Citizenship and Culture Pournelle Chart

Based on a diagram by Chris Gilligan,

the diagram itself based on the work of

Ruud Koopmans and Paul Statham.

Thanks to Professor Chaeyoon Lim

for helping me access this information.

Is It Comparable to Slavery?

Notes on National Anarchism

     Ethnic nationalism has its place; it should not be forced upon anyone, but nations have the right to determine themselves. Anyone who sides with Ukrainians against U.S., E.U., and Russian economic and military imperialism should see that.

     I would not associate with any group whose primary requirement for membership is race or ethnicity, but if things like black men's business alliances and the Congressional Black Caucus can and should exist, then you've got to admit that exclusion on the basis of race is valuable, but discrimination by whites against non-whites in a white-dominated culture (or replace "white" with "majority" in all cases), not so much.

     I don't support natives kicking out the descendants of colonizers. Colonizers themselves, yes, especially if they've broken treaties. I don't think it's necessary for Palestinians to kick out all Jews, nor Native Americans and Mexicans to kick out all non-native inhabitants of the United States, but I think there's little reason why some communities should be required to be open to outsiders.

     Local autonomy with nationality as a factor is a viable solution for native peoples, especially those who have fought and died for the land they live on. And I think they should have the right to determine who can become a member or not, whether that's based on someone's blood quantum, or their adherence to the local culture, or both.

     I think that, insofar as Native Americans and Mexicans are peoples who are native to the U.S. - and insofar as African-Americans are a displaced people - they have shared a common struggle. Their development and success is conditioned and potentially limited by that common struggle, so I think they should retain the right to discriminate.
     But we should also realize that young Israelis and young Americans who did not immigrate but were born in their home nation-States, are also "displaced peoples" in that they might otherwise wish to live somewhere else. However, that entitles them neither to the land itself, nor the right to discriminate against other displaced and/or native peoples as they please. That right comes from somewhere else.

     Not long ago, businesses has the right to discriminate against anyone for any reason. Considering some New York blacks' (including Muslims') perception that Jewish merchants are trying to destroy their communities with liquor, that African-Americans in Portland, Oregon risk getting displaced by white yuppies' Whole Foods, and that Koreans feared black criminals robbing them during the L.A. riots, it would make sense that native and displaced minorities should have the right to protect themselves, whether against the majority culture (i.e., whites) or against one another.

     Consider the possibility of a Klansman or a neo-Nazi going to a supermarket and asking a Jew or a black person to decorate a pro-Klan or pro-Nazi birthday cake for them. If you think that's only unacceptable because the Klansman or neo-Nazi is white, then take for example a Jewish Nazi, or a Catholic Klansman. They've existed. Do you see now how "freedom from discrimination" only forces us to serve one another involuntarily?
     Does an all-white business have the right to exist in a predominantly black neighborhood? If not, then suppose that the business has only one employee, whom is white. What now?

     Does a family-owned "all-Chinese business" have the right to hire a security guard and keep people out based on their ethnicity? If not, then what if the business is situated in an area with extraordinarily high violent racial and ethnic hate-crime rates, and there are many ethnicity-based gangs that hate Chinese people?

     Most importantly, how is hiring a security guard anything but "discrimination"? I was told in college that discrimination no longer exists in the private sector. How can that be true if there are security guards and bouncers who are allowed to refuse service to people without having to explain why?

     If a security guard keeps a Japanese person out of a Chinese business because of Japanese gang activity in the area, are we to automatically assume that a "hate crime" has occurred? Or should we simply respect the right of all businesses to discriminate on the basis of any criteria they please, because then we wouldn't potentially force a business owner to put his whole family at risk simply because someone who might be racist and violent demands "freedom from discrimination" and asks to be served?

     "Being able to live a free life without facing discrimination" is not how I view nor define freedom. None of us has the right not to face discrimination, nor can we avoid discriminating in our everyday choices. We discriminate when we decide who to date, have sex with, and marry, and we discriminate when we choose our friends.

