has been compromised and that needs to be purified.  But the GOP must be cleansed before it can become the vehicle for that purification.

But only if real conservatives come to power.  So then why is the man who is replacing Cantor as Majority Leader not a Tea Party purist?  Two ambitious House Tea Partiers made half-hearted attempts, but they were bested by a better-connected and better-organized moderate conservative backed by the Establishment.  As Dana Millbank so nicely explains, a true believer will never learn to work the system as well as a pragmatist.  The failure of the Tea Party to capture Cantor’s post is widely seen as a simple expression of Tea Party weakness within the Republican caucus: there just aren’t enough of them.  But Tea Partiers everywhere were quite angry that Cantor’s primary loss didn’t result in the elevation of one of their own.  They’re even angry at their own Tea Party House conservatives who, as Erick Erickson says, “refused to step up and make a play for leadership, choosing instead to just obstruct.”  The grassroots is ever more eager to topple more GOP leaders.

But maybe that’s why no Tea Partier took the post, because once one does there’s a target on one’s back.  Purity is never sated.  The conservative populism that sees regular folk as pure and Washington and Wall Street as corrupt automatically makes any elected leader – even a Tea Party leader – suspect.  As Michael Warren of the conservative Weekly Standard writes:

As majority leader, Cantor likely expected Republican voters to appreciate their congressman’s proximity to the center of political power in this country. But that’s not what Nancy Russell [chair of one county’s GOP in Cantor’s district] heard from her fellow Virginia Republicans. “I almost feel like they’d rather not have their representative in the leadership,” she says. In a cautionary tale for any ambitious member of Congress, Cantor’s success in Washington was, back home, his ultimate undoing.

The base is so hyper-aware of the temptations of political life – influence-peddling, elitism, cronyism – and so dogmatically and habitually hostile toward any concentration of power that, like right-wing commissars, they constantly scrutinize their leaders for signs of deviationism.  It’s easy to imagine that many Tea Party Congressmen don’t believe leadership is worth the scrutiny.

And the realities of the legislative process demand from its leaders just the sort of compromise and deal-making that the base finds so repellent.  True believers will still come to Congress, maybe even in greater numbers, but true believers make unproductive legislators.  They only make good obstructionists (much to Erickson’s disappointment).  They can shut down the government and refuse to raise the debt ceiling but at the last minute the grown ups have to step in and make sure that the world keeps running.  The less purist, more career-oriented, more realistic conservatives like John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell understood that Obamacare could not really be stopped and the debt ceiling could not really be breached.  They may be careerists – with Cantor the most slippery and repulsive careerist of them all – but careerism forces them to govern prudentially.  The Tea Partiers – unfettered with the responsibility of actual governance – are free to make outrageous demands and release fire-breathing denunciations of the capitulators.  Pressure from the base may compel even the more sensible leaders to grandstand and take us all to the brink of disaster, but as bearers of responsibility they understood that the business community, the American people, and simple reality dictated their capitulation.

And on some level the purist conservatives must understand that they can only act so irresponsibly because they don’t control the Congress.  On some level they must be grateful that those more pragmatic leaders saved them from their own reckless and irresponsible actions.  And the shrewdest ones among them must know that the American people don’t really want Leviathan to be slain, that most people are happy to receive their Social Security checks and their Medicare reimbursements.  The conservative base is still being conned, but now they’re being conned by their own pure heroes.  And really, of course, they’re conning themselves.  Tea Party hopes are simply incompatible with American political and fiscal reality.  Tea Party Congressmen, demanding government shutdowns and calling their own leaders squishes and RINO’s, are doing the most they can given the present circumstances.  One can either be a purist or a responsible legislator, one cannot be both.  During the campaign Cantor complained to a conservative crowd about Brat’s cheap criticism: “It is easy to sit in the rarefied environs of academia, in the ivory towers of a college campus, with no accountability and no consequence.”  He was answered with jeers.  But how is the Tea Party back bench any less of an ivory tower?

