There is a chasm that haunts this country- the chasm between what America says it is and how it treats Black Americans.
America says that it is a country conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are free and equal, and yet America continually tramples on Black Americans’ liberty while simultaneously making a mockery of equality. The Libertarian-Progressive vision of America is for it to finally become what it says it is: a nation dedicated to all people being both free and equal.
The problem with America is not that it is irredeemably bad, far from it; the problem is that it does not live up to its ambitions. This country was founded upon soaring ideals. Surrounded by states soaked in despotism and aristocracy, that was heady in ambition and noble in sentiment, but those ideals were, from the beginning, contaminated by the well-understood fact that liberty and equality were only for some. The core metaphysical chasm in this country was at its founding and is today the yawning gap between American ideals and American reality. Every time that chasm has shrunk, every time more people were included under that umbrella of liberty and equality, that has been a step forward. Every time that progress has gone in reverse, that has been a shameful failure.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The holiest ground in all of America is a copse of trees in a Pennsylvania field. It was there on July 3, 1863, that the chasm threatened to grow unfixable, that the Confederacy, a treasonous insurgency dedicated to the idea that all men are not created free and can never be equal, charged. And it was there they met their high-water mark. In that moment, when the South was pushed back and the North started its march to victory, America became both more free and more equal. And in every subsequent moment of civil rights advancement, America became more free and more equal. In each of those moments, the chasm got a little smaller.
And every time that chasm got smaller, status-quo defending whites used, or tried to use, the state to slow or reverse that. The story of American racism is thus the story of the state being deployed to deny liberty and equality to Black Americans. Whenever and wherever Black Americans have been allowed to compete on equal terms, they have excelled. Black excellence in the United States is a thing to behold, and not just because of the adversities it has had to overcome but also because of the amazingness of its output. From barbecue to Motown, Madame CJ Walker to Beyonce, Frederick Douglass to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Black excellence has been and is central to American brilliance. The reason we don’t have more of that has nothing to do with markets or modern classically liberal capitalism or with Black Americans and everything to do with white Americans leveraging their power over the state to impede the liberty of Black folks.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The combination of libertarian and progressive sensibilities holds out hope for improvement and, in part because of those sensibilities, there has been some progress. Well into the 1990s, less than half of the country supported interracial relationships. When I was kid in 1990s Alabama, I remember hearing people, and not just one crank but a lot of people, oppose interracial relations, often going out of their way to use vile rhetoric in the process. That doesn’t tend to happen anymore- thank God! Support for interracial marriage is now near-universal (94%).
Furthermore, it is neither progressives nor libertarians who are the worst offenders with regards to racial animus today. Whole volumes could be filled with examples of the racism that flows from right-wing populist nationalism. Still, just as Romans 3:23 tells us that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” in the American political context no significant political persuasion is unblemished by the stain of racism. In the contemporary context, libertarians and progressives should not pat themselves on the back for being less racist than white nationalists. That’s too low a bar, by a long shot. Rather, both libertarians and progressives should reflect on the ways in which we too have fallen short, the ways in which we too have failed to shrink the chasm.
Libertarians have been at their worst when, like Barry Goldwater, they become so fixated on defending even the ugliest forms of freedom that they lose sight of the fact that equality is not only a political commitment every bit as worthy as freedom but also that equality is one of the most important underpinnings of freedom: huge imbalances in wealth and power almost inevitably lead to exploitation and injustice, i.e. freedom-denial. Some libertarians may be quick to dismiss Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act as an ancient mistake that libertarians would never make again, but I have to ask- aren’t the libertarians who get more worked up against private businesses’ mask mandates than they do against the American state taking the lives of Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, and George Floyd demonstrating a similar kind of moral obtuseness as that done by Barry Goldwater? It should be a point of great shame for self-proclaimed lovers of liberty that Black Americans- the Americans with the most acute sense of what the word ‘liberty’ means- so consistently shun libertarianism.
