1. These companies have every right to legally censor those they disagree with.
2. By exercising that right they put themselves at risk of being regulated more stringently (as utilities for example) when they demonstrate inelasticity in consumer choice.
3. I'd rather them not be treated as utilities because that hampers competition and thus impedes efficiency.
4. Your statement above is a farcical caricature of conservative ideology. Every product/service deserves a debate on what regulation is appropriate but as a society regulation only exists because bad actors necessitated its creation. No one wants car seats for their 8 year olds - we'd much rather be trusted to do the right thing.
The quote was made by a different Frank Wilhoit on the Crooked Timber blog / community.
Investigative work here: https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1183470106816331776
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit
The quote you're referring to is from a comment on a web page left in 2018:
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
The name in the comment links to his site:
He's a music composer.
But I'm not knowledgeable about history, so do elaborate if you know details please.
The Girondists were considered right only because Jacobins were super left and ended up killing thousands of priests, what few nobles they could still find, tens of thousands of suspected royalists in mass executions, and eventually the Girondists themselves too for being too soft. The Girondists went to the guillotine singing The Marseilles! Certainly not the royalists that lot.
I recommend the “Revolutions” podcast - about 30 hours worth of the French Revolution is better than any movie.
Also the history of revolutions is very educational in this day and age. I for one hope we will never experience anything like it.
You don’t know what the term “protected class” means, and you should probably stop using it.
“Woman” isn’t a protected class, “sex” is. “Christian” isn’t a protected class, “religion” is.
Veteran status and age over 40 are notable examples; you are absolutely permitted to discriminate against non-veterans and against people under 40.
Many accusations of hypocrisy boil down to just that - different people with different opinions treated by the outsiders as a homogenous group.
Even in 1976, Carter won with the traditional new deal coalition of southerners and northeast progressives. He won South Carolina by the same margin as Massachusetts. Even in 1980 against Reagan, Carter performed much closer to Reagan in the south than his overall national performance (outright winning Georgia, but coming close in most southern states).
The current alignment of southern states with Republicans really dates to the late 1980s to early 1990s, when Republicans started flipping Senate seats in the south.
Pinning this on Democrats’ support for the Civil Rights Act two decades before is one theory, but another is the industrialization of the southern economy. Southern New Deal Democrats represented agricultural states against protectionist northern industrial interests. But look at the economy of places like Georgia and Tennessee today. They’re built on low taxes and low regulation to draw companies away from high tax high regulation northern states. That started happening in the 1980s. Georgia is a really archetypal example of this: it’s probably the most openly pro-business big city in the country, and has a famously cooperative relationship between Atlanta Democratic mayors and Georgia Republican governors centered around attracting companies from places like New York: https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/with...
It is no more reasonable to say that Democrats were staunch opponents of civil rights into the 1960s (Truman integrated the military!) than it is to say that Republicans were religious conservatives. Southern Democrats opposed civil rights, and Northern Republicans were New Deal economic populists.
I did the (probably pointless) exercise a few years ago of reading the GOP party platform documents from 1972 through 2012, tagging each with specific issues like "block grant benefits to states" or "oppose campaign finance restrictions". I don't believe for a moment that these documents are representative of the real party, but it's interesting that you can watch the GOP's position change so clearly over time. Into the late 1970s, the GOP was open to abortion!
The parties have held relatively coherent positions since the 1980s; I think when people talk about the roles the parties have had in US history, as opposed to specific politicians, we should probably limit ourself to the parties of Reagan and Mondale and their successors.
Republicans had been trying to win southern whites since the turn of the 20th century. That caused a large number of African Americans to abandon the party. They started voting overwhelmingly Democrat in 1936.
But the Democratic Party didn't support the Civil Rights Act until 1964. And the south remained solidly Democratic well into the 1980s, outside of Presidential contests. Many completely white rural southern counties voted for Carter and Clinton. What explains that timeline?
You have to look at the economics and the law. FDR's Democratic Party was recognizably modern: technocratic, and proponents of the administrative state, regulation, and economic redistribution. Southern whites stayed in this coalition because the south was poor and agrarian, and had interests averse to those of northern businesses. New Deal programs were instrumental in industrializing the southern economy: https://siepr.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/.... In 1930, the southeast was the poorest region, with half the national average income. By 1970, the gap had closed dramatically, to 80%. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/comparing-wealth-u-s-geogra...