We clearly see the fundamental Tea Party ambivalence toward power.  They desire it and they fear it. They wish to acquire federal power so that federal power can be subdued.  They know they need power to purify America but they’re excessively fearful of the corruption it brings and they’re insufficiently respectful of the responsibility it demands.  And they fear democracy.  They fear its ends – the maintenance and expansion of the welfare state – and they fear its means – compromise, deal-making.  Democracy, like responsibility, is messy and confusing and disillusioning.  It is incompatible with purity.  The Tea Party’s goals are unreachable, their means are romantic and their populism is visceral and immature.  Their only real accomplishment has been to hamper responsible and productive governance. 

And to eat their own.  Brat slew Cantor as David slew Goliath, but he could easily become the next Goliath himself.  He will soon face the choice whether to remain pure or to become effective.  If he chooses the former he consigns himself to futility, though it can easily be a noisy and gratifying futility in which the conservative media complex hails him as a hero.  If he chooses the latter, however, in a few years we’ll be reading bitter right-wing denunciations of “Brat the RINO” and “Brat the sellout” and beholding his primary demise at the hands of a genuine, true, pure, immaculate candidate to his right.  And Eric Cantor will smile.
 

Tolerance, Acceptance and Approval

Recently the CEO of Mozilla Corporation, Brendan Eich, was pushed out of his job because of his failure to support same-sex marriage.  It was discovered that in 2008 he donated $1000 to the campaign for California’s heavily contested Proposition 8, an amendment to the state constitution prohibiting gay marriage.  He had never shown any animus toward gay subordinates and he earnestly promised as CEO that he would protect the equality of all employees.  But what doomed him at Mozilla was the persistence of his opposition to same-sex marriage; while much of the country has become more friendly toward the idea, Eich has not.  After a week of boycotts and protests, the board of directors nudged Eich out the door.

Many liberals see Eich’s semi-firing as something to celebrate, as a victory for gay rights.  A bigot has been punished, sending a salutary warning to bigots everywhere.  But many observers – mostly conservatives but some liberals as well— see this incident as a worrisome bit of McCarthyism, as possibly the herald of a new age of liberal witch-hunting in which insufficient deference to received leftist truth can damage or end one’s career.  That is, gays are winning the cultural argument, they have achieved some measure of social and economic power and they and their supporters are ruthlessly and carelessly using that power to punish and demonize even the mildest dissenters.  Last year’s heretics have become this year’s Inquisition.

But many of Eich’s supporters speak as if there is no political position one could take that would justify removal.  But this is foolish and everyone knows it.  Every society holds certain views to be self-evidently intolerable, that is, so outrageous or so destructive that anyone professing them must be denied any influence.  Would it be OK to fire a CEO who was a member of the Klan?  Or a blatant anti-Semite?   Or a supporter of al Qaeda?  This sort of social condemnation is one of the inevitable limits of freedom, even in a society with free speech.  No society is possible or sustainable without a short list of unacceptable ideas.  The argument over Eich really amounts to this: Should opposition to same-sex marriage be on that list? 

Conservatives make fun of liberals for claiming to be oh-so-tolerant while stomping on those with un-liberal opinions, but liberals (in effect) counter with the perfectly defensible argument that there’s nothing wrong with being intolerant of intolerance.  If one really believes irrational disapproval of a group undermines that group’s equitable treatment then it’s acceptable to socially punish those perpetuating that inequity.  For a very long time it was widely considered acceptable to fire, deny service to, ostracize, humiliate and even harm gays; in many quarters it still is!  Liberals argue that it’s OK to shame the shamers; not because turnaround is fair play, but because unjustified shaming is so destructive.  That is, intolerance of intolerance is not as objectionable as intolerance of racial or sexual difference, since the latter can’t be justified.  To punish someone for anti-gay actions is defensible in a way that punishing someone for being gay is not.  This is the crucial point: there is no rational basis for anti-gay or anti-gay-marriage sentiment.  Gay love, desire and commitment are morally no more or less than the straight versions.  In a decent world homophobia and opposition to gay marriage would easily and inarguably be on the unacceptable opinion list.  In a thoroughly decent world, of course, they wouldn’t need to be, since in a thoroughly decent world homophobia would be as unknown and as unimaginable as hatred of left-handed people or curling enthusiasts or tulip lovers.

