Conservatives Whine for Quotas

The answer to its title-question -- Should discrimination against Trump supporters be illegal? -- is No, of course.

Nevertheless, this New York Magazine Intelligencer piece by Jonathan Chait will be quite annoying to anyone who isn't a leftist, because lots of it will come across as the kind of sanctimonious, self-congratulatory stereotyping that we^* get all the time.

No. I am not a "racist moron" simply because I disagree with the left on most of its positive agenda -- particularly of egalitarianism and nature-worship -- today.

That said, the only thing more irritating and disturbing about it will be, for fellow proponents of liberty, the valid point it makes below just before insulting non-"progressives" and offering us unsolicited advice:

Image by New America, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

[Eric] Kaufmann's proposal is more audacious: He wants the government to step in. "Employers should not be permitted to fire employees for legally protected speech unless the firing is justified by the core aims of the organization and authorized in an employee's contract," he suggests. Also, "publicly funded organizations would be required to be politically neutral in their communications and operations except on matters directly pertinent to organizational aims."

Conservatives normally take a highly skeptical view of extending government authority into such prerogatives as an employer deciding whom to hire and fire. Kaufmann [of the Manhattan Institute (!)] argues [in the National Review (much less surprising)] that this robust new government authority will merely be used to enforce "neutrality," not to coerce institutions into becoming active supporters of the Republican agenda. Putting aside the difficult, if not impossible, task of designing and enforcing workable rules to this end, the goal of politically neutral spaces that permit political disagreement is sympathetic.

Wow!

From the Unsolicited Advice Department comes the expected counsel to not support racists. Of course, whether or not you believe Trump to be a racist, that advice is right up there in terms of politeness and usefulness with, Don't be an idiot, since anyone a leftist disagrees with these days is branded a "racist," more often undeservedly than not.

That said, I am hardly defending Trump, for whom I only very reluctantly voted in 2020 simply because of how horrible several of his opponent's proposals were. (I had been hoping for divided government and fearing a Democrat-controlled Congress.)

Moving on, let me raise two things the Intelligencer, no friends of liberty, omitted and would have left out anyway if they'd thought about either.

First, Have conservatives lost their minds? Do they not recall that until Ronald Reagan rid the airwaves of the "Fairness Doctrine" that the likes of Rush Limbaugh and countless other conservative and pro-liberty voices were basically muzzled -- by the government's requirement of "equal time?" (And speaking of not defending Trump, let me remind you that he ignorantly and shamefully popularized reviving that vile regulation.)

Second, a far better way to "not be seen as racist" (or whatever pejorative is fashionable with the left on a given day) is to quit letting leftists get away with pretending they have the moral high ground. This has been a longstanding problem, and it may be a habit impossible to break for some conservatives.

But for advocates of liberty and better conservatives, this means two things: (1) Ignore the cry-bullying of the worst elements of the left: You'll never change their feelings and what they say will have no weight with the persuadable people you want and need to reach. And (2) Offer liberty as a positive and distinct alternative to the left, and stand up for it on moral grounds.

To wit: One can and should oppose (actual) racism while upholding individual rights, including property rights. One could argue, Yes. If an employer wants to be an ass (and get all the negative publicity and other problems that he deserves) and not hire Republicans (or blacks, or whites, or atheists, or Christians, or Democrats), it should definitely be legal. This is because that job is the property of the owner, to do with as he pleases. Nobody is obligated to give a job (or media attention, or a platform) to anyone else. The principles of free speech and innocence until proven guilty are similar: We accept repugnant speech and the occasional criminal walking free because we recognize that those principles protect our freedom. America is a free country, where one may do as he pleases so long as he does not injure anyone else.

Neither those ideals nor that kind of conviction is what we're seeing on the right today.

No. Instead of actual opponents to the left, we have people like Eric Kaufmmann, and Twitter-master wannabes Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, who are quite happy to join the left in throwing out personal liberty -- and to give government all the power to guarantee outcomes that will seriously threaten our freedom, that they know they don't deserve and that they are naive enough to believe will happen, historical evidence cited above to the contrary.

-- CAV

* I use we to mean opponents of the left. Playing into the hands of the left is the fact that conservative "movement" is really just an amalgamation of elements that oppose the left for a variety of reasons and banded together in part to have any hope of stopping the left.

Unfortunately, conservatives don't really stand for something, as Ayn Rand eloquently pointed out long ago:

It is generally understood that those who support the "conservatives," expect them to uphold the system which has been camouflaged by the loose term of "the American way of life." The moral treason of the "conservative" leaders lies in the fact that they are hiding behind that camouflage: they do not have the courage to admit that the American way of life was capitalism, that that was the politico-economic system born and established in the United States, the system which, in one brief century, achieved a level of freedom, of progress, of prosperity, of human happiness, unmatched in all the other systems and centuries combined -- and that that is the system which they are now allowing to perish by silent default.

If the "conservatives" do not stand for capitalism, they stand for and are nothing; they have no goal, no direction, no political principles, no social ideals, no intellectual values, no leadership to offer anyone.

This at once explains why the conservatives are losing and why it is so easy for leftists to smear all opposition as, for example, "racists" or "morons."

While it is not unfair to opine about people who self-identify as "conservative" or regard this approach as the right way to defend America from the left, it is incorrect (although convenient for some purposes) to use the label to dismiss the left's political opponents.