The Republican Party, meanwhile, continued to be a small-government, anti-regulation party during this time. Goldwater tried to win the south by opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on small-government grounds, and while that worked in a few deep-south states, he lost every normally Republican state except Arizona.
By the time Reagan came along, a couple of things had changed:
1) The south's economy had dramatically industrialized, creating prosperous suburbs of the kind Reagan won all over the country.
2) The legal debate over the Civil Rights Act had long since been replaced by debates over affirmative action. The 1980 Republican Platform reflects this:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-p... ("However, equal opportunity should not be jeopardized by bureaucratic regulations and decisions which rely on quotas, ratios, and numerical requirements to exclude some individuals in favor of others, thereby rendering such regulations and decisions inherently discriminatory.").
With the illegality of de jure discrimination settled by Brown v. Board, and commercial discrimination settled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the debate shifted to addressing what we'd call today "structural racism." And on that point, the Reagan platform reflects the same limited-government Republican ideology that existed since before Hoover. And Democrats' support for government intervention and affirmative action reflected their broader 20th century ideology as well.
FWIW, I happen to side with Democrats on this one, at least with respect to economic interventions. But the parties have more or less the positions you’d expect ideologically.
There is a good book that covers this: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133898/th.... It gives a similar but slightly more nuanced take than Pearlstein, which I don't think is wrong, just incomplete and a bit misleading.
1) Goldwater’s landslide loss in 1964, winning no Republican states other than his own, proved that opposing the civil rights act of 1964 wasn’t tenable for either party. It’s not like Democrats could have beat Reagan had they opposed it. They would have lost their northern base, just as Goldwater lost the Republican base in 1964.
It’s one factor in the detachment of the south from the Democratic Party, but that detachment had been a long time coming due to economic changes.
2) By 1980, the debate shifted to affirmative action and quotas, where Republicans had a longstanding ideological basis for opposing government intervention.
https://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/phillips-souther...
(Similarly, I think you've collapsed the GOP of the 60s too far down; the Rockefeller Republicans were, on domestic policy, square in the middle of where the mainstream Democratic party is today. George Romney would have opposed AOC, but so does Gina Raimondo.)
At any rate, when people debate which is the "racist" party, they almost invariably ignore the fact that the US was a 4-party polity in the mid-century, not a 2-party polity. What's changed since then is that we have, from 1980 through today, sorted down to 2.
Goldwater offered a libertarian justification for allowing the south to continue segregation. And what did that get him? He flipped five Deep South states, at the expense of losing every traditionally Republican state Nixon had won in 1960, with the exception of Arizona. Goldwater lost stalwart Republican states in the Great Plains and Mountain West, like Colorado, that had voted against FDR three out of four times. Supporting segregation was a political loser for Republicans.
Nixon and Reagan did not "run the same strategy." Neither supported segregation. They didn't have to. Democrats, having abandoned their segregationist wing, sought far-reaching government programs and social engineering to remedy economic and social disparities, as Democrats are wont to do. Nixon and Reagan pushed back on those policies, entirely consistent with Republican ideology.
This article does a good job explaining what really happened: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-myth-of-the-racist-re...
> The evidence suggests that the GOP advanced in the South because it attracted much the same upwardly mobile (and non-union) economic and religious conservatives that it did elsewhere in the country.
> Buckley used the pages of National Review to promote a ‘fusionism’ of sorts between paleo-conservatives, neo-conservatives, tea-party enthusiasts, the deeply religious, libertarians, social conservatives and free-marketeers.
Particularly since Trump, a lot of the base is now economically moderate or even liberal, but socially conservative. The social conservatives are the ones who are most worried about the social liberals having increased power over online media platforms.
Apart from that, the deregulatory conservatives don’t believe that criticizing some practice of private business means going further to impose government regulation. To them, there is a role for self regulation. And the social conservatives and traditional conservatives don’t care about using the power of government for perceived proper ends at all. They are quite mad, in fact, at the limited government conservatives for giving up so much ground on things like healthcare and unions over those issues.
Plus, certain behaviours are in the interests of specific businesses but damaging to free competition as a whole: monopolies, censorship, etc.
The political scientist and author Frank Wilhoit talked about it in his works:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.