I won’t waste much of your time articulating my own political perspective; feel free to skip the next paragraph if you just want my take on something that I think most people don’t “get” about Libertarians – particularly when it comes to the issue of racism. On a higher level, I think this understanding is an important one because I both truly believe and fervently hope that Libertarians – as in actual Libertarians, not Glen Beckish Republicans-in-Drag – be valuable progressive allies on a host of issues, if we can see past the labels and the rhetoric.

I’d call myself a “Common-Sense Libertarian” – fully expecting a lot of oxymoron-alarms to go off. Granted, the majority of highly visible self-styled Libertarians are ideologues who think returning America to the gold standard is the most pressing issue we face, but bear with me. I think that the government’s main role is to protect its citizens … and that includes protecting them from financial fraud, industrial poisoning, and lunatics who think that the Founding Fathers wanted everybody to own a machine gun. I think that there are a lot of areas where the government should keep its big oppressive nose out of the lives of citizens … especially when it comes to who or what you want to put into or take out of your body. I’m not so much pro-union as I am utterly baffled by the notion that unionization is anything other than an unquestioned, inalienable right under the first amendment. And as for social programs, to paraphrase Ambrose Bierce: I am a believer in federal non-involvement … “but not, sir, a bigoted one.” I don’t like the idea of Uncle Sam planning my retirement or dictating my healthcare; I also don’t like the idea of people starving in the streets or dying of treatable illnesses, and I firmly believe that all the much-maligned “entitlement programs” are, in the final analyses, sound financial investments that no sane person would object to. A healthy, educated populace produces more tax revenue and incurs fewer non-value-adding costs (law enforcement, incarceration, curing preventable diseases, etc.) than a Somalia-style anarchistic dystopia. Finally, while I’m not a Democrat or a progressive per se, I do tend to fall well left-of-center on most of the most important issues that face our country, and I understand that my own personal politics are far better served by the diverse and generally reasonable D-Party than by the losers, lunatics and plutocrats in the GOP.

I offer the above not because I want to start a debate about any of these topics – I’m not here to proselytize, I’m not interested in changing anybody’s mind about Libertarianism or what it “really is” – I just want to establish two things:

1) Although I’m certainly not part of the core Democratic constituency, I’m sincere in my support for the majority of the causes important to Progressives and especially in my desire to elect more (and, yes, better) Democrats.

2) I do, however, “speak the language” of the Atlas Shrugged-y types – and whether you want to appeal to potential allies or beat the tar out of rhetorical adversaries, it’s good to know how they think.

All of which brings me to xomnow’s diary about Ron Paul’s racism. This diary made me sad, because … well, there are a lot of good, smart Libertarians out there, and I’d rather they not carry water for indefensible jackasses. What a non-Libertarian needs to understand is that Ron Paul is guilty of utterly despicable racial hatemongering … but that some of the evidence for this isn’t as damning to Libertarians as it seems to the rest of the world.

There are plenty of instances of clear-cut, undeniable racism from Ron Paul. He has written that “blacks talk about their own racial superiority” and intend to use violence to “take over the country.” He has written at length about young black men as being manipulative, “fleet-footed” criminals. This is horrific, and it clearly demonstrates that every single one of Paul’s statements about race should be interpreted in this light. It is obvious that Paul was motivated by the ugliest kind of bigotry when he published a newsletter with the statement:

"Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for that pro-communist philanderer, Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressmen [sic]. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day."

Disgusting, right? Well, yeah, it is once you understand that Paul is a racist. Most people would happily take these words as damning evidence for said racism in their own right – but you should be aware that a Libertarian could look at this statement and see some very different dynamics at work.

See, skepticism of government intrusion gives Libertarians some unfortunate bedfellows: for example, a Libertarian who believes that the government shouldn’t infringe on a business’s right to manage its own affairs might find himself stuck in a crowd of racists who want segregated lunch counters. For this reason, Libertarians get called racist an awful lot … and if you’re not only not racist but viscerally opposed to racism (as many Libertarians who fetishize equality to an incredible degree are), this can really get on your nerves after a while.

Y’know how we were all aghast over what an imbecile GWB was … and yet he kept getting elected? Republicans didn’t want a stupid President, but the fact is that calling Republicans “stupid” and “crazy” is sort of the default rhetoric for a lot of leftists, and so consequently it’s a lot easier for actually stupid and crazy Republicans to get elected (because Republicans have learned to filter out those accusations as political background noise). I’ve always thought that this is a core advantage that the GOP has; because their standard invective vs. Dems is so over-the-top, the only way Dems could benefit from this narrative weakness would be to run candidates who really are anti-American socialists. For Libertarians, it’s “crazy” and “racist” – so we get guys like Ron Paul as standard-bearers. Sigh.

What’s the result of this? Libertarians are used to being called racist even when they’re not, so when the most recognizable so-called Libertarian in American politics is accused of racism it’s easy to just yawn and disregard those ignorant, race-card-playing lib’ruls. Consequently, evidence to support such an accusation needs to bypass well-established defensive mechanisms that will, if triggered, result not only in the rejection of the accusation but also the dismissal of the accuser. This can be tough, because the most inflammatory statements can be largely benign or at least defensible if you’ve got strong reason to reject assumptions of racism.

- MLK a pro-communist philanderer? Well … he did cheat on his wife, which has no bearing whatsoever on the celebration of his immense courage and sacrifice on behalf of all Americans, but it’s still a fact. And yeah, MLK did sympathize with a number of people and economic policies with strong socialistic implications – again this shouldn’t detract from a celebration of his accomplishments any more than PETA should praise Hitler for being a vegetarian, but when your #1 issue is free market economics it’s easy to condone this kind of sentiment.

- Annual Hate Whitey Day? Sheesh. How could this not be racist? Well, let me tell you a story. I was at the University of Michigan when SCOTUS picked up the big Grutter and Gratz affirmative action lawsuits, and I bussed to DC to demonstrate ... against AA. Why? Well, granted I was a white college kid with zero understanding of the socioeconomic dynamics that had given birth to the policy in the first place, but I wasn’t there because I thought it was unfair to white people. I firmly believed then (as now) that affirmative action policies bring in brighter students, because it takes vastly more smarts and more character to achieve any given level of academic performance if you don’t have a support system working for you. No, I opposed AA because I thought it was unfair to minorities, because it gave actual racists an excuse to detract from their accomplishments.

This notion of “actual racists” is a crucial one. When Paul calls MLK Day “Hate Whitey Day” a lot of Libertarians could interpret this (wrongly) in the context of government policies that are in turn interpreted (also, I believe, wrongly) as seeking to correct racism through “reverse racism” – in other words, fighting the oppression of minorities by enshrining the denigration of white people. In other words, Hate Whitey Day.

See?

Imagine you heard Sean Hannity accuse Jane Q. Democrat of being a Maoist who wants to nationalize all industry and redistribute the wealth of everyone who makes more than $100K per year. Imagine Rush Limbaugh did the same, and Beck, and so on and so forth. You’d yawn, right? That’s just what they do. But suppose those things were actually true? Chances are, most Democrats would strongly reject those policies of hers – but if they only heard about them from right-wing sources, they’d never believe they were real. That’s how it is for most reasonable, decent Libertarians (and yes, we do exist) when we hear accusations of racism against the Ron Pauls of the world. It's not because we're racist - it's because we assume that you assume we are, and we assume that because a lot of the time it's true.

Whether or not you care about talking to Libertarians, about this issue or any other, is up to you. But if you're gonna, bear in mind where we're coming from. Yeah, Libertarians have earned a lot of the negative stereotypes, but it doesn't have to be that way. How about helping us beat them?