The more sophisticated Eich supporters concede the necessity of the list, but argue that there are good reasons that resistance to gay marriage should not be placed upon it.  Unorthodox conservative Conor Friedersdorf, himself a supporter of gay marriage, makes a strong case here, arguing that not all such resistance arises from animus toward gays.  Many Eich detractors have compared anti-gay-marriage views to anti-mixed-race-marriage views, but Friedersdorf sees a difference:

Opposition to interracial marriage was all but synonymous with a belief in the superiority of one race and the inferiority of another. (In fact, it was inextricably tied to a singularly insidious ideology of white supremacy and black subjugation that has done more damage to America and its people than anything else, and that ranks among the most obscene crimes in history.) Opposition to gay marriage can be rooted in the insidious belief that gays are inferior, but it's also commonly rooted in the much-less-problematic belief that marriage is a procreative institution, not one meant to join couples for love and companionship alone.

But Friedersdorf doesn’t explain why the belief in marriage as a “procreative institution” doesn’t lead to opposition to marriage for the infertile or the elderly.  Are there those who consider childless marriages to be somehow lesser?  If so, even they wouldn’t prohibit such marriages.  Friedersdorf points out that there are many who oppose gay marriage but support civil unions, but racists never suggested anything like civil unions for interracial couples.  But if they had, wouldn’t we have rejected the proposal as still grounded in racism?  Friedersdorf’s point is that opponents of gay marriage are not as morally repugnant as the segregationists who opposed interracial marriage, and that seems quite true.  But even though they’re clearly not bigots in the most hateful sense, their opposition is just as irrational and indefensible.

Some writers argue that since resistance to gay marriage is largely based upon religious dogma it’s not fair to characterize opponents as bigots or to characterize that resistance as irrational, at least not in the usual sense of that word.  But frequently religion is not the source of political belief so much as its alibi.  That was clearly true with many of the religious arguments that Jim Crow-era racists made in support of white supremacy; they used the Bible to buttress cultural and political prejudices they held independently.  But some, including Damon Linker, think that sexual issues are different:

Racism — along with opposition to interracial marriage — received its primary historical validation from ideas, prejudices, and economic circumstances that have nothing directly to do with the message of Judeo-Christian scripture.  The same cannot be said about Judeo-Christianity's normative teaching on sexuality, which is rooted in both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. It is deeply intertwined with the authoritative dogmas and doctrines of churches followed by hundreds of millions of people throughout the world, and has also been repeatedly reaffirmed and elaborated on at great length and with considerable theological sophistication throughout a nearly 2,000-year tradition of thinking that runs right down to the present.

That is, Jewish and Christian dogma has much more to say about sex than about race.  Linker states the obvious, that opposition to homosexuality per se is central to traditional monotheism, but he states is as an excuse.  They may be bigots but it’s OK because their God endorses it.  It should be noted that this is a very different argument from Friedersdorf’s claim that many reject gay marriage who don’t reject homosexuality itself.  If someone disputes gay marriage because they’re sincerely convinced that the creator of the universe declares homosexuality repulsive and morally wrong then it’s ridiculous to deny that such a person is anti-gay.  Just because anti-gay belief is central to Judeo-Christian dogma should not make us give that belief a pass.  Maybe it should make them question that part of their dogma.

Religious conservative Peter Wehner argues that many religious objectors to same-sex marriage wrestle earnestly with the moral confusions raised:

Let me speak from a perspective within my own faith community. Based on conversations and having written and taught classes on the subject of Christianity and homosexuality, my sense is that many evangelical Christians are working through how to approach the issues of their faith and the gay rights movement with a good deal of care and integrity. They are attempting to be faithful to Scripture in a way that is characterized by grace rather than stridency. Even as they continue to oppose same-sex marriage, they are asking whether their own attitudes have been distorted by their own cultural and political assumptions and that the focus on homosexuality is, as I’ve put it elsewhere, wildly disproportionate to what one finds in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Particularly among younger evangelicals, there’s a palpable discomfort with the approach taken by prominent figures over the last few decades – people like (but not exclusive to) Franklin Graham, James Dobson, Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell. They are not the spokesmen they want to represent them or their faith.

