Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Another miss by libertarians

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Cover of Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America By Rachel S. Ferguson and Marcus M. Witcher

Previous readers of this content may recall my main argument: the libertarian “freedom movement” failed to address racism in the post-World War II United States and often used libertarian arguments to hinder progress for African Americans. However, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, these freedom advocates surprisingly became focused on issues of racism, particularly “affirmative action” and “quotas.” In an attempt to reconcile their past, libertarians have since attempted to rebrand their “classical liberalism” as always being opposed to racism. These efforts never succeed because the stories they tell are simply unsupportable.

Comes now Black Liberation Through the Marketplace, a book by libertarians, Rachel. S. Ferguson and Marcus M Witcher (FW). It is published by Emancpation Books, which announces itself in this way:

A spectre is stalking American newsrooms and publishing houses: the spectre of angry woke leftists aggressively seeking to dictate the range of acceptable viewpoints on a wide range of issues. This campaign of mob censorship not only runs counter to our cherished national traditions of free thought and speech, it especially limits the expression of independent views by writers of color who may dissent from the majority opinion of their group.

OK then….

FW assert that classical liberalism’s principles of individualism, property rights, free markets, and the rule of law are inherently antiracist, while accounts of the rise of racialized chattel slavery and capitalism are mistaken. But they grapple with little of the enormous literature on these subjects. FW write as if the 1619 project is the last word on these subjects rather than a project meant for public consumption. and Ed Baptist’s decade-old The Half that Never Was is the only book on the topic. The authors assure us that the thesis of “the inextricable association of capitalism with slavery has been roundly criticized by experts as being woefully unfamiliar with the economic literature on slavery” (p. 32). Well, sure. and those experts’ work has been rebutted in turn: historical inquiry is complicated and FW misleadingly write as if this were a settled controversy. More worryingly, they simply act as if some sort of economic calculation has settled the matter rather than even attempting to address the enormous literature on racist ideology and how many classical liberals, John Locke pre-eminently, justified racial conquest and slavery in the language of property rights and freedom.

FW correctly notes that at the beginning of the 20th century, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois were both striving for Black liberation, albeit through different paths (p. 174). Both leaders sought emancipation from American racial oppression, with Washington believing that economic advancement would lead to white Americans acknowledging Black financial power, thereby granting full legal and political rights to Black citizens. Du Bois, on the other hand, believed that political and legal rights were essential for economic advancement, as without them, Black citizens would be powerless to protect their gains.

While FW argues that the market can lead to Black liberation, they overlook the fact that full political and legal rights are crucial for this to happen, and, more tellingly never tell the reader that the “classical liberals” in the post-World War II US opposed extending those political and legal rights to Black Americans. FW’s own evidence proves that even with economic advancement, the market cannot eradicate racism on its own. Between the end of the Civil War and World War I, FW tell a tale of enormous economic advancement. “Simple competition” meant that “White planters had to choose between their preference for wealth and their preference for discrimination” and found that choosing discrimination had severe economic costs. But wait, then FW tell us that “market forces forced whites to turn to the political realm to maintain supremacy” (p. 79). This means that even though “Black Americans tripled their per capita income by 1914” (p. 80), political and legal equality never emerged through market mechanisms to protect those gains as Washington argued they would. This is the problem with thinking that the market would “solve” racism: there is never any timetable offered, no indication of how long Black citizens would have to remain disenfranchised and suffer discrimination when that happy day arrives when white people will finally recognize them as fellow human beings because, now, they are finally rich enough to be granted full citizenship. This is hardly good enough.

FW highlights the brutal violence experienced by Black individuals during the first half of the 20th century. However, they fail to mention that several devastating massacres against Black people were motivated by the economic progress that was supposed to guarantee their safety in a market economy. In the 1906 Atlanta massacre, the white “mob destroyed Black-owned businesses and homes and targeted the historically Black colleges and universities in the area. A barbershop owned by Alonzo Herndon, one of the nation’s first African American millionaires, was vandalized.” The Tulsa race massacre specifically targeted “Black Wall Street” an important hub of Black economic success. Far from protecting Black people, economic power often made them targets for white violence precisely because Black people lacked the legal and political protections that economic advancement was supposed to bring in its wake. Libertarians frequently assert that the state’s primary function is to safeguard private property. Nevertheless, historical evidence demonstrates that it only defends the property of those who already possess the legal and political clout to demand protection. The market and property, absent the mechanisms of government, cannot survive, contra libertarian claims to the contrary.