     If I believed that I have the right not to be discriminated against, then I'd believe that I have no right not to be denied requests for sex and dating from women, and I'd be like the guy in L.A. who shot three women because he was angry that no woman would have sex with him. The freedom from discrimination is the right to order people to serve you by assenting to associate with you.

     Lastly, national autonomy and communal autonomy require neither territorial integrity, nor well-defined international borders, nor the prevention of immigration. In the view of the panarchists, legal communities can exist side-by-side, within one another, and even on the same territory.
     Imagine two people, each in his own apartment, one living above the other. Imagine that each one subscribes to, pays for, and receives goods and services from some company providing justice, security, and protection. Such a company could have ethnicity, race, culture - or things like hobbies, interests, personality type, etc. - as the determining factor, or as one of many determining factors (regarding membership, or rates, or conditions of membership, etc.).
     We should keep in mind that what is desired by the members of the Congressional Black Caucus and 100 Black Businessmen of Madison - as well as by proponents of affirmative action - is precisely the kind of practice which is embraced by the national-anarchists; namely, the practice of using race or ethnicity as a condition influencing membership, whether in the public or private sector, and whether heritage is the sole criterion or but one of several criteria.
     One of the arguments made by members of the Congressional Black Caucus in favor of the group is that it does not discriminate on solely one basis but rather on two bases. They do not allow non-blacks to become members, but they also do not allow non-congressmen to become members. This fact and their de facto exclusion of Republican blacks beg the following question: How does the act of tacking additional reasons to discriminate onto currently existing discrimination make that discrimination less discriminatory?
     It is not that discrimination is universally harmful to minorities; it can be beneficial, but this is a controversial viewpoint. It's not difficult to understand why the topic of discrimination and segregation on the part of non-whites in the U.S. has not been fully explored nor discussed.
    Ethnic, racial, religious, etc., separatism (and, more broadly, the freedom from association and from involuntary servitude) are valuable and acceptable as long as they are not forced. Understanding this - and that discrimination is all around us - could allow ethnic, cultural, racial, religious nationalism to exist in independent, autonomous, self-determining manners; without bringing territorial integrity into the mix, and without building border fences and checkpoints in order to prevent the flow of immigrants into an area.
     I agree with everyone who points out that no "national anarchism" should occur if it actually depends on a State (i.e., local/territorial monopoly on violence, implying territorial integrity) to prop-up forced segregation, discrimination, or separatism based on ethnicity, race, culture, religion or any other characteristic or attribute (especially along the lines of borders drawn without respect to the rights of native peoples or the boundaries of local watersheds).

On Civil Rights and Jim Crow Laws

Written on February 11th, 2012

Edited in April 2014

   The purpose of the Civil Rights Act was to provide civil rights to blacks. Civil, as in rights relating to their participation in government (like voting rights), not their right to tell employees and management of private establishments how to conduct their business.

   That is, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came along. This act had ten provisions in it. Nine of them dealt with real civil rights having to do with blacks' participation in government. The other provision required states to prohibit businesses which serve the public from discriminating against patrons on the basis of race.

   This provision did not define the difference between "public" and "private", and subsequent court rulings on the law simply assumed that all businesses serve the public (which I associate with government, i.e., "the public sector", not private businesses), and declared federal jurisdiction on the grounds that any business can be construed to have some "substantial effect" on interstate commerce, which the federal government has (way too broadly) asserted itself to have the ability to regulate.

   Not all southern businessmen segregated customers by race or refused to hire based on race because they were racists. But all of them did so because it was the law; specifically, the Jim Crow law. A law, created by governments, not by the private sector. The reason Jim Crow laws were maintained is because racists intimidated city council members into codifying them.

   Providing blacks with civil rights to vote and participate in government like all other citizens would have permitted them to vote that the governments of their states to prohibit discrimination in private businesses, and the federal government wouldn't have had to breach the Constitution the way it did in the Heart of Atlanta v. U.S. ruling which resulted from the 1964 CRA.

