Wanjiru Njoya
Dr Wanjiru Njoya is a Scholar-in-Residence for the Mises Institute.
In Against the State, Lew Rockwell explains how the constant expansion of state power is often justified as a necessary means of achieving the dreams and visions of voters. In its relentless pursuit of power, the state has a strong incentive to focus on the problems that are likely to resonate most deeply with voters and, hence, most likely to persuade them to vest increasing control of their lives in the state. Statists embrace “the moral high ground” in justifying schemes designed to protect people from all manner of social problems.
Rockwell observes that “the goal of the state is to find some practice that is universally reviled and pose as the one and only way of expunging it from society.” Key among the reviled practices the state is now dedicated to expunging from society, as the latest iteration of its forever war against racism and other Thought Crimes, is the concept of “hate.”
Many voters are beguiled by visions of a world in which there is no political incorrectness, no offensive opinions, no discrimination, and now even no hate. Accordingly, state power is depicted as the only way to build a future “beyond hate.” For example, in endorsing Kamala Harris as “the only patriotic choice for president,” the New York Times opined that “Ms Harris has offered a shared future for all citizens, beyond hate and division.” Rockwell warns that, by declaring war on racism, the state inevitably “makes war on large sections of humanity.”
The war against hate is not limited to policing people’s subjective feelings but also serves as an enforcement platform for the civil rights framework. As civil rights focus on new threats to sexual and racial identity, the war against hate is accordingly harnessed to protect sexual and racial minorities through civil rights enforcement.
Examples of anti-hate laws emerge with increasing frequency. Civil rights in California now include the right to be protected from reading hateful messages in flyers and pamphlets under a new law protecting them from hate-littering: “Assembly Bill 3024, which was introduced by Asm Chris Ward (D-San Diego), expands state civil rights protections against the dissemination of materials like flyers or pamphlets contain [sic] threatening speech with the intention of intimidating members of a protected class.”
This constant expansion of civil rights law is rooted in its history in political activism. The Civil Rights Act 1964 does not explicitly declare itself to be a revolutionary instrument whose purpose is to advance black power, but it has long been interpreted by activist courts as intended specifically to protect black people from racism. For example, the US Library of Congress notes that the roots of civil rights law lie in “black power” political protest:
Resistance to racial segregation and discrimination with strategies such as civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance, marches, protests, boycotts, “freedom rides,” and rallies received national attention … Success crowned these efforts: the Brown decision in 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 helped bring about the demise of the entangling web of legislation that bound blacks to second class citizenship.
As a result, when the Trump administration interpreted civil rights law as legislation that, on its face, confers equal protection on all citizens, following “the letter of the law,” they were accused by the New York Civil Liberties Union of redefining “whose civil rights to protect” and subverting the law away from its historical purpose of protecting minorities:
The Justice Department’s civil rights division has [historically] used the Constitution and federal law to expand protections of African-Americans, gays, lesbians and transgender people, immigrants and other minorities … [Trump’s] Department of Justice is now moving away from that, and its emerging view of civil rights is a dangerous trend, inconsistent with legal history, and a disturbing manifestation of President Trump.
In response to the state’s ever-expanding war on racism, Rockwell asks:
Do we really want to unleash the state to solve this problem? Not if we understand the dynamics of states. The power will not be used to solve the problem, but rather to intimidate the population in ways to which people will find it difficult to object.
State coercion never resolves the problems it sets out to address but only gives rise to new and worse problems. Rockwell presents many examples of ways in which, through the expansion of its own powers, the government is “becoming a source of the very problem that government is trying to correct.”
In the state’s role as what Rockwell calls “the great social referee, it accumulates more power unto itself and leaves everyone else with less freedom to work out their own problems.” Instead of looking to the state for salvation, Rockwell reminds us of the importance of freedom:
What freedom has illustrated is that differences among people do not lead to intractable conflicts. More and more social cooperation is possible and fruitful, to the extent that people are granted their freedom to associate, trade, make contracts, and work together toward their mutual advantage.
This article was originally published by the Mises Institute.