In 1955, at the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, FW note that “all previous attempts to use Black economic power to end segregation and discrimination had failed” (p. 192). Many things had changed since Washington’s death four decades earlier. The growth of Black wealth in Black social spaces such as churches and lodges had, as FW note, meant that there was a “powerful foundation” for Black protest “built over the preceding seven decades, of Black businesses” (p. 192).

But wait, does that mean that Booker T. Washington and FW are right? That the market did, indeed, make strides toward getting Black legal and political rights. No, not really. It isn’t that the market forced white people to finally concede that Black people were real people. It was that Black people stood up and demanded their full rights as citizens. Nothing was given, it was taken. That Black economic advancement, and tight social networks, made it possible for such demands to be made does not equate with “the market” eliminating Jim Crow.

Du Bois, the NAACP, and the Civil Rights Movement supported of Black economic advancement, but the opposite was not the case. Libertarians, who advocated for market solutions to racism, opposed any political or legal solutions to racism. Libertarians believed that Fair Employment Practices were an unjustified infringement of property rights, and they opposed any requirement for owners of public accommodations to stop racially discriminating. They also argued that the federal government had no business interfering with states administering public education, even if that meant maintaining racial segregation. Libertarians sometimes even supported segregationists who claimed that the 14th Amendment was illegally adopted, thereby relieving state governments of their obligation to provide equal protection of the law. When Virginia proposed a voucher system to maintain racial segregation in private schools, libertarians like James Buchanan and Milton Friedman were eager to provide their support for the project.

The core of the libertarian opposition was what Albert Hirschman called the “perversity thesis” which holds that any attempt to cure a social ill will only exacerbate the very problem it is meant to solve. Of course, if the perversity thesis were true, Jim Crow should have eliminated racial discrimination rather than viciously enforce it, something libertarians never considered. Libertarians consistently argued that implementing a Fair Employment law would intensify racial tension. Libertarians believed that to combat racism, it was necessary to change the minds of racists through persuasion, rather than relying on legal action, holding this belief even as mountains of social scientific evidence against it accumulated. The entire civil rights movement held that legal and political changes could precede attitude change, a view that libertarians simply view as “coercion” rather than freedom and equality. No matter how much retrofitting libertarians attempt to make to their central ideas, the record is clear that their “freedom movement” inhibited this country’s battle against its own racism.

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Race Scientists Ask You Believe in Impossible Things

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The White Queen and Alice from Alice Through the Looking Glass
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

When racial hereditarian researchers tell you they are objective scientists only concerned with the rigorous scientific pursuit of truth, what else do you need to believe to accept that claim? What are the markers of an open-minded researcher who is completely nonpartisan politically? We would expect that person to be careful not to entangle themselves and their research with those who are pursuing political ends; those who seek to use the mask of science to advance specific policy options and social orders. We would not expect them to draw upon political writers as authorities for their scientific claims. We would not expect them to collaborate with people pushing a political agenda.

In a recent article, Michael Woodley, Matthew A. Sarraf & Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre write that they believe the Holocaust happened. They also want to make clear that They are “hereditarians” not racists. Nor are they eugenicists. Oh, and Woodley especially wants us to know that he had nothing to do with his work being cited by the Buffalo shooter who killed African Americans in the name of racial purity. (I know what you are thinking, “Where does Woodley stand on the existence of Bigfoot?” Well, he appears to think the jury’s still out on that question).

Of course, anyone who must take to print to deny they are Holocaust deniers, a scientific racist, a eugenicist an inspiration for a racist terrorist might want to stop and think about why they are so characterized by so many people. An obvious question is, “Maybe it is me?” It appears that the authors never ask themselves that question. They portray themselves as objective scientists and their many, many critics must simply misunderstand the nature of science and objective inquiry because they are so blinded by “leftist” ideology. To believe their claims, you must believe a host of other impossible claims they use to support it.

