Tag: Philip Kennicott

The Boys Who Cried “Racist”




That is, Paul Krugman can’t understand why people would oppose government control of health care — or skyrocketing deficits, or a federal takeover of education, energy, and finance along with health care — unless they’re driven by racism. But he’s not the only one who sees racists under every bed. Take Washington Post cultural writer Philip Kennicott yesterday, in an essay titled “Obama as the Joker: Racial Fear’s Ugly Face”:



He’s talking about a poster that depicts Obama as the Joker from last year’s Batman movie over the word SOCIALISM. It’s not a very effective poster; what does the Joker have to do with socialism? But it’s ridiculous to see racism in it.

More serious thinkers also try to tar the entire limited-government argument with the brush of racism. Take Cass Sunstein, the celebrated Harvard law professor who has been appointed to a high position in the Obama White House. In his 1999 book with Stephen Holmes, The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (and you wonder why Obama chose him?), he made such a sweeping argument, called out here by Tom G. Palmer:

[I]mmediately after gallantly conceding that ‘‘Many critics of the regulatory-welfare state are in perfectly good faith’’ (p. 216) they turn around to tar all critics of the welfare state with the charge of racism: ‘‘But their claim that ‘positive rights’ are somehow un-American and should be replaced by a policy of nonintervention is so implausible on its face that we may well wonder why it persists. What explains the survival of such a grievously inadequate way of thinking? There are many possible answers, but inherited biases — including racial prejudice, conscious and unconscious — probably play a role. Indeed, the claim that the only real liberties are the rights of property and contract can sometimes verge on a form of white separatism: prison-building should supplant Head Start. Withdrawal into gated communities should replace a politics of inclusion’’ (p. 216).

The classical liberal ideas of individualism, individual rights, property rights, “negative liberties,” and limited government date back hundreds, even thousands, of years. They find their roots in the Greek and Hebrew conceptions of the higher law, the Scholastic thinkers, the Levellers’ ideas of self-ownership and natural rights, the political theory of John Locke, the economic analysis of Adam Smith, and the political institutions of the American Founding. To suggest that the case for freedom and limited government — or the application of that theory to contemporary proposals for the expansion of government — must be attributable to racism is uncharitable, ahistorical, thoughtless, and indeed contemptible.
