A White Libertarian on Martin Luther King

It’s MLK Day. The mail doesn’t run, the stock market and banks are closed—and oh yes—schools too. But no fireworks, beer or gift giving. There won’t even be any mattress sales. But there will be some tribute breakfasts—Mimosas will not be available at any of them. But “We Shall Overcome” will be in the air.

Part of the problem with the day is Martin Luther King has not been dead long enough. No one is quite sure how to make him into a unifying mythological figure. There are few people anymore who will openly argue that Dr. King is not deserving of Secular Sainthood. However, Americans are not good with Saints until they grow long white beards, become jolly, dress in red felt and get fat.

But with Martin Luther King we must be very respectful and oh so serious. In fact any criticism leads to accusations of racism and fascism. However, that is understandable. Though it is good for historians to delve into what made the man tick, and his place in the civil rights movement, it is not useful in the morph to holiday icon. I have yet to hear the suggestion that Santa Claus may be a pedophile.

I don’t really care about the plagiarism or womanizing. The blood of assassination should wash all that away. After all, if there was space, John Kennedy would be enshrined on Mount Rushmore.

And though it is hard for both the Left and the Right to do, I think it would be best if we had collective amnesia on the advocacy of democratic socialism, antagonism toward the free market, consorting with communists and what is sometimes called the privilege agenda.

But what is real irksome is any attempt to make him into a warm, soft cuddly lover of universal freedom. That demeans the man, the civil rights movement and the whole sorry history of America with the “peculiar institution.” Although it is hard to realize in the day of hip hop, MLK proved once and for all that African-Americans were not happy dancing folk—just as Betty Friedman dispelled the myth of the happy housewife.

Dr. King, put the libertarian principle of nullification into action. Where laws are evil the people have a right not to obey those laws. And that is as American as apple pie. Remember that thing in the Declaration of Independence about the people’s right to remove a government when it becomes unjust. The Declaration’s ghostwriter put it more elegantly when he wrote that revolutionaries must occasionally nourish the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants.

However, MLK did not advocate the spilling of blood—although some was necessarily shed in the revolution. He was a believer in the satyagraha principles of Mahatma Gandhi. And to some extent those did help the cause. But so did burn baby burn. And Ice Cube is an assist—though Oprah and Bill Cosby don’t understand it. It is hard to launder the dark stain on the Republic. Look—the bloodiest war in our history was only a start.

I think we can all join in celebrating the revolutionary in the man and the movement he was such an integral part of. But there are a couple of other aspects that still split us.

The civil rights movement became split between the socialist and the libertarian agenda. King tried to incorporate both. But that dichotomy is uncomfortable. As Lincoln said, on the eve of the Civil War, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

These can also be called the “rights” and “privilege” agendas. The civil rights movement started with a cry to remove state sponsored or sanctioned coercion of African-Americans. The federal and state governments openly legislated coercive discrimination against individuals or acquiesced in its private perpetuation. After the Emancipation Proclamation the new slavery was still institutional coercion. And the cry of the movement was “leave us alone.”

But that changed, and this is demonstrated in the life of Martin Luther King. While the labor union liberals fought for white privilege over blacks, the establishment Left and Communists reached out to African-Americans on civil-libertarian grounds, establishing a historical and emotional connection between protection of blacks’ liberties with state centralization and statist economic intervention. Instead of “leave us alone” they screamed “take care of us.”

Sadly, many conservatives abdicated their conscience and became irrelevant to the discussion. They found the matter of “states' rights” to be of greater importance than the denial of even the most basic rights to a large chunk of the individuals in our country.

Not that conservatives have not had pangs of guilt and reformed. There are those who note that MLK was an evangelical preacher. Some have argued, as preposterous as it is, that Dr. King was a Republican. But embracing the civil rights movement is an intellectual tenet of neoconservative thinking. Thus it was that John Silber, the neo-con president of Boston University, refused to take action on the degrees awarded to King, even though it was conclusively proven the dissertation was largely plagiarized.

I think if the stuff of failed economic theories and social experiments are discarded from the myth, as they have been, and continue to be in real life, an American mythological figure emerges.

We are then left with a man who confronted the hypocrisy so evident in the life of Jefferson, and put into real action the words he so engagingly penned.

Most every American can appreciate a guy like that.

Maybe even toss back a few beers in celebration of his life.