   There is no civil right that allows someone to compel a business to associate with him. The liberty which the Declaration of Independence guarantees to us means the freedom of association; that is, the freedom to associate, and the freedom not to associate. If you can compel someone to associate with you in a way that violates the Constitution, you are making someone serve you against their will, i.e., involuntarily. It's involuntary servitude, which is prohibited by the 13th Amendment, which the law regards as on-par with slavery. Indeed, this is the defense which the plaintiff used in the case of Heart of Atlanta v. U.S., which I referenced above.

   The same law that prohibits businesses from discriminating against blacks and segregate patrons in order to protect whites can also be used to prevent businesses from segregating in order to protect black patrons from white patrons. If government has eradicated all private-sector discrimination - as one of my past UW professors has claimed - how can businesses still legally hire bouncers and security guards to choose which potential patrons enter and which must leave?

For more entries on civil rights, slavery, segregation, and discrimination, please visit:
http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/06/title-ii-of-civil-rights-act-of-1964.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/02/barry-goldwater-and-conservative.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/11/response-to-exposing-racist-history-of.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-role-of-aswpl-and-christian.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/01/slavery-civil-war-and-fifth-amendment.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-cherokee-freedmen-controversy.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/02/zionism-images.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/social-policies-for-2012-us-house.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/bundy-cows-better-off-as-slaves.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/sen-cliven-bundy-harry-reid-owes-feds.html

Barry Goldwater and the Conservative Backlash

Barry Goldwater and the Conservative Backlash:

A Case Study of Ethnic Collective Action by Whites in the Election of 1964

In 1964, Republican Barry Goldwater, a two-term U.S. Senator from Arizona, defeated New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller in his bid to win the nomination as their party’s candidate for president, opposing the re-election of incumbent Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson. In the general election, Senator Goldwater carried his home state and the five Deep South states – including several states that had not voted for Republican presidential candidates since Reconstruction – but failed to defeat Johnson, receiving fifty-two electoral votes, two hundred and eighteen shy of the simple majority required to win.

Over twenty-seven million Americans, about six million of whom were strong Goldwater supporters, and nearly four million of whom worked in his campaign, backed the Republican presidential ticket in the election of 1964. Most of his supporters were males, the elderly, Republicans, and those who considered themselves conservatives as opposed to liberals.

Their support affirmed the existence of an abundance of voters who were willing to support a candidate who opposed labor unions, the ongoing American military involvement in Vietnam, excessive taxation by the federal government, and excessive spending on social welfare programs. But the outspoken rationality that rallied so many supporters to Goldwater’s side also contributed to his mischaracterization as racist, and to his eventual landslide trouncing.

The Senator propounded a complex, nuanced argument which at the time appeared to the average voter as a perspective that was in stark opposition to the racial progress that the United States needed and had just begun to embrace and advance. Goldwater opposed the portions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that to him and his ideologues represented the encroachment of the federal government on the right of states to permit owners of private establishments who wish to deny patrons equal access to their property because of the patrons’ immigrant status or because of their racial, ethnic, or religious identity, to continue to practice discrimination and / or segregation based on those criteria if they so desired.

Democratic Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy and Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson had defeated Republican Vice President Richard Nixon in the presidential election of 1960. During Kennedy’s campaign, he expressed interest in encouraging Congress to enact a new Civil Rights Act. Following Kennedy’s assassination in November of 1963 and Johnson’s subsequent succession to the presidency, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed by President Johnson four months prior to his re-election to the presidency. It included Title II, which prohibited discrimination in facilities engaged in interstate commerce, and Title VII, which prohibited the practice of discrimination by employers and provided for the establishment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The support for Barry M. Goldwater throughout his political career, from his first foray into politics in 1949, to his election to the U.S. Senate in 1953, to his candidacy in the 1964 presidential election, to his re-election to the Senate in 1968, until his refusal to seek re-election to the Senate in 1986, following his fifth non-consecutive term, is an example of a collective action because it fits sociologist Jack A. Goldstone’s definition of a “contentious collective action,”  which is  “any  sustained effort  at making  claims on a society, or on other social actors, by a cooperating group (or groups) of individuals that provokes resistance [emphasis mine].”