Go to Page Two

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The Big Myth: Fictions of Free Market Fundamentalism

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Cover of The Big Myth: How American Business Taught us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway

According to the American Economic Association:

Economics can be defined in a few different ways. It’s the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives, or the study of decision-making. It often involves topics like wealth and finance, but it’s not all about money. Economics is a broad discipline that helps us understand historical trends, interpret today’s headlines, and make predictions about the coming years.

If that’s how professional economists define their field, a question should arise in your mind: what does economics have to do with human freedom? To understand human freedom, other fields of study seem to be more relevant: philosophy, sociology, political science, or even history. In their new book, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (read an excerpt here), tell us why Americans tend to think that “freedom” is best addressed by economics. As the title indicates, it is the result of over a century of mythmaking funded by businesses, corporations, and very, very wealthy people. It is the Big Myth.*

The book is a critique of the extensive public relations campaign that “market fundamentalists” have been conducting in the United States for over a century. Oreskes and Conway have nothing against markets and give credit to them where credit is due. The difference between them and the “market fundamentalists” they critique is that:

Contemporary conservatives, libertarians, and market fundamentalists are not really defending capitalism, even if they think they are. They are defending a certain idea of capitalism, a vision of growth and innovation by unfettered markets where government just gets out of the way. (p. 13)

The idea of the perfect, unfettered market, however, existed, “precisely never. There has never been a time in human history when markets met these conditions, and there is no reason to think that such conditions could ever exist” (p. 418). Nonetheless, the utopian vision of a “free market” has been invoked time and time again against any kind of governmental oversight or regulation of businesses.

Market fundamentalists can only advocate for unfettered markets by ignoring the role government has always played in capitalism. For example, free market fundamentalists make much of what they call the “Great Enrichment:” the great growth in wealth beginning in the 19th century. I’ve pointed out in this space before how slavery, not libertarian “freedom” was responsible for a great deal of that wealth (see here and here). Oreskes and Conway point out that much of the geographic expansion that fed the “Great Enrichment” came from the displacement of American Indians (pp. 172-85, 226). The idea that European settlers could simply take the land of indigenous Americans comes from John Locke’s idea of “property rights” and has been endorsed recently by conservative pundit, Jonah Goldberg. No market fundamentalist idea is every truly dead.

Oreskes and Conway also document the rise of industrial technology, the “American System of Manufactures” which allowed interchangeable parts in machinery through the development of machine tools. This technological revolution allowed for the mass production of goods on a scale never before possible. The revolution in industry resulted from the federal government’s investment in the problem: “It took nearly fifty years–what would have been an inconceivable period of research and development for a private corporation in the nineteenth century (or today for that matter)–but once it was achieved, it revolutionized manufacturing” (p. 124). When confronted with well-documented histories of governmental involvement with the creation of wealth and advancing capitalism, market fundamentalists like Milton Friedman, just ignore it, or worse, lie about it (p. 275). The market fundamentalists create a fictional past to suit their ideological predispositions and, more importantly, the ideological demands of those paying them.

Details on page two.

*Full disclosure: Erik Conway and I are graduates from the same PhD program and had the same advisor. He’s a friend. Oreskes and Conway flattered me with a brief mention in the acknowledgments for a tiny bit of help finding some hard-to-locate publications. I have admired and taught their previous book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming as well as the related documentary. Additionally, I have used Oreskes’s book, Why Trust Science? as a text in my “Science and Public Policy” class since its release a few years ago.

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Hayek Versus Hayek

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It turns out I have more thoughts on Andrew Koppelman’s new book, Burning Down the House. In my previous post, I dealt with Hayek and racism. Here I focus on Koppeman’s claim that a sharp distinction can be drawn between the crude and radical libertarianism of Murray Rothbard and the sophisticated and moderate libertarian libertarianism of F.A. Hayek. It was Rothbard’s fanatical opposition to any version of the welfare state or regulatory control of businesses that libertarians are embracing today, Koppelman claims. By abandoning such absolutist claims and embracing Hayekian balanced approach to governance, libertarianism can be a useful guide for our future. Koppelman is correct that a clear distinction can be drawn between Rothbard and Hayek but errs in thinking Hayekian thought is not responsible for the libertarian embrace of current policies that Koppelman deplores. I show that Koppelman misunderstands the argumentative strategies employed by today’s libertarians to oppose reasonable regulations on business and the expansion of the welfare state. These strategies are better described as Hayek’s than Rothbard’s. Also, I show that Koppelman’s main intellectual opponent is Hayek himself, who consistently opposed policies that Koppelman claims Hayek’s logic should endorse.

