New Agenda

 

I receive subscribed-to online email updates from Chris Rufo. I will quote what he wrote and then comment on it. He sent me one on 1/19/2024, entitled: “A New Civil Rights Agenda—The only hope for a diverse nation is a regime of colorblind equality.”

 

My response: The only hope for a diverse nation is a regime of colorblind equality. What people’s group associations are is mostly irrelevant: what is most diverse and respectful of individuals is their individual identity, their individual rights, so they are treated with colorblind equality based on merit, nothing else. That must be our new Civil Rights Agenda.

 

Rufo (R after this): “This year’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was marked by contentious debate about the state of civil rights law in America.

 

On the left, as always, the failure to achieve equal outcomes along racial lines requires greater state intervention.”

 

My response: We must accept the incontrovertible fact that America’s most promising future is linked to self-realization, high-end anarchism and generating a generation of supercitizens. Worrying about equality of outcomes is antithetical to allowing each individuators maximum legal freedom to work out the possibilities for her with her unique abilities and talents.

 

This cannot be realized with growth of the state and greater state intervention in the economy and in private lives; all that is so forbidden and passe. Sorry Marxists.

 

R: “On the right, a different critique has gained traction, most notably in Christopher Caldwell’s Age of Entitlement and Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke, books arguing that American civil rights