Wehner is asking, in effect, for a little understanding of the difficult position in which many religious opponents find themselves.  They find the crude gay-bashing of some religious right leaders – Graham, Dobson, Robertson, Falwell – to be deeply offensive.  But at the same time the centrality of their religion’s sexual teachings makes them uncomfortable with things like gay marriage.  Are such people bigots?  Should their discomfort with gay marriage bar them from positions of power and influence?  How about the ones who support civil unions, should their attempts at conciliation illicit any from liberals in return?

Consider that even gays have had an ambivalent attitude toward gay marriage.  Before gays petitioned for marriage they asked merely to be left alone, they asked to be tolerated.  And for years, many straight Americans responded with what we can fairly call libertarian homophobia.  They looked down on gays, but allowed them their repugnant pursuit of happiness as long as it occurred behind closed doors, in their own neighborhoods, etc.  After a time and with the growing awareness of perfectly respectable gay individuals in their midst, that tolerance turned to something like acceptance, including the belief, for instance, that no one should be fired or denied housing simply for being gay.  Acceptance also ushered in the era of civil unions, which gave gay relationships the same legal rights and responsibilities as marriage, but without the name and the social status it implies. 

Strange as it may now seem, many gays initially resisted the notion of gay marriage (some still do).  They saw themselves as cultural separatists, licensed by their disparaged sexual desires to be rebels against silly bourgeois institutions like monogamy and marriage.  Conservatives like to remind us that marriage is a traditional institution with a venerable conservative pedigree.  Its goal is social stability; that is, it redirects the sexual urge into socially constructive channels, it tames sex.  And many gays were quite happy to see their urges remain un-channeled and untamed.  But the present-day fight for marriage equality seeks neither to ignore marriage nor to remake it; crucially, it seeks admission to the institution without wishing to change it.  It sees gay desire and gay life as no threat to anyone, not even middle class convention.  Gay couples can live in split-level suburban homes and drive their children to soccer practice in gas-guzzling SUV’s as wantonly and thoughtlessly as any heterosexual couple.  It turns out that Cam and Mitchell are just Ozzie and Harriet with different parts.  The 50’s absorbed the 60’s.  It fits perfectly that a transplanted Tory like Andrew Sullivan was the earliest prominent exponent of gay marriage.  It’s liberal to perceive that homosexuality is morally equal to heterosexuality, but it’s conservative to perceive that a traditional institution should express and nurture that equality.  Gay marriage isn’t the great uprising of sexual corruption and social destruction that it seems in the darkest conservatives fears; it’s not the end of traditional society, merely the accommodation of gay life to it.

But it’s an accommodation that forces the issue of approval.  Friedersdorf is right that marriage is a special case, but not because of its procreative function, because of its social function.  It may seem strange to be so vehement over a word, but the fight over the word “marriage” is so important because it conveys approval in a way “civil union” does not.  Marriage is crucially a social institution, a relationship that the entirety of society endorses, celebrates and blesses.  The push for gay marriage means gay equality can no longer be an issue of individual choice, one that I support and you oppose.  There’s always the right to disagree, of course, but society as a whole is being forced to choose one way or the other.  Society will either bless gay love and commitment the same as straight love and commitment, or it will it not.  There is no third option.