The collective action of the Conservative Backlash was certainly sustained, as in 1966, many of Goldwater’s supporters helped elect his ideologue Ronald Reagan the governor of California, and in 1968, Alabama Governor George “Segregation Forever” Wallace became the most successful third-party candidate in decades, and Goldwater was re-elected as U.S. Senator from Arizona, going on to serve three more six-year terms.

Claims on  society  were  certainly made by the Conservative Backlash.  For example, Goldwater’s stated opposition to Titles II and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was based on the grounds that the act attempted to “legislate morality”, and on the idea that “[o]ur aim… is neither to establish a segregated society nor to establish an integrated society… it is to preserve a free society… [b]arriers infringe the freedom of everybody in society, not just the minorities.”

The action to support Barry Goldwater certainly provoked resistance. Despite the conservative senator’s history of supporting civil rights legislation such as the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, which aimed to protect the rights of blacks to vote, and the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which eliminated the poll tax, on June 18^th, 1964, during a session of the 88^th Congress, Senator Goldwater, “stressing… his belief that the legislation bestowed unconstitutional authority on the U.S. government in Titles II and VII… announced his intention to vote against [the House resolution to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964].” Goldwater’s declaration in defense of his position that “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice” was twisted and used against him by President Johnson, who called Goldwater’s “extremism” an “unpardonable vice.” He was also shamelessly campaigned against by Johnson re-election campaigns, best exemplified by the single  televised airing  of the infamous  “Daisy” advertisement that featured the explosion of a nuclear bomb.

Support for Goldwater and the Conservative Backlash qualifies as a white ethnic collective action because 97.3% of Senator Goldwater’s supporters in the 1964 election were white – less than two percent below the figure for white supporters of George Wallace’s independent campaign, but over sixteen percent higher than the figure for white supporters of Johnson’s re-election.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was backed mostly by Northerners in both houses of Congress, and by a greater percentage of Republicans than Democrats in both houses, gave the U.S. federal government primacy over the states with regard to the regulation of the right of business owners to choose to deny entry to and / or segregate potential patrons on the basis of certain categories of social distinction. It did so by redefining numerous types of private enterprises as “public” so that the federal government may have the right to regulate them as “public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce”, the power to regulate interstate commerce among the states having been specifically enumerated to the federal government in the Constitution.

Title II of the legislation provided that “[a]ll persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation… without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.” It declares that a “civil action for preventive relief, including an application for a permanent or temporary injunction, restraining order, or other order, may be instituted by the person aggrieved” against those who “attempt to withhold or deny… or deprive… any person of any right or privilege secured by [the previous sections of the act]” to access establishments which “provide lodging to transient guests [with exceptions for those buildings having five rooms or less and those buildings which are occupied by the owner of the premises]”, are “engaged in selling food for consumption on the premises,” are “place[s] of exhibition or entertainment,” or are located within such establishments, provided that either their “operations affect commerce”, or that discrimination and / or segregation by the establishment is “supported by State action” or is “enforced by officials of the State…”.

In addition, Title II provides that injunctions and orders may not be made by aggrieved persons against “private club[s] or other establishment[s] not in fact open to the public, except to the extent that the facilities of such establishment are made available to the customers and patrons of an establishment within the scope of [the subsection of the title which described the types of establishments listed in the above paragraph].”

This law essentially redefined all private establishments which provided lodging, the consumption of food, exhibition and entertainment, as public places, and thus under the jurisdiction of the United States federal government. Although the law did not specifically state under what circumstances the owners of establishments could decide that their property constituted a “private club” – in which case they could have continued or resumed practicing discrimination and/or segregation on their property without fear of being subjected to legal recourse – the law did specifically state which types of establishments’ owners may not be permitted to practice discrimination and / or segregation.

In order to understand the causes and context of Goldwater’s defeat, and of the 73-to-27-vote failure of the U.S. Senate to prevent this legislation from being passed, it is necessary to briefly explain the history of the opposition to racial segregation and discrimination in the decade and a half that preceded the 1964 election.

