The 1960s rise from the grave

Ramesh Ponnuru has an excellent article about libertarians and the Civil Rights Act in the current issue of the National Review. (Log-in required). Read this then read the whole thing:

Civil rights are a problem for the American Right: a political problem, an intellectual one, a moral one. In the civil-rights debates of the 1950s and 1960s, many conservatives — including William F. Buckley Jr., other figures associated with this magazine, and Sen. Barry Goldwater — took positions that the vast majority of conservatives now reject. Most contemporary conservatives who know this history regret it and find it embarrassing…

[Rand] Paul’s views on the Civil Rights Act cannot simply be treated as an irrelevancy because it is 2010. He is running largely on the basis of his adherence to a political philosophy. He means to confine the federal government to what he regards as its proper constitutional dimensions. Voters may reasonably conclude that a political philosophy that places such strict limits on government that it cannot ban racial discrimination in circumstances such as those of the South in the mid-1960s is defective…

It was entirely reasonable for a constitutionally conscientious legislator to conclude that the only way for Congress to enforce the guarantee that states offer equal protection to all citizens was to uproot the whole system: Force the states to allow blacks to vote; require hotels and theaters to treat customers without regard to race; ban employers from considering race as well; end every part of the system that could be ended.

Segregation was a far greater offense to personal liberty and constitutional principles than the measures required too end.