Now we see what’s at stake.  Gay marriage supporters are asking religious opponents to approve – not merely tolerate or accept – something that contradicts their fundamental views on the nature of morality and society.  Think about that.  That’s asking a lot.  That doesn’t mean that gays don’t deserve that approval; they do.  And it doesn’t mean there are defensible reasons for opposing gay marriage; there aren’t.  All arguments opposing gay marriage boil down to the inferiority of gay love, and are therefore fundamentally false.  But even though we can’t call that opposition defensible we might consider it understandable.  It’s not easy to remove one’s cultural prejudices – or even be aware of them! – and we could be a little more forgiving of those who find it so difficult to do so.  We all carry the weight of history, we are all unwilling products of our upbringings, and none of us is remotely free of prejudice or irrationality.  That doesn’t absolve anyone of the responsibility to examine and justify their beliefs, but it should make us a little less eager to punish dissent.  And we can be a little patient with religious objectors especially, particularly those of the good-faith variety that Wehner highlights, not because religion justifies their bigotry, but because it helps explain it. 

That intimate connection between Christianity and anti-gay feeling in a country as religious as ours is the greatest obstacle still facing the struggle for gay equality.  Gays understand the great power homophobia still commands and they fear its intractability.  Intolerance of anti-gay-marriage dissent is a manifestation not only of growing gay social, political and economic strength, but of gay vulnerability as well.  Gays now have some power, but without security.  They fear backlash and they fear reaction.  It’s that fear – plus justified righteousness and good old-fashioned vengefulness – that makes them strike where they can at hapless holdouts like Brendan Eich.

But generosity would suit the cause of gay equality more than crusading vindictiveness.  We are in the middle of an evolution, a process.  That process has brought us from a time only twenty years ago when gay marriage was seen as an impossibility to its near triumph today.  The pace of that evolution demonstrates the openness of the American people to such a clear and simple call for justice.  The end of that process will be a society in which rejection of gay marriage will be treated as social anathema, as the foolish and unjustifiable prejudice which it is.  But pluralism and prudence demand that our list of unacceptable opinions be kept as short as possible; it must include only those ideas that are the most objectionable and most destructive.  This is crucial to the kind of society we will be; only a scrupulously limited list is compatible with freedom of thought and expression.  It’s terribly dangerous to add to it too readily; that would stultify discourse and deaden our intellectual and social life, and possibly even lead to something like the left-wing McCarthyism envisioned in conservative nightmares.  That we’ve come so far so fast makes it more understandable that a large dissenting minority still exists.  Human minds can evolve only so fast.  And pushing too far, too fast can create just the sort of backlash that gays and gay supporters fear.  That practical concern, plus faith in the open society, plus charity toward our common human frailty, should keep opposition to same-sex marriage off the list, for now.  We shouldn’t try to force it before its time.  When a critical mass has been persuaded by reason, not subdued by threats, it will happen of its own accord.

The Whitest Guilt

Who is to blame for the ongoing social dysfunction – poverty, illegitimacy, drug abuse, violence – in much of the African-American community?  More reliably than almost any other issue, your answer reveals you as a liberal or a conservative.  The standard liberal understanding is that the persistence of white racism traps blacks in bad jobs, terrible neighborhoods, constricted lives.  There are more sophisticated liberal explanations that involve the loss in recent decades of urban industrial jobs as well as the legacy of centuries of slavery, deliberate segregation and debilitating social and economic oppression.  Conservatives, on the other hand, attribute black social dysfunction to black cultural pathology, that is, to attitudes and norms prevalent in the black community that discourage behavior broadly associated with success, e.g. family stability, educational attainment, steady work, self-control.  The sophisticated liberal explanations lay some blame at the feet of African-American culture, but what characterizes the conservative explanations is the focus on cultural explanations to the exclusion of anything else.  To conservatives, blacks alone are to blame for their plight.

Paul Ryan, conservative Republican congressman from Wisconsin and the 2012 GOP Vice Presidential nominee, recently got in trouble for expressing just that view.  Here’s what he said on March 12^th on conservative Bill Bennett’s “Morning in America” radio show:

We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.

The immediate, forceful reaction from many quarters on the left was that Ryan was trafficking in surreptitious racism.  That is, he was referring in coded language to the black community particularly, characterizing African-Americans as work-averse and attributing that aversion to moral failure.  That is, blacks are poor because they’re lazy.  The very next day Ryan shifted into full politician damage-control mode, labeling his comments “inarticulate”, meeting with African-American political leaders, denying he had meant blacks in particular, and (sounding suspiciously like a liberal) blaming the troubles of the poor on “society as a whole.”

