There will never come a time when all human beings are in full ideological agreement, which is why free speech is of paramount importance to peaceful co-existence. Free speech is the only foundation on which men who disagree with each other can debate their opposing ideologies, or even hurl insults at each other if so inclined, but ultimately all the protagonists can do is try to persuade each other. All this changes when the state gets involved and decides to wield state force in backing one side or the other. When the state attempts to control “race relations” by using state machinery to protect people from racial discrimination and “correct” the historical suffering of any race, the situation escalates from ideological disagreement into all-out race war.
The main strategy by which the state performs this type of disastrous racecraft is by conferring preferences and special rights on the races deemed to be disadvantaged or vulnerable through measures such as civil rights or affirmative action, while imposing tailored penalties on the privileged race through schemes like direct or indirect reparations. By such means, the state escalates what would merely be an ideological, philosophical, or cultural debate, into hostility, conflict, and ultimately potential violence. The entire history of a country is reduced to a toxic political dispute about racism, in which all races are expected to close ranks with their own race and fight against the other races. It is the worst form of collectivism, namely, collectivism fueled and backed by the legal system and state force.
An example of the tragic outcomes of statist racecraft may be drawn from the Reconstruction Era. After the War, as Lew Rockwell observes, “the South was put through a cruel ‘Reconstruction’…the right of self-government was taken from the South and military governments were installed.” Crucially, freedom of the press was suspended. President Andrew Johnson sought to, as he said, “induce all persons to return to their loyalty and to restore the authority of the United States.” As David Gordon explains, this era is often viewed benignly as one in which a federal government, guided by principles of justice and equality, attempted to persuade a reluctant South to uphold these ideals. But, as Gordon argues, it is necessary to go beyond this superficial narrative to understand the complexities of this history:
Frequently an accepted version of the past turns out to be based on mythology, created to advance special interests. Even when we become aware of these interests, it is difficult to break loose from the common opinion. In few areas of history has the conventional wisdom assumed such dominance as in the Reconstruction era (1865–77) that followed the War between the States.
The example of South Carolina
In his book, Reconstruction in South Carolina 1865-1877, John S. Reynolds details attempts by the federal government to socially engineer race relations in South Carolina. The stakes were high. In his account of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in 1870, he observes that the black and white militia became increasingly hostile and violent to each other. He suggests that the Klan “would have remained inactive but for the arming of the negroes and the conduct of the state militia into which they were enrolled.” The problem there was not the mere fact that black men bore arms, which upset white racists, as contemporary commentators often argue, but rather the fact that black militia were armed by the state for a specific purpose—to reconstruct race relations in the aftermath of the War.
Reynolds notes the edict in South Carolina that “persons desiring to publish newspapers were required first to ‘obtain the consent of the major-general commanding.’” With the press subject to state control, there were few sympathetic outlets for the free expression of dissent. In this tense environment, state authorities deemed it apposite to encourage black militias so that free blacks would not be vulnerable to attacks from whites:
...at the suggestion of Reconstruction governors and other leaders, blacks often formed militias to resist white terrorism. For example, in June 1867 in Greensboro, Alabama, the police let the murderer of a black voting registrar escape; in response, a freedman who would later serve in the Alabama State Legislature urged his fellow freedmen to create a permanent militia. “Union League” militias were formed all over central Alabama… Official or unofficial, the black militias were the primary target of the white racist resistance.
The idea, in creating black militia to provide armed defense on behalf of the federal government against the vanquished white population, was that law and order would be kept by those loyal to the federal government which in this case included the emancipated black population. From a contemporary perspective, and with the benefit of hindsight, it seems incredible that it did not occur to anyone at the time that this would surely only result in creating new resentments where none had existed before. Reynolds is right to describe this strategy as “reckless in the extreme.”
Based on what we know about how government schemes are created, it is likely that the federal and state authorities were not primarily concerned with the likely outcome of their interventions, but instead acted in the confident knowledge that they would be judged for their good intentions, not their disastrous outcomes. As it turned out, the outcome was more racial violence. The argument is not that there would be no violence on earth if governments were abolished, but that government interventions inevitably escalate hostilities and make the outcomes far worse than they would otherwise have been.
There is an important lesson to derive from this history. All state interventions purport to be motivated by good intentions, but when the stakes are as high as they were in Reconstruction Era South Carolina, something more than good intentions is required to justify statist racecraft. Today, state-backed interventions such as destroying Confederate monuments, proscribing public display of the Confederate flag, and renaming military bases that bore Confederate names, are pertinent examples of the same type of statist folly.
There is a clear distinction to be drawn between people’s opinions or interpretations of history, on which free speech permits us to disagree as vehemently as we wish, and destroying historic monuments by means of state funds and state machinery. The lesson for contemporary race debates is that no matter what the government’s expressed intentions may be, the outcome of statist racecraft can only be to produce further hostility and conflict. The more the government gets involved in race relations, the less liberty for all. As David Gordon remarks in “Reconstructing Reconstruction,” “the policy of centralized despotism that Lincoln instituted has continued down to the present and has enslaved us all.”