During the 1950s and the first term of the Kennedy-Johnson administration, the United States underwent rapid social change, especially in the South. In the first few years of the 1950s, lawyers associated with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People filed several suits in federal courts questioning the constitutionality of public school segregation, eventually resulting in the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Kansas decision. Brown made segregation in public schools illegal, “thrust the NAACP into the limelight”, and made it conceivable that blacks might very well succeed in using non-violent, legalistic methods to fight systematic segregation and discrimination in public settings.

Although it was a “limited victory”, the 1953 mass bus boycott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, officially headed by Reverend T. J. Jemison, and “mobilized and directed through the local black churches and the United Defense League”, which was an “organization of organizations”, provided “evidence that the system of racial segregation could be challenged by mass action”.

The successful mass bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama several years later, was organized by Rosa Parks, E. D. Nixon, the NAACP, the Women’s Political Council, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Baptist Ministerial Alliance, and “the majority of Montgomery’s black ministers”, who “saw this moment in history as a critical time when they and their churches could change the oppressive social system that choked Southern blacks at every turn.” The boycott lasted over a year, drew national attention, and served as a solid example of a non-violent successful collective action by blacks to oppose discrimination in publicly-provided services.

Following the Brown decision, the mass bus boycotts, and the integration of the University of Alabama, all of which were supported by the NAACP, “the bureaucratic strategies of the NAACP came under intense scrutiny and criticism by blacks for the first time.” The State of Alabama banned the NAACP in 1956, which “went to court to fight for the right to exist” for over eight years. Due to the fact that Birmingham, Alabama was the site of the headquarters of the NAACP’s Southeastern Region, which comprised six states, the entire Deep South was affected.

The attack on the NAACP by whites “occurred at a moment when the NAACP stood a good chance of attracting a large following”, “destroyed not only a great deal of what the NAACP was but also what it might have become,” and “left an organizational and protest vacuum in many Southern black communities”, depriving blacks of “organization[s] through which to address local grievances”.

The period between the bus boycotts and the Greensboro, North Carolina lunch counter sit-in protests of 1960, which sparked the broader, South-wide sit-in protest campaign (and which inspired more than fifty additional sit-ins in Southern cities in the following week alone), is referred to as the “quiescent period,” during which time “organizations appropriately designed to facilitate collective action were established… operat[ing] in a fluid but organized manner as they mobilized and prepared the masses to engage in direct action.”

Although the common misperception regarding the Greensboro sit-ins is that “they were the product of an independent student-initiated movement”, the four black male students at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College who sat down at the Woolworth’s in Greensboro that February “were, or at some time had been, members of an NAACP Youth Council” and “had participated in numerous meetings in social action-oriented churches in Durham.”

The fact that the students had been involved with the NAACP should not be misconstrued to suggest that any part of the NAACP besides members of its Youth Councils were openly or directly involved in coordinating the sit-ins. On the contrary, “[t]he NAACP, with some 380,000 members… was dominated by older leaders who never endorsed the sit-in strategy.”

This particular non-violent sit-in protest occurred at a time when the NAACP was mired in a legal battle in the courts of Alabama, and was effectively outlawed in the South (including North Carolina) at a time when the number of anti-segregationist organizations by which one could be recruited had recently grown.  Numerous “[p]reviously established movement centers were directly involved in the planning and execution of the early 1960 sit-ins,” such as the Southern chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality, the NAACP’s Youth Councils, the Southern  Christian  Leadership  Conference,  the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs.

The dramatic increase in the frequency of the practice of non-violent sit-in protests in the late 1950s and the early 1960s represented a distinct shift in the strategies of the Civil Rights Movement. The movement, which had used legalistic techniques of contentious collective action to achieve justice in public schools nationwide in the Brown victory, and which had used non-violent, direct-action techniques of contention in the bus boycotts, had succeeded thus far in its goal to stop racial segregation and discrimination in public settings.