Seriously?  Can anyone doubt he was criticizing African-American culture?  Ryan’s radio comments are the sort of thing conservatives always say when addressing the troubles of poor blacks.  Some have pointed out Newt Gingrich’s similar remarks made while running for president in 2012:

Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day; they have no habit of “I do this and you give me cash,” unless it's illegal.

Is it possible Gingrich wasn’t talking about blacks?  No, that’s exactly who he was talking about!  Ryan’s remarks may not have been as artless as Gingrich’s, but his point was the same: African-American culture does not sufficiently inculcate an ethic of work and self-sufficiency.  It’s not exactly calling them lazy, but it comes dangerously close to that ancient and appalling racist libel.

But it’s not the same.  There’s nothing necessarily racist about assessing a culture as deficient in some particular.  Some cultures are clearly better at some things – consider the Italian attitude of slowing down and enjoying life – and not so good at other things – consider the lax Italian attitude toward bribery.  Each culture arises from a unique, complex and contingent set of circumstances and each has its strengths and weaknesses.  Cultures are like unhappy families, each imperfect in its own way.  To be racist one has to believe an ethnic group is inherently inferior, that it has some genetically-determined quality that unavoidably causes it to fall behind.  If Ryan meant to imply this about African-Americans then he was indeed expressing racism, and if he meant to subtly signal such notions to receptive whites he was indeed employing racist dog whistles.  But is there any reason to think so?  Ryan did himself no favor by citing, in his original comments, Charles Murray of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, a writer infamous for claiming that African-American social problems result from their genetically-determined inferior intelligence.  Yes, that’s right.  Ryan says he meant nothing racist – that he wasn’t even referring to blacks particularly! – while citing an explicitly racist writer.  This is inarticulateness of the highest order!

But even though all conservatives attribute black troubles to black culture, not all conservatives attribute black cultural dysfunction to black genes.  Indeed, even Ryan probably didn’t mean that.  And, as noted, many liberals believe black culture does play an important part in black troubles.  Here’s Jonathan Chait:

The argument is that structural conditions shape culture, and culture, in turn, can take on a life of its own independent of the forces that created it. It would be bizarre to imagine that centuries of slavery, followed by systematic terrorism, segregation, discrimination, a legacy wealth gap, and so on did not leave a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success.

To these more sophisticated liberals, the horrific historical treatment of African-Americans has left a terrible legacy which, through normal cultural transmission, continues even now to debilitate African-American attitudes and norms.  That is, oppression by whites caused the problems of black culture, and once such pathologies took hold they became quite hard to mend.  Non-racist conservative explanations for black social pathology ignore those hundreds of years of oppression and instead revolve around the liberal welfare state.  To conservatives, excessive liberal condemnation of America’s real and imagined sins leads blacks to see themselves as victims deserving compensation in the form of government handouts.  Thus liberals provide both the rationale and the funding for black dependency and sloth.  So liberals blame the present-day troubles of blacks on their historical mistreatment at the hands of the dominant white power structure, as well as the persisting white racism that liberals find all too evident.  That is, traditional American society – the society that liberals fought so hard to improve and that conservatives fought so hard to preserve – is at fault.  Meanwhile, conservatives fault many of those same liberal improvements (while failing, of course, to credit liberalism’s clear successes, such as civil rights laws).  When it comes to the problems of African-Americans, liberals and conservatives, unsurprisingly, blame each other.

