{"id":42383,"date":"2018-02-23T05:00:35","date_gmt":"2018-02-23T10:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=42383"},"modified":"2020-08-07T09:42:18","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T13:42:18","slug":"timothy-sandefurs-frederick-douglass-self-made-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/02\/23\/timothy-sandefurs-frederick-douglass-self-made-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Timothy Sandefur\u2019s Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Bean<\/a> responds to a negative review of Sandefur’s new biography in the New York Times<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"\"Frederick Douglass, whose bicentennial birthday fell on Valentine\u2019s Day, is one of the great figures in American history, a hero whose legacy is celebrated even by those who might otherwise contest his actual ideas.<\/p>\n

Illustrating this truth, the New York Times<\/em> marked the occasion by publishing a largely negative review<\/a> of Timothy Sandefur\u2019s new biography, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man<\/em> \u2014 a book that depicts the African-American ex-slave and social reformer as a classical liberal who championed individual liberty based upon natural rights, self-reliance, and Rule of Law.<\/p>\n

The book reviewer, Yale University historian David W. Blight, criticizes Sandefur and other \u201cconservatives\u201d for \u201cco-opting\u201d Douglass. (Sandefur is a self-described libertarian, but in Blight\u2019s mind, \u2018libertarian\u2019 and \u2018conservative\u2019 are distinctions without a difference.) In making this complaint, Blight demonstrates his confusion as to the meaning of \u201cthe Right\u201d and classical liberalism.<\/p>\n

Blight concedes that Douglass was a \u201cradical thinker and a proponent of classic 19th-century political liberalism\u201d who \u201cloved the Declaration of Independence\u201d and \u201cthe natural-rights tradition.\u201d On these issues, Blight\u2019s view is consistent with Sandefur\u2019s libertarian interpretation of Douglass.<\/p>\n

Yet, Blight goes on to protest that the libertarians (or conservatives \u2014 he conflates the two groups) are wrong to co-opt Douglass because the great abolitionist \u201cbelieved that freedom was safe only with the state and under law.\u201d<\/p>\n

But this view of freedom\u2019s security is not one that libertarians would dispute. To say otherwise is to make a classic straw man argument<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Blight\u2019s review gets two things about political classification especially wrong. First, classical liberalism is neither Left nor Right. Throughout history, classical liberals have extolled \u201cunalienable Rights,\u201d individual freedom from government control, the U.S. Constitution as a guarantor of freedom, color-blind law, and capitalism. These values distinguish classical liberalism from left-wing liberalism, with its emphasis on group rights, equality of outcomes, and hostility to free-market capitalism. They also put classical liberals squarely in opposition to nativists and white supremacists who used the law as a weapon to exclude \u201cundesirable\u201d immigrants or separate the races in the American South.<\/p>\n

Second, \u201clibertarianism\u201d \u2014 the modern descendant of classical liberalism \u2014 is not and never has been a \u201cdo-nothing\u201d philosophy. Classic liberals (or libertarians) were activists for abolishing slavery, eradicating segregation, defending immigrants\u2019 rights, passing anti-lynching measures, and much more. Indeed, although they recognized the role that law played in protecting the exercise of liberty, it was the law that so often violated the inalienable rights of Americans. Classical liberals fought slavery, segregation, pernicious immigration quotas, internment, and \u201caffirmative action\u201d because these government measures denied individuals equal protection of the law.<\/p>\n

Blight\u2019s conceptual errors may account for why he sometimes badly misreads his subject. He claims, for example, that Douglass loved \u201cthe reinvented Constitution \u2014 the one rewritten in Washington during Reconstruction, not the one created in Philadelphia in 1789.\u201d This is a gross mischaracterization of Douglass\u2019s views.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Bean responds to a negative review of Sandefur’s new biography in the New York Times: Frederick Douglass, whose bicentennial birthday fell on Valentine\u2019s Day, is one of the great figures in American history, a hero whose legacy is celebrated even by those who might otherwise contest his actual ideas. Illustrating this truth, the New […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,7,10,13],"tags":[1391,431,86,550,605],"class_list":["post-42383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-liberty","category-usa","tag-biography","tag-conservatism","tag-criticism","tag-libertarianism","tag-slavery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-b1B","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42383"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59401,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42383\/revisions\/59401"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}