Conversely, progressives are at their worst when they become so fixated on equality, and particularly the cheapest forms of performative equality like Robin DiAngelo-style seminar rhetoric, that they forget how to talk or even think in the language of liberty. Racial equality cannot be achieved so long as black people are de facto not free to live in certain suburbs; by making certain zip codes totally unaffordable to anyone but the predominantly white professional class, exclusionary zoning limits freedom and does it in a way that entrenches inequality. The same could be said for a wide variety of unnecessary occupational licensing that disproportionately harms the Black working class. It should be a point of great shame for self-proclaimed lovers of progress that for all the talk of racial justice, many of the most progressive enclaves in America are so emphatically devoted to staying as tony as possible that their streets, their shops, and their neighborhoods remain almost entirely monochromatic even while the yard signs say “all are welcome here.”
------------------------------------------------------
And so, both we white libertarians and we white progressives need to ask ourselves a question: do we want the check of liberty to come back saying insufficient funds, or do we want that promissory note to clear? If we want that check that Martin Luther King spoke about to clear, then we the libertarians need to do some soul-searching as it pertains to priorities and we the progressives need to do some soul-searching as it pertains to making anti-racism more than the empty trick of learning all the new critical theory verbiage while continuing to dream hoard.
That little trick of trying to have it both ways by doing things that make one feel progressive without actually having to come to terms with denied liberty and entrenched inequality is not that different from what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls 'patriotism a la carte.' What Coates meant by patriotism a la carte is the tendency of Americans, and particularly white Americans, to want to claim association with the things from America's past that are positive (winning WWII, the American Revolution, the Civil Rights movement, etc.) while pretending to have no association with anything negative from the past. He then asks a thought-provoking question: are we members of a community that transcends generations, or are we not? If we're going to claim to be part of a national community that created everything from the Declaration of Independence to the game of basketball, that won the Cold War, and that has inspired dreamers the world over, then we have also to acknowledge connection with the terrible sins committed by that national community. And if we're going to acknowledge that connection to those sins, then we have an obligation not just to stop committing those sins but to do what we can to try to atone for those sins and try to undo their legacies.
--------------------------------
At the 50th anniversary of the march in Selma, John Lewis gave one of his final speeches. In it, he connected the undoing of those legacies to the struggles for freedom and equality across our country’s history saying: "So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was at Appomattox. So it was in Selma, Alabama. Each of us must go back to our homes after this celebration and build on the legacy of the March in 1965. The Selma Movement is saying today that we all can be doing something. So I say to you, don't give up on the things that have great meaning to you. Don't get lost in a sea of despair. Stand up for what you believe. Because in the final analysis, we are one people, one family, the human family. We all live in the same House, the American House, the world House. We're black. We're white. We are Hispanic, Asian-American, Native-American. But we're one people."
I love that speech because it speaks to the dogged optimism and commitment to progress that I think ought to emotionally and intellectually inform our collective attempt to improve the way that Black people get treated in this country. When Ta-Nehisi Coates asks if we are members of communities that transcend generations, to me it is both unavoidable and to the good that we are indeed members of such communities. We, the people who claim to love liberty, and we, the people who claim to want progress, and we, the American citizenry of the twenty-first century, have an opportunity to help shrink the chasm. If we can do that, we will have achieved something that we can be very proud of. If we can do that, we can earn our place in the lineage of all those Americans who can say they helped close the chasm.
---------
When you’re standing next to the copse of trees where Pickett’s Charge was repelled, where the Confederacy reached its high-water mark and was turned back, where the cause of liberty refused to retreat, you think about your place in that American community that spans generations. You think about your duty to add to the side of righteousness, however small you may be. You think about how far we’ve come but also how far we have to go. You think about the possibility of creating a country that lives up to what it says about itself.
The work that we do may feel like one small feat at a time- a zoning reform here, an end to qualified immunity there, greater school choice here, an end to stop-and-frisk there- but when we make that our work, that work is nevertheless connected to the work done at Lexington and Concord, at Gettysburg, and at Selma. We have a duty to generations past and future to get that work right and to finish the unfinished business of building a nation that really is conceived in liberty and that really is dedicated to the idea of all people being free and equal.