Birmingham, Alabama, 1963

But conservatives never seriously address the historical and traditional oppression – cruel, violent, horribly destructive – of blacks by whites.  Conservative analysis of African-American dysfunction begins with the Great Society, as if nothing relevant happened before then.  They seem embarrassed by discussions of slavery and Jim Crow, by the thought that America could have committed such momentous and monstrous crimes.  And this reluctance, this touchiness, is of a piece with conservative hyper-sensitivity to charges of racism.  When liberals accused Ryan of race-hustling, conservatives howled at the injustice.  Every time conservatives talk about racial problems they blame blacks, and every time they’re accused of racism they blame liberals.  They’re desperate to escape any accountability on race!  No rational person believes all of conservatism is tainted by racism, but there is no denying the historical fact that modern American conservatism was founded upon implacable antipathy toward three huge threats to traditional society: international communism, the welfare state and racial integration.  Liberal success in substantially actualizing that third threat has ironically given some cover to the conservative claim that whites no longer hold blacks back.  Conservatives mock liberals for what they call “white guilt”, i.e. the desperate liberal shame over being part of the race that treated blacks so badly for so long.  They believe white guilt enervates liberals by robbing them of the moral authority needed to place blame where it belongs: at the feet of blacks themselves.  But consider the absurd conservative refusal to confront not only present-day racism but even historical racism, particularly conservative complicity in historical racism.  We can only call this preposterous denial the conservative version of white guilt.  While there is some truth to the notion that liberals too readily let African-Americans avoid their responsibilities, it’s conservatives who scramble like madmen to avoid their own.

And the notion of conservative white guilt helps explain another quite strange phenomenon: white fear of oppression by blacks.  To be conservative is to believe that in present-day America whites are more mistreated by blacks than the reverse.  This putative oppression takes many forms: black-on-white crime, liberal taxation to pay for plush welfare benefits for blacks, affirmative action programs that take jobs from deserving whites and give them to undeserving blacks, black intimidation of white voters, black calls for reparations for slavery.  Rush Limbaugh famously referred to Obamacare as “reparations.”  Indeed, it’s black self-pity and resentment that causes our racial troubles.  Whites are now the true victims of racism, mostly at the hands of a “racial grievance industry” run by “race hustlers”, the most infamous being Al Sharpton.  And the most vicious form such vile race hatred takes is the constant liberal accusation of conservative racism.  In this view, Paul Ryan is more of a victim than the poor “inner city” denizens to whom he condescends.  Conservatives are hyper-aware that racism of the old-fashioned kind is now so comprehensively and thoroughly delegitimized that any taint of it instantly undermines any position or policy.  In this view no charges of white racism are ever valid; they’re all transparent attempts to silence or marginalize conservatives and conservative ideas, as bludgeons used to beat down whites fighting for fair treatment.  In the 60’s it was Bull Connor spraying demonstrators with fire hoses, now it’s the Huffington Post spewing defamation of conservative whites.

But the worst white fear, going back at least as far as Reconstruction, is fear of blacks in power.  When Obama first ran for president in 2008 he received more votes in almost every county than had his 2004 Democratic predecessor, John Kerry.  But in a broad swath of the Upland South, stretching from West Virginia through Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas, Obama got a smaller percentage of the vote than Kerry.  We need not wonder why this area bucked the national trend.  When (in another context) voters in this area were asked why they didn’t vote for Obama they expressed fear of “minorities in positions over the white race”.  This is the fear of black revenge.  But revenge for what?  Deep down conservative whites know blacks are right to be so profoundly aggrieved, and so profoundly aggrieved at them.  This is conservative white guilt: if the Negroes get in charge they’ll screw us the way we’ve screwed them.  To such people, all liberals are carpetbaggers and all liberalism is reparations.

Paul Krugman, in a piece on the Ryan controversy, argues that “American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People.  Indeed, race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics,” such as conservative support for Medicare paired with opposition to Medicaid.  Krugman is right to see white populism lurking behind many domestic conservative policies, particularly white opposition to the welfare state (of course, such opposition has perfectly legitimate non-racial motivations, as well).  But there’s more going on in the racial churn than just white anger over paying taxes for Those People.  There’s white fear of retribution and there’s the stubborn white refusal to face responsibility.  And, importantly, there’s the boiling resentment at liberal attempts to force that responsibility upon them.  No one likes to be reminded of the guilt they’re trying so hard to repress.  This is less about income tax rates and more about the shackle and the poll tax and the lynching noose and the long shadow they cast over white American pride. 