Considering that those high up in the leadership of the NAACP did not endorse sit-in protests, and that the success of the Montgomery bus boycott “let the black population know that the tactics and strategies of the mass movement could be effective and could bring far faster results than the legalistic method of the NAACP”, and given that sit-in protests had been common and successful in the South for the previous three years, is it any surprise that youths who had been involved in anti-segregationist organizations would once again choose to employ methods of non-violent direct action to fight for their right to be served in settings which they felt they deserved the permission and ability to frequent? Moreover, is it any more surprising that they would do so without considering that the business owner, as a legitimate possessor of property, an obvious racist though he very well may have been, in theory retained the legal right to decide who comes on to his property and for what purpose? Is it irrational or extremist to suggest that, with the NAACP held in thrall, the movement lost focus on its original goal of prohibiting discrimination in public places and instead unwittingly drifted into the realm of organized crime?

When those students decided to occupy the segregated restaurant section of that segregated Woolworth’s shop that day, they boldly bore the brunt of whatever harassment and humiliation the whites frequenting the shop were willing to dole out, and they deserve praise for their bravery and courage, and also admiration for their success in sparking action that caused many businesses throughout the South to voluntarily end segregation long before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did away with their ability to choose to do so.

However, the direct anti-segregationist action that those four college freshmen implemented was in fact unlawful, violated the rights of the owner or owners of the Woolworth’s store, and was essentially a case of conspiracy to commit the criminal trespass of private property. Furthermore, the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for which the protesters expressed approval, constitute violations of the Fifth and Thirteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Following Barry Goldwater’s loss to incumbent President Johnson, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, ruled against the plaintiff, attorney Moreton Rolleston, the owner of the motel, who was asking for $11 million in compensation, re-affirming the legitimacy of the Civil Rights Act that had been passed several months before, and issued a permanent injunction against Rolleston, requiring him to integrate his lodging facility within twenty days. The circuit court case which had preceded the U.S. Supreme Court case had prohibited Georgia Governor Lester Maddox from using race as a criterion by which to deny entry and access to his Pickrick Cafeteria in Atlanta, which employed blacks. Rather than integrate, Governor Maddox chose to shut down his cafeteria.

Those representing Governor Maddox and Mr. Rolleston had argued that their Fifth Amendment rights had been violated because they had not been justly compensated for the compulsory taking of their property (i.e., their labor and service) for public use without due process of law. They also argued that their Thirteenth Amendment rights had been violated because they had been forced by Congress, through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to serve people they did not wish to serve, which to them amounted to “involuntary servitude,” (i.e., slavery), which the Thirteenth Amendment prohibits without either due process of law or just compensation.

Concurring with the Supreme Court’s decision, Justice Hugo Black wrote the following: “in view of the Commerce Clause, it is not possible to deny that the aim of protecting interstate commerce from undue burdens is a legitimate end. In view of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, it is not possible to deny that the aim of protecting Negroes from discrimination is also a legitimate end. The means adopted to achieve these ends are also appropriate, plainly adopted to achieve them, and not prohibited by the Constitution, but consistent with both its letter and spirit.”

Black also wrote that “[i]n the past, this Court has consistently held that regulation of the use of property by the Federal Government or by the States does not violate either the Fifth or the Fourteenth Amendment… A regulation such as that found in Title II does not even come close to being a ‘taking’ in the constitutional sense… Moreover, it would be highly ironical to use the guarantee of due process – a guarantee which plays so important a part in the Fourteenth Amendment, an amendment adopted with the predominant aim of protecting Negroes from discrimination – in order to strip Congress of power to protect Negroes from discrimination.”

It is lamentable that there has to this day been no successful opposition to the proclamation by the highest court in the nation that racial equality is to be recursively defined as the conditions that result from the implementation of any law that is interpreted by the court to have been passed in order to “protect Negroes from discrimination,” and even more lamentable that the efforts by Goldwater and his supporters remain largely forgotten today, perhaps in part due to the evolution of the Republican Party away from its ideological roots.

What is fortunate for the public is that so many of the prominent political and ideological figures who succeeded Goldwater and allied themselves with him as part of an “extremist” Conservative Backlash or as members of what Goldwater called the “new liberal” faction of the Republican Party, such as George Wallace, recurrent presidential candidate and political commentator Patrick J. Buchanan, conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, and former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, have proven themselves to be too conservative, intolerant, or unamenable to reason with regard to social issues (save for Wallace, who, following the attempt on his life in 1972, rescinded his pledge to always support segregation) to experience sustained political success.