To begin, I will explore Hayek’s argumentative strategy for evaluating a given governmental action.

Frontpiece of Cato's Letters, Vol. 1
The Cato Institute, named after Cato’s Letters was founded by Rothbard and Koch in 1977

For Hayek, Koppelman argues, state action could be justified through cost/benefit analysis: does the proposed action’s benefits outweigh the cost? If so, the action is justified, if not the action is not justified. But that description, which reduces Hayek to the kind of everyday cost/benefit analysis that every policymaker presumably employs in some form and misses what makes a particular calculation “Hayekian.”

What makes a cost-benefit analysis Hayekian is that Hayek demanded that state intervention in the economy shouldered very strong probative obligations “Hayek’s view did not entail minimum government. It rather imposed strict conditions on intervention in the economy” p. 15). For Hayek, the market enjoyed a strong presumption of efficiency and, in order to justify State action, the government should shoulder a quite heavy burden of proof to show that the benefits of taking action outweigh the costs imposed. The state may act in “market failure can be shown.” (p. 177). Koppelman argues that Hayek, read properly, allowed for reasonable regulation of economic activity in order to protect the public good and a welfare state provided those measures met very stringent evidentiary requirements showing them to provide net benefits to society. For Hayek, that could include things like a guaranteed minimum income to provide for basic human needs. These reasonable measures are viewed as anti-libertarian by today’s libertarian right, who are committed to Rothbard’s dogmatic views of private property which forbids such measures. For Rothbardian thinkers, taxation is always theft, state action is always coercive, and the market will always provide for human needs better than the government–views Hayek rejected according to Koppelman. Koppelman concludes, “Hayek’s reasoning thus yields a moderate, pro-capitalism, pro-free trade philosophy that embraces the modern regulatory and welfare state so long as it does its job properly’ (p. 71).

Well, now. Before we all go jumping into bed together, let’s ask ourselves a basic question: do Hayek’s views provide the guidance necessary to actually govern in the way that Koppelman claims it did in the past and should in the future? If the question of state action turns on how much evidence is required to overcome the presumption the market enjoys, for Hayekians, that means the evidence needs to be very good and there needs to be a lot of it. But who makes the determination that the evidence is sufficient? How is the evidence gathered and weighted? What counts as a “cost” or a “benefit?” Those are the kind of questions that need answers before a political theory can guide policy.

More importantly, since there is a strong presumption against state action in Hayek’s formulation, those opposing regulations or a welfare state do not need to “win” any particular argument about such actions. They merely need to set the burden of proof high enough such that it is difficult, or perhaps impossible to meet, as Richard Gaskins has shown. Schematically, the argument looks like this:

  • Make the opposing advocate shoulder the burden of proof.
  • Set the standards for meeting the burden of proof very high.
  • Claim that the opposing advocate has not met the burden of proof either by claiming the available evidence does not meet the burden of proof OR that the available evidence does shows the costs outweigh the benefits.

In fact, this is precisely the strategy employed by the“neo-Hayekians” who are homed at “intellectually serious policy-wonk institutions such as George Mason University and the Cato Institute” (p. 110) to forestall the kind of “modern regulatory and welfare state” Koppelman claims they should be embracing.