And that illuminates what liberal charges of racism are really after.  Sure, sometimes liberals use those charges to bully, to intimidate, to silence.  “Racist” is for liberals what “socialist” is for conservatives: a clumsy but powerful rhetorical weapon.  And sometimes liberals honestly see racism where none exists; for some liberals it’s always 1965 on the march from Montgomery to Selma.  But deeper down is the earnest liberal wish that conservatives face up to the persistent hard realities of race in America and undertake the hard work of racial expiation as liberals have tried to do. Before the Civil Rights era, liberalism largely ignored the problems of blacks; to maintain the partisan unity that made the New Deal possible the Democratic Party acquiesced to the demands of its southern conservative wing and denied government benefits to blacks. But, starting in the 1960’s, liberals atoned for their racial sins by trying substantively to address these issues.  Indeed, the entire conservative critique of racial liberalism is that it has atoned all too well – and that the atonement is underwritten by those in strenuous dissent.  But that dissident resentment helps perpetuate the antipathy toward African-Americans that keeps them in their collective place.  Why does the party that espouses small government and individual freedom find it so necessary to justify even obvious and genuine expressions of white animosity?  The issue of past and persistent African-American misery is not one issue among many, it is central to the acrimonious and hateful ideological divide that plagues us.  The hard feelings of guilt, resentment and fear it elicits polarize and poison all of our politics.  Liberals react to every remotely insensitive conservative remark as the second coming of Bull Connor. And conservatives react same way to every liberal accusation of racism (even those with clear merit) and thereby harden racial alienation and deepen our ideological polarization.

But let’s stand athwart that vicious cycle and yell Stop!  There are few genuine Bull Connor’s still around.  But there are some (don’t you know any?) and liberals are right to expose them.  But how bleeding obvious is it that liberals must be more fair and circumspect in their accusations, but also that conservatives must respond with more open and honest self-examination.  Even though there are the more sophisticated liberal explanations for African-American troubles, the liberal instinct is to blame only white racism and excuse almost any bad black behavior.  That’s because liberals are so exquisitely aware of the terrible reality of white-on-black oppression – both historically and in its current subtler forms – that blaming black culture at all feels to them like blaming the victim.  And conservatives are working so tirelessly to avoid that same awareness that they cannot blame anyone else.  But liberals need to remember that victims can act badly too.  And they need to understand that racial resentment and racial bigotry may be closely related, but they are not the same.  It may be more gratifying to stomp the latter, but they’d do better to soothe the former.

But here is the crucial question: Can conservatives be made to acknowledge and appreciate the historical and continuing immiseration of African-Americans?  They must, but they almost certainly won’t.  There are so many obstacles that seem so insurmountable: a conservative communications complex invested in pushing racial hot-buttons, the social and economic separation of whites and blacks, the worsening of political polarization and mutual mistrust, and – most importantly – 60 years of smoldering resentment.  But just as African-Americans must acknowledge their own cultural shortcomings and assume the responsibility and hard work needed to overcome them, so must conservatives take responsibility for how their own denial of racial reality contributes to our painful political polarization.  Conservatives may comfort themselves with the thought that African-Americans vote for Democrats in overwhelming numbers because liberals enable their victimhood, but blacks easily perceive conservative racial irresponsibility and resentment.  Thus, as the demographics slowly move America in a more racially diverse direction they also move it in an irrevocably liberal direction.  But the conviction that whites owe blacks nothing – not transfer payments, not preferential treatment, not protection for voting rights, not even understanding – is so central to conservative ideology and psychology that they couldn’t give it up without a radical reworking of their worldview.  Conservative white guilt is at the heart of our ongoing political dysfunction and unhappiness.  Unable to come to terms with the enormity of the moral failure of traditional American culture, unable to concede the persistence of racial mistreatment, unable to accept their own complicity, they consign African-Americans to unequal treatment, themselves to resentful alienation, and all of us to bitter division and strife.