Political Hypocrisy and Civil Rights

Last week, my brother and I squabbled via e-mail. I had held up the mirror of political hypocrisy in the form of an opinion piece from the National Review that I shared on Facebook. My brother caught his own reflection, which surprised me, and complained. I called him on it, he took offense, and we were off to the races.

Ironically, I had originally withheld my own comments precisely to avoid offending anyone. You see, if I simply tell someone that he’s wrong, then I’m being insulting, but if I instead try to let him see his own mistakes, then I apparently look condescending … or so I’ve been told. What rhetorical device can I use to make my point without risk of offending or worse yet being ignored?

However, since this will be ignored anyway, I may as well expound on the issue, since I already did most of the work for my brother’s benefit. My words will be out here in the wilderness at least.

Now, the point of the National Review piece was about hypocrisy in the treatment of civil rights, namely conflicting support or defense for discouraging the right to arms through gun-control laws and discouraging the right to vote through voter-authentication laws. If restrictions are justified on one of these to avoid certain perceived harms, then they must also be justified on the other to avoid its perceived harms. Put simply, it is hypocritical to insist on unfettered exercise of one right that may cause harm but demand restrictions on another right that may also cause harm.

My brother, of course, simply denied the equivalency, which is what disappointed me and angered him. After all, guns are bad, right? They’re just used to murder people. But votes are good. They’re used to help poor people get welfare benefits and affordable health care. Never mind that votes have been responsible for far more murders than have privately held firearms.…

I contend that the issues are very much equivalent in that important and/or fundamental civil rights are implicated in both examples. In fact, the methodologies of restriction are eerily similar, so I would argue that the voter-authentication efforts have been informed by the history of gun-control legislation. The next step might be to require background checks prior to each election, since felons are also prohibited from voting.

I could make a case for why the electoral franchise is too widely available, but that isn’t my point here and implicates too many other tangential issues. For the sake of this argument, I accept that voter disenfranchisement is a bad thing, assuming that easy access to ballots correlates to increased rates of voter fraud no more than easy availability of firearms correlates to increased rates of murder. In other words, let’s assume that there is no real problem for voter-authentication laws to solve.

I recognize these voter-authentication laws for what they really are (just like I recognize gun-control laws for what they really are). Though I could make a good-faith argument that these laws are wise and benevolent and not disenfranchising at all—like a right to arms limited just to your own home, you aren’t really disenfranchised as long as you can still vote between 1:30pm and 2:00pm in the state capital on election day—I suspect that they are less about preventing electoral fraud than they are about discouraging casual voters. Casual voters are the only group who will respond to get-out-the-vote drives, so these laws will undercut the effectiveness of such drives and thus threaten the political power of the party that most relies upon them.

I’ve seen with my own eyes just how easy electoral fraud can be, but I will oppose these voter-authentication laws and support the inevitable legal challenges. Assuming the laws are eventually stricken, the resulting jurisprudence can be used against very similar gun-control laws. In the same manner, again assuming victory for the pro-rights argument, the jurisprudence that results from the ongoing right-to-arms litigation will eventually be used to protect and expand other civil rights. What weakens one weakens all, and what strengthens one strengthens all.

And this is why I wish that I could win “liberals” over on the right to arms and “conservatives” over on private morality issues, but if I can’t convince my own brother of the importance and interdependence of all civil rights, then whom can I convince?

Of Family and Political Philosophies

I was asked how my brother and I ended up with such differing political views. It was a pointed question that deserved a considered answer. I will pour myself another drink and answer it again here.

I would describe my brother as a highly intelligent modern “liberal.” He has intentions as noble as anyone’s and may not be as ideologically inconsistent as most, but his consistency is at least soft, and I suspect that he can be swayed fairly easily by appeals to “social justice” or political utilitarianism. He studied computer science and now works in the well-paid programming field—when he can.

Our father is a self-described bleeding-heart liberal and was born to working-class parents who came of age during the labor movement. He would even consider himself a communist at times, but in practice, I find him to be a garden-variety Keynesian—which would be perfectly reasonable in a fiscally responsible regime. He studied engineering and followed his father into the trades as a machinist. He has been a modestly successful small businessman, weathering the ups and downs of the industrial economy in southern California.

Our mother has wandered more both politically and geographically, but she has trended slightly more “conservative” throughout the years. She wanted nothing more than to be a wife and mother but found herself a single parent working at low-paying clerical jobs. She eventually left the crowded, regimented world of suburban California for the open, semi-rural environment of Cache Valley in Utah.

I can be described as a libertarian or as a classical liberal, someone who advocates equality before the law and individual freedom for all. In fact, I would make a better communist than my father, but I keep my communism in storage next to my perpetual-motion machine. I studied history, wherein I discovered that humanity has not changed at all in the last 20,000 years, despite the historical chauvinism that visits every new generation. I have also worked in academia for almost two decades now, so I’ve had plenty of opportunities to see the dark side of the ivory towers.

My parents taught me to be financially responsible and to respect others. Why those qualities should be expected of an individual but not of the governments constituted by individuals at large, I cannot say. However, it is that fundamental hypocrisy that irks me so.

It took me 30 years, but I ultimately confronted and rejected utilitarianism. Until then, I was surely as self-important and chauvinistic as anyone. I made a very conscious decision on that day in September. The ends do not justify the means. My previous worldview was destroyed utterly, and my grief is still as raw and primal as ever, but I am a better and more moral man for it—shamed and humbled though I may be.

Philosophically and morally, that decision left me with only one ideologically consistent path to follow. I would like to think that, when shown the same historical facts, any intelligent person would reach the same conclusions, but that is simply not the case. Utilitarianism is an incredibly seductive philosophy, appearing to offer the collective power to do great good—though the underlying causes of various social problems are often misunderstood—and too few will look beyond that promise to see that it can also be used to justify great evil. Indeed, regimes that I would die fighting have accomplished very great things.

I could say more, namely about the moral courage required to allow others to fail, but I think that I’ve answered the question. Different political philosophies are valid and have been proven so by their historical success, but that doesn’t make them necessarily moral. I chose objective morality for its own sake—or perhaps because the alternatives too horrified me. Everything else is mere detail.