Go on to Page Two

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F.A. Hayek and the False Promise of a Racially Just Libertarianism

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The cover of Andrew Koppelman's book, Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed

In his new book, Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed, Andrew Koppelman, the John Paul Stevens Professor of Law at Northwestern University attempts to rescue libertarianism from itself by centering the work of Freidrich A. Hayek, one of the most distinguished economists of the twentieth century. Toward the end of the book, Koppelman discusses Barry Goldwater “who admired and sometimes quoted Hayek…After he had the [1964 Republican] nomination [for the Presidency], Goldwater (himself no racist) voted against the Civil Rights Act on libertarian grounds: ‘the freedom to associate means the same thing as the freedom not to associate.'” (p. 188). On the following page, he writes, “Reagan succeeded in shifting American politics–and American understandings of liberty, in Hayekian direction. He used the word freedom in his speeches more than any president before or since” (p, 189). Nestled between those two sentences is this one: “Libertarianism in all the forms we have examined is firmly opposed to racism. We have seen no trace of it in any of the arguments we have surveyed” (p. 189). That Koppelman cannot see any “trace of racism” in Goldwater parroting standard segregationist lines to oppose the Civil Rights Act or in Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” environmental racism, and generally throttling any antiracism in the Republican party underscores the flaws of his analysis of the history of libertarian ideology and racism.

In some respects Koppelman tells a story that parallels Matt Zwolinksi & John Tomasi’s The Individualists. Both books tell a story of libertarian ideas that, somehow, lost their way. What was once a philosophy that championed freedom for all became, or is in danger of becoming, a philosophy of reaction and repression. For Zwolinski & Tomasi it was a reactionary turn the movement took in the second half of the twentieth century. For Koppelman, the problem is similar: it is that libertarianism has misunderstood its own founding ideas; for him, libertarians are too entranced by the views of Ayn Rand and Murray N. Rothbard instead of F.A. Hayek, libertarianism’s true founder because “American libertarianism began with Hayek” (p. 7).

One reason Koppelman argues that Hayek is properly viewed as the founder of libertarianism is that Koppelman believes that nearly every viable option in today’s political landscape opposes the planned economy that Hayek feared. “Excerpt for a politically impossible fringe, the American left aims for a generous welfare state–more generous than the present one–in the context of capitalism” (p. 4-5). Yes, even Bernie Sanders (p. 5, 35). According to Koppelman, “The ideas of Hayek, valuing markets because they promise a better life for everyone are today commonplace in the Democratic Party” (p. 13). For Koppelman, the enemies of libertarianism come from the right, not the left. Libertarian ideas are threatened by Republican embrace of “Christian fundamentalism and Trumpian racist, xenophobic nationalism” (p. 12).The question then becomes, does Hayekian libertarianism give Koppelman the tools he needs to combat racism? To answer that question, I will examine how Hayek fits into the history of the relationship between libertarian thought and racist thought. Despite attempts at “revisionist” history from twenty-first century libertarians, the libertarian tradition they’ve inherited was either an active participant in building a racist society or passive observers of it. Looking to libertarian ideology to somehow be an active warrior against racism at this late date might be possible, but to do so libertarians need to honestly evaluate their own past.

Page Two will explore these difficulties.

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Another Distorted History of Libertarianism and Racial Justice

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Some religious traditions, most famously, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, practice the Baptism of the Dead. In this practice, the Church baptizes a living person who is acting as a proxy for a deceased person in order to ensure that that deceased person gains entry into Heaven. Often this practice has met with vigorous objections from leaders of other faiths who find the practice disrespectful to their own faiths.

When libertarians write the history of their ideology in matters of race they tend toward a similar practice. Historical figures are torn from their contexts and declared “libertarians” in order to, metaphorically, get libertarians into the Kingdom of Free Market Heaven. Often the historical figures are a bizarre hodgepodge of folks, usually chosen more for their appealing views on racial justice than on their advocacy of views normally thought of as the centerpieces of libertarian thought such as the non-aggression principle, capitalism, property rights, or strict individualism. The most egregious example of libertarians trying retroactively baptize a historical figure as one of their own is when they try to claim that Martin Luther King, Jr., noted socialist, was a libertarian (examples: here, here, and here).

In their new book The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism, Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi know better than to try to retroactively enroll MLK as a libertarian, indeed, they point out that many libertarians object to MLK’s ideas (pp. 220, 358). These are real scholars publishing with Princeton University Press, not some blogger on the internet like some people around here. On the other hand, Zwolinski and Tomasi cite a whole lot of bloggers in their chapter on “Racial Justice and Individualism” which is my focus, so perhaps the playing field is more even than I thought.

