Gene Demby responds to a column suggesting the “free market” could have ended Jim Crow:
Indeed, the Montgomery bus boycott succeeded because the city’s bus system was the rare service used by whites that also required black folks’ money to effectively function. Black folks couldn’t have actively boycotted their way into better housing or schools — because, you know, their exclusion from the marketplace for these things was the whole point of segregation — nor were they afforded the means to build wealth independently to create their own comparable institutions. (When folks did carve out pockets of economic independence, they were short-lived and their ends were often very bloody.) Flynn’s free-market answer to American racism only works in a world where a straightforward economic decision — like choosing to send your daughter to the better school closer to your home — didn’t require an Army escort to keep her from being killed. That world was not ours.
It’s not as though the federal government didn’t leave the Southern states to themselves for decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was ruled unconstitutional. What happened was that white people in the South weren’t being “rational actors” in the way an abstract economic analysis might expect them to. White supremacy was valuable than whatever mere monetary gains they could have gleaned from serving blacks, both because of tradition and as Demby suggests, because social pressure and the very real threat of violence towards white businesses that broke racial taboos.
In George Orwell‘s essay on nationalism, he writes that for nationalists, “certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible.” He offers as some examples of facts different varieties of nationalists are incapable of accepting:
BRITISH TORY: Britain will come out of this war with reduced power and prestige.
COMMUNIST: If she had not been aided by Britain and America, Russia would have been defeated by Germany.
IRISH NATIONALIST: Eire can only remain independent because of British protection.
TROTSKYIST: The Stalin regime is accepted by the Russian masses.
PACIFIST: Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.
The fact is that the most influential movement for individual freedom in United States history, the civil rights movement, demanded federal intervention, while the forces of white supremacy framed their appeal using the libertarian rhetoric of Barry Goldwater. As Damon Root has written, there were some libertarians who deployed ideological arguments against Jim Crow. But the Southern states that went Goldwater in 1964 weren’t doing so because they wanted to implement their own local desegregation efforts. They did so because Goldwater’s libertarian position offered a superficially non-racist moral and constitutional defense of segregation and racial discrimination.
To conservative nationalists–and I don’t mean “nationalism” with regards to the U.S., but in regards to conservative ideology–we could add to Orwell’s list “Jim Crow would have ended without the intervention of the federal government,” which is really just a subset of the dogma that “more government = less freedom.” The lesson of the civil rights movement and American history is that equation really fails as a hard rule. The irony is that it’s precisely because of the massive cultural changes ushered in by the 1964 Civil Rights Act that conservatives have such a hard time imagining mere commercial self-interest not winning out.
