Let’s begin today by going back to everybody’s favorite whipping boy, Gary Johnson, and everybody’s favorite subject, compulsory gay wedding cakes. Here’s a portion of the recent interview with Johnson conducted by Reason’s Nick Gillespie:
GILLESPIE: Let’s talk about your stance on religious-liberty issues, which has angered a lot people on the right and many libertarians. Your position is that you essentially want to extend anti-discrimination protections for race and gender to cover sexual orientation when it comes to businesses that are open to the public. Yet you support an opt-out for vaccinations. Why not support an opt-out for the religious owner of a business who doesn’t want to bake a gay Nazi wedding cake?
JOHNSON: Because it would create a new exemption for discrimination. At the end of the day we’re just going to agree to disagree. But you bring me specific legislation dealing with a cake baker not having to decorate a cake for a Nazi and I’ll sign it.
At the risk of being deliberately misquoted by the New York Times, I’m compelled to point out that if there exists a group in the modern Western world that is the consistent victim of unremitting, crushing discrimination, Nazis are that group. Nazis are so relentlessly discriminated against that here we have anti-discrimination law champion Gary Johnson, in the middle of his screed about the evils of discrimination and the important role government can play in fighting it, pausing to explain that he believes the anti-discrimination laws themselves should discriminate against Nazis. That, my friends, is some hardcore discrimination.
Why, you ask, do I bring this up? Surely I’m not so perverse as to defend Nazis. No, I raise this issue not to defend Nazis, but to examine the curious double-standard we see on display. Lest we think the situation I’m responding to is merely more verbal goulash coming from the world’s least libertarian Libertarian, I’ve engaged with many Johnson-defenders over the past few days, and they tend to agree with his anti-discrimination discrimination; the most persistent of them, indeed, told me that disliking Nazis is "rational," whereas disliking homosexuals is "irrational." The distinction itself escapes me, but its origins do not. That is what I’d like to explore here.
Herbert Marcuse was a German philosopher of the Frankfurt School, active during the mid-twentieth century. He was a brilliant and penetrating thinker, and his works very much repay reading. It should also be noted, however, that Marcuse was quite mad, as is probably a necessary precondition for a philosopher whose primary goal was to integrate Marx and Freud into a sort of unified theory in which the pursuit of aestheticism will eventually allow man to expand eroticism beyond the realm of sexuality, where he can use its power to transform the laws of reality and make socialism work. No, seriously, that’s what he said.
As riveting as An Essay on Liberation can be, though, it is not that but his earlier Repressive Tolerance to which I presently turn my baleful gaze. In Repressive Tolerance, Marcuse lays down the foundation for his case that there is such a thing as being too tolerant:
tolerance cannot be indiscriminate and equal with respect to the contents of expression, neither in word nor in deed; it cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the possibilities of liberation. Such indiscriminate tolerance is justified in harmless debates, in conversation, in academic discussion; it is indispensable in the scientific enterprise, in private religion. But society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence, where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake: here, certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude.
Note carefully what Marcuse is quite explicitly saying. He is not saying that the commission of violent acts cannot be tolerated; no, he’s saying that there are some words and thoughts that are themselves too dangerous to be tolerated. He doesn’t mention them by name in this passage, but in a few later passages he will specifically identify Nazis (and fascism in general) as being on the list of things that are simply too dangerous to tolerate. Again, importantly: the point Marcuse is making is not that the German people would have been justified in resisting the Nazi regime. He is saying that Nazi ideas should be actively suppressed always and anywhere, because those ideas "counteract the possibilities of liberation." Here he is, spelling it out a bit more clearly for us:
Tolerance would be restricted with respect to movements of a demonstrably aggressive or destructive character (destructive of the prospects for peace, justice, and freedom for all). Such discrimination would also be applied to movements opposing the extension of social legislation to the poor, weak, disabled. As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for ‘the other side’, I maintain that there are issues where either there is no ‘other side’ in any more than a formalistic sense, or where ‘the other side’ is demonstrably ‘regressive’ and impedes possible improvement of the human condition. To tolerate propaganda for inhumanity vitiates the goals not only of liberalism but of every progressive political philosophy.
Gary Johnson couldn’t have said it better himself — and I mean that sincerely. If your ideology is "demonstrably" — to whose standards is left unclear, of course — "destructive of the prospects for peace, justice, and freedom for all," then you are not deserving of peace, justice, or freedom. It is the exact same bizarre circularity Johnson ineloquently expressed when he jumped immediately from refusing to create "a new exemption for discrimination" to laying out the foundation for a new exemption for discrimination.
That this philosophy is the rock undergirding the Social Justice War should perhaps come as no surprise; the snowflake brigade self-consciously seeks to emulate the radicals of the 1960s, after all, and Marcuse was one of their chief exponents. It’s sad to see it infecting the libertarian movement, however. As libertarians, we need to be better than this. We don’t believe in peace, justice, and freedom only for those specially-selected progressive few, but for everybody — homosexuals, Nazis, and bakers alike. If you aren’t willing to accept that freedom can’t be sacrificed on the altar of progressive policy, you’ll wind up saying things like this:
The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and ‘philosophies’ can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the ‘marketplace of ideas’ is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the ‘end of ideology’, the false consciousness has become the general consciousness — from the government down to its last objects. The small and powerless minorities which struggle against the false consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped: their continued existence is more important than the preservation of abused rights and liberties which grant constitutional powers to those who oppress these minorities. It should be evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don’t have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise, and that liberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.
And nobody wants that.
On a side note, isn’t it amazing how much of modern America is contained in that one paragraph from an essay Herbert Marcuse wrote fifty years ago, even all the way down to Alicia Dearn’s nonsense about "competing rights?" Truly John Maynard Keynes was correct when he said that "the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else."