Zwolinski and Tomasi seem well aware of philosopher Stephen Toulmin’s adage that “Definitions are like belts. The shorter they are, the more elastic they need to be. A short belt reveals nothing about its wearer: by stretching it can be made to fit almost anybody…Yet the hope of hitting on some definition which is at one and the same time satisfactory and brief dies hard” (p. 18). They opt for “satisfactory” rather than “brief” and devote their first chapter to answering the question, “What is Libertarianism?” and draw careful distinctions among “classical liberals,” “neoliberalism,” and “Strict libertarians.” That last category is itself comprised of deontic libertarians, who are guided entirely by inflexible principles and consequentialist libertarians who “evaluates the consequences not of specific policies but of general principles and retains its commitment to those principles even if they (seem to) fail in particular instances” (p. 16). As an aside: keep an eye on that parenthetical “seem to,” it will become important later. Zwolinski & Tomasi often label failures of libertarianism, no matter how big or well documented as seemings. Libertarianism can only “seem” to fail, not actually fail.

Their summary of libertarianism gives us this:

Libertarianism is best understood as a cluster concept. We see libertarianism as a distinctive combination of six key commitments: property rights, negative liberty, individualism, free markets, a skepticism of authority, and a belief in the explanatory and normative significance of spontaneous order. (p. 6)

It is the jockeying among those various elements that make libertarianism so slippery a concept: just which element should be weighted the most, for example? It is also these differing commitments that seem to open the door to reactionary libertarianism. In Zwolinski & Tomasi’s history, libertarianism grew out of an absolute commitment to individualism and negative liberty first embaced by certain 19th century figures’ opposition to slavery. In the twentieth century libertarianism took a reactionary turn in defense of the status quo, and is now embroiled in controversy over which path the “Liberty Movement” will take here in the 21st century: radical or reactionary? (Spoiler alert: they don’t tell you).

I will focus on Chapter 7, “Racial Justice and Individualism” since that is the chapter that is most relevant to my work and expertise. Buckle up and go to page 2.

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South Carolina wants to ban genetic science

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A poem published right after South Carolina started the Civil War declaring they did it for “freedom.”

South Carolina, despite their claims to contrary, has never been a state eager to embrace racial justice. The latest example of the state’s regressive racial thinking is Proposed Bill SC S0424. Like many states ruled by conservatives, the Palmetto State’s legislature is in a tizzy about what they think Critical Race Theory (CRT) is. Because those spreading the moral panic about CRT lie about it and the white legislators who listen to them don’t really care about what CRT actually, many legislatures are proposing the “banning” the teaching of CRT. South Carolina has proposed legislation that is the perfect exemplar of the deep and eagerly embraced ignorance of the anti-CRT crowd. Proposed Bill SC S0424 reads, in part:

(9) an individual must be compelled to affirm, accept, adopt, profess, or adhere to concepts, forms of language, or definitions not firmly and widely established, empirically or scientifically accurate, or that are controversial or theoretical, such as:

         (a) gender theory, including nonbinary pronouns or honorifics;

         (b) unconscious or implicit bias; or

         (c) that race or biological sex are social constructs;

I’m going to leave aside the gender issues in the post and focus on the idea that race is a social construct. It would seem that South Carolina wants to ban ideas like this one:

In one word, the term race is only a product of our mental activities, the work of our intellect, and outside all reality. Science had need of races as hypothetical limits, and these “products of art,” to use Lamarck’s expression, have become concrete realities for the vulgar. Races as irreducible categories only exist as fictions in our brains. They exist in us but not outside us. We can never sufficiently insist on this fact, which is elementary and undeniable to all truly scientific minds and to those desirous above all of ascertaining the truth.

That quotation is not from some wild-eyed “Cultural Marxist” but from French writer, Jean Finot’s book Race Prejudice published in English in 1907. In the subsequent century, Finot has been proven correct, “truly scientific minds” know that “races as irreducible categories only exist as fictions in our brains.” If South Carolina had its way, its schoolchildren would not be taught the best genetic science of the 21st century.

