Mitt Romney, the NAACP, Ayn Rand, and Libertarian Racism

Mitt Romney is polling at about 1 percent support among African Americans. Consequently, he had nothing to lose by giving an address to the NAACP yesterday.

I will give Mitt Romney extra points for showing up before such a hard audience. Given how Romney was booed, and the unpopularity of his policies, such a speech before the NAACP took some tenacity (others would call it hubris) and strength of conviction.

However, politics is ultimately about winning friends, giving interest groups something they want in order to support you, and securing the votes of a given public: Mitt Romney fell flat in all these regards before the NAACP on Wednesday.

Consider the following. What politician, who is serious about winning over a constituency, spends time in front of one of their most important organizations, and then proceeds to tell them, to their faces, about his support for policies which would hurt them and/or are counter to their interests?

Black folks support President Obama's health care reforms. Black folks disproportionately work for federal and state governments--and are thus put out of their jobs and on the street by Romney and the Republican Party's assault on the public sector and unions. Black folks, as a group of Americans disproportionately represented among the working and lower middle classes, would see their taxes go up under Romney's proposed tax initiatives.

Yet, in a major speech before the NAACP, Mitt Romney says he will work against all of those stated interests and priorities. Riddle you that one.


Nevertheless, there is something to be salvaged from Mitt Romney's address to the NAACP. As all politicians do, across divides of party, he stuck to the approved narrative. Here, Mitt Romney recycled the typical Republican "free market" enterprise talking points about creating an "opportunity" society, using capitalist incentives to fix "broken schools," and how he would unleash "productivity" in America--as opposed to that Karl Marx wannabe corporatist Barack Obama who has brought taxes down to historically low levels.

Romney, and the Republican party's efforts to win over black voters (and people of color more generally), adheres to a tired game plan. The Tea Party GOP is infected by a type of Ayn Randian vision. This Galtian worldview of "surplus people" who deserve their fate is now a core principle of the Republican Party. Greed is good; positive liberty and the social safety net are sins. The "job providers" must be protected at all costs. The Common Good is to be damned.

Mitt Romney's proposals are a reflection of this cut throat, one against all, ethos.

The fact that Romney is offering up this vision to the NAACP is a teachable moment, what is an opportunity to discuss race, libertarianism, and Ayn Rand's political ideology.

As we have discussed here on WARN, I have long asserted that libertarianism is a philosophy better suited for the children of the rich and privileged who advocate for its virtues of independence and self-reliance, all the while spending mommy and daddy's money, than as a workable political solution to serving the Common Good.

Sadly, the influence of libertarianism remain outsized.

Ayn Rand's books are afflicted on young people as a benchmark for being "educated" and "learned," because there are powerful monied interests who support the teaching of libertarianism philosophy in our public schools and universities. 


Ironically, most students never get through her horrendous texts--and I would double down that most instructors have not either. A fact not to be overlooked, Ayn Rand herself was a hypocrite of the first order (perhaps not as bad as Ron Paul who cashes his Social Security checks) that lived out her final days on the public dole and on the government tit.

I would argue that the politicians who channel Ayn Rand's worldview are not much better than most high school or undergrad students: they recycle the talking points and have little understanding of the core substance underneath them.

Mitt Romney played that game today as well, as he stood before the NAACP, and tried to sell libertarianism to an African American audience who knew better. Libertarianism, while espousing "personal freedom," fails mightily in understanding how the rhetoric of "liberty," "freedom," and "the free market" was used to enforce white supremacy, and to historically disadvantage people of color in the United States.

Ayn Rand penned an essay on the race question and libertarianism which is well worth reading in its entirety here. Decades later it is eerily similar to how conservatives think about the relationship between white racism, the State, and black and brown communities in the present. As Romney offered up before the NAACP, all of Ayn Rand's talking points are present in the contemporary, "colorblind," "post racial" discourse of Republicans, specifically, and conservatives, more generally.

In the following quote, there is an odd mix of blaming the victim, extolling the virtues of the market, and condemning the most ugly forms of racism (while protecting the "freedom" of whites to discriminate against racial minorities).

Also, Ayn Rand, like the conservatives who are inspired by her, creates a false equivalency between the sin of white racism and those efforts to ameliorate and/or protect oppressed peoples from racial tyranny

From the essay Racism by Ayn Rand:

It is true that the Federal government has used the racial issue to enlarge its own power and to set a precedent of encroachment upon the legitimate rights of the states, in an unnecessary and unconstitutional manner. But this merely means that both governments are wrong; it does not excuse the policy of the Southern racists.

One of the worst contradictions, in this context, is the stand of many so-called "conservatives" (not confined exclusively to the South) who claim to be defenders of freedom, of capitalism, of property rights, of the Constitution, yet who advocate racism at the same time. They do not seem to possess enough concern with principles to realize tht they are cutting the ground from under their own feet. Men who deny individual rights cannot claim, defend or uphold any rights whatsoever. 

It is such alleged champions of capitalism who are helping to discredit and destroy it.The "liberals" are guilty of the same contradiction, but in a different form. They advocate the sacrifice of all individual rights to unlimited majority rule -- yet posture as defenders of the rights of minorities. But the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. 

This accumulation of contradictions, of short-sighted pragmatism, of cynical contempt for principles, of outrageous irrationality, has now reached its climax in the new demands of the Negro leaders. Instead of fighting against racial discrimination, they are demanding that racial discrimination be legalized and enforced. Instead of fighting against racism, they are demanding the establishment of racial quotas. Instead of fighting for "color-blindness" in social and economic issues, they are proclaiming that "color-blindness" is evil and that "color" should be made a primary consideration. Instead of fighting for equal rights, they are demanding special race privileges... 

It does not merely demand special privileges on racial grounds -- it demands that white men be penalized for the sins of their ancestors. It demands that a white laborer be refused a job because his grandfather may have practiced racial discrimination. But perhaps his grandfather had not practiced it. Or perhaps his grandfather had not even lived in this country. Since these questions are not to be considered, it means that that white laborer is to be charged with collective racial guilt, the guilt consisting merely of the color of his skin. 

But that is the principle of the worst Southern racist who charges all Negroes with collective racial guilt for any crime committed by an individual Negro, and who treats them all as inferiors on the ground that their ancestors were savages. 

The only comment one can make about demands of that kind is, "By what right? -- By what code? -- By what standard?"

Am I wrong to suspect that Mitt Romney is deeply familiar with this script? How do you all reconcile libertarianism and the "race problem?"