After he returned in 1789, Jefferson served the slave-owners well with his charisma and political skills. Throughout the first six decades of the Nineteenth Century, the agrarian-based political party that he founded frustrated Northern efforts to restrict the expansion of slavery. The Jeffersonians, who later became known as the Democrats, bought time for a new industry to enrich Virginia's plantation owners, the breeding of black slaves for sale to the new slave states in the west. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Racism and the American Right."]
Twin Pillars
Thus, slavery and the racism that went with it were always powerful driving forces in the ideological hostility to federal authority. One might say these peculiarly American economic and political forces were shackled together from the beginning.
This bond even survived the Civil War when the white Southern aristocracy soon reestablished itself under Jim Crow laws that treated freed slaves as second-class citizens. And, in the 1950s and 1960s when the federal government intervened against segregation, the old arguments about states' rights and contractual rights could be heard again.
Though many Americans had hoped that the election of Barack Obama in 2008 as the first African-American president would signify the beginning of a post-racial America, the opposite seems to have happened. The racist fury over having the dark-skinned Obamas in the White House energized a new rightist political movement that now seeks to roll back some of the key civil rights laws enacted a half-century ago.
Much as the white-dominated South tied up Congress in the pre-Civil War days and then used political obstructionism to end post-Civil War Reconstruction, the nearly all white Republican Party is now intent on creating a Second Jim Crow Era by suppressing the non-white vote, gerrymandering congressional districts and investing heavily in anti-government propaganda.
There will, of course, be assurances that none of this is racist; it is simply the implementation of "libertarian" values. And, indeed, many well-meaning Americans have embraced the "libertarian" label out of frustration with other government abuses, including imperial military overreach and intrusions of personal freedoms, either via surveillance or drug prohibitions.
But those problems can be addressed through serious political reforms without embracing an ideology that disdains collective government action to address serious challenges to the nation, whether those threats are global warming, out-of-control financial markets or the shameful legacy of American racism.
Regarding all those challenges, the response from the "libertarians" is to simply constrain the federal government, an old message with a very ugly past.
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