On the next page, I’ll explain why.

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The Survival of the Unfit: Darwinism, Race, and Eugenics in the United States

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This is a paper that I first presented at a workshop at the University of Mississippi in 2012. I submitted it to a journal soon after and got a “Revise and Resubmit.” I then moved, switched computers and it got lost somewhere in all that. When I re-discovered it recently, I realized that it was really too late for me to bring it up-to-date with current work on eugenics given my other writing commitments. Therefore, I decided to post it here for anyone interested in these historical issues. I still like the paper and think it has something important to say.

Abstract: The historical relationship among Darwinism, eugenics, and racism is notoriously difficult to unravel. Eugenicists worried about the “survival of the unfit,” a phrase that should, prima facia, be nonsense for those with a Darwinian worldview in the early twentieth century. To be “fit” in a Darwinian sense meant adapted well enough to the environment to out-survive (and out-reproduce) one’s competitors. For eugenicists, the measure for “fit” could not be those best adapted to the environment in this way because they were concerned with the opposite situation: those who thriving and yet were “unfit.” Additionally, historians now reject the idea that eugenics was necessarily founded on racist assumptions. We can address these problems by examining the different forms of Darwinism adopted by early twentieth-century notions of “fitness” and how the term was interpreted in the context of American debates about immigration restriction and race. For some eugenicists, the idea of panmixia allowed them to argue that the unfit were outcompeting the fit. For others, notably Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn the idea of organic selection provided them with a Darwinian mechanism that solved the problem of the “survival of the unfit.”

Keywords:  Darwinism; Eugenics; Racism; Fitness; Panmixia; Organic Selection

CONTINUED ON PAGE TWO

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Genetics and Progressives

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Kathryn Paige Harden. 2021. The genetic lottery: why DNA matters for social equality. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Katheryn Paige Harden’s new book, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality hovers between a plea and a demand that social scientists incorporate behavior genetics into their research. Unfortunately, the book is based on a series of false assumptions about the social sciences that undercut the book’s central thesis.

Social scientists, Harden warns, “have been trained to view the results of behavior genetics with fear and loathing” (p. 277). Indeed, they are guilty of committing a violent crime:

The tacit collusion in some areas of the social sciences to ignore genetic differences…is wrong. It is wrong in the way that robbing banks is wrong. It is stealing. It’s stealing people’s time when researchers work to churn out critically flawed scientific papers, and other researchers chase false leads that go no where. It’s stealing people’s money when taxpayers and private foundations support policies premised on the shakiest of causal foundations. Failing to take genetics seriously is a scientific practice that pervasively undermines our stated goal of understanding society so that we can improve it. (p. 186)

Well, anyone accusing their colleagues of being the moral equivalent of a stick-up artist must have good grounds to do so. Moreover, they must come from a research tradition that has never been guilty of “churning out critically flawed scientific papers!” Unfortunately, Harden misrepresents the fields the criticizes. She shifts standards of evidence to suit her pre-conceived goals. Most importantly, she fails to show that behavior genetics is at all relevant for the values and policies she endorses.

[Continued on page 2]

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Libertarians and Holocaust Denial

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Photo by MARCIN CZERNIAWSKI on Unsplash

After a long covid delay, my paper, “The Pre-History of American Holocaust Denial” is finally published at the journal, American Jewish History. It is part of a special double issue on American antisemitism. The roster of authors is distinguished and I’m honored and delighted to find myself in their company.

Holocaust denial is the idea that the Nazi genocide of European Jews has been greatly exaggerated or, in its most severe form, never actually happened. It is, quite correctly, labeled an extreme form of antisemitism. In the United States, the Institute for Historical Review, founded in the late 1970s. My paper focuses on the decades before that, from the end of World War II to the founding of the IHR.

Here are some of the highlights of my paper:

There is more, all fully documented from archival sources. All of this is not in spite of libertarian ideology but a consequence of it: they were isolationists and were perfectly willing to distort the history of World War II to suit their ends. They made active alliances with overt antisemitic, right-wing activists and, in many cases, shared their antisemitism. It is time the libertarians stopped denying their ugly history regarding Holocaust denial and started taking responsibility for it.


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