Although it has been said that Goldwater energized the libertarian movement of the early 1970s, his efforts likely did more to empower people like Wallace, Reagan, and Buchanan than people like Texas Congressman Dr. Ron Paul and his son Barry Goldwater, Jr., the former congressman from California, who remains for the most part invisible on the national political scene, having left Congress in 1983, but having campaigned for Dr. Paul and appearing as his  hypothetical running mate on an unofficial Louisiana Taxpayers’ Party ballot.

The Conservative Backlash continued to affect national politics during the 1980s as the elder Goldwater remained a senator until the latter half of that decade, regaining prominence towards the end of his career with the reworking of the military command structure in the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. Although the “extremist” / liberal Republican faction lost steam due to competition within the party against the religious right – which gained notoriety and popularity following the era of public focus on family values during the presidencies of born-again Christian Jimmy Carter and during the Reagan-Bush era – today, the stranglehold imposed on national politics by evangelicals and born-agains of the religious right has appeared to begin to weaken.

This weakening is best symbolized by the widespread popular opposition to the social policies of former President George W. Bush, the dismissal of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as an inexperienced, insufficiently intelligent religious conservative unfit for office, and by Arizona Senator John McCain’s failure to invoke the moral-religious legal rhetoric necessary to garner enough of the Reagan-and-Bushes-voting conservative religious base of the Republican Party without alienating himself from those supporters who exalt him as a “maverick” for his contention with his own party, though reticent as he was to distance himself from his would-be predecessor.

With many supporters of Barack Obama seeing him as part of the legacy of the Kennedy-Johnson administration, and perceiving the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as having been an event which secured the freedom of immigrants and of racial and ethnic minorities to associate with society, and moreover an event which allowed for the possibility that the son of an African immigrant could become the commander of the strongest armed forces on the planet, it is almost inconceivable that a politician today could voice his support for the reversal of the 1964 bill and the subsequent court decisions which affirmed its legitimacy and still be taken seriously as a viable candidate around which either of the two major parties could organize a presidential campaign.

Since the tide of public support turned against Republican President George W. Bush after his 2004 re-election, and especially in the past several months, which have seen much debate concerning which ideologically conservative figure ought to be thought of as the one best representing the views of the party, the Republican Party now appears to be in imminent danger of becoming fractured, leading the public to consider the possibility that there will soon emerge a niche for a new breed of conservative – perhaps one that will embrace secular values, perhaps a religious extremist the likes of which this country has not seen since Alan Keyes vowed to implement state-sanctioned prayer in public schools – but nonetheless one who will undoubtedly threaten the stability of the domination of electoral politics by two parties that inevitably drift toward one another as every other November nears, by doing what true mavericks do best: by unwaveringly and unapologetically demanding that the issues highlighting the differences between more than two candidates and parties be addressed and brought to public attention.

“[F]reedom is diminished when barriers are raised against the freedom not to associate.”

     - Senator Barry Morris Goldwater, five-term United States Senator from the State of Arizona

Written in May 2009

Originally Published on February 26th, 2012

For more entries on elections and campaign finance, please visit:

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/09/spooner-amendment.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/02/on-scott-walker-and-government-secrecy.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/01/contracts-of-surety-and-secret-ballot.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/01/to-critics-of-wisconsin-governor-scott.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/03/how-partisans-in-us-federal-government.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/criticism-of-secret-ballot-voting-system.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/on-monopoly-and-scott-walker-recall.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/why-voting-is-not-necessarily-evil.html

For more entries on civil rights, slavery, segregation, and discrimination, please visit:

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/11/response-to-exposing-racist-history-of.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-role-of-aswpl-and-christian.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/01/slavery-civil-war-and-fifth-amendment.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-cherokee-freedmen-controversy.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/02/zionism-images.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/on-civil-rights-and-jim-crow-laws.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/social-policies-for-2012-us-house.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/bundy-cows-better-off-as-slaves.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/sen-cliven-bundy-harry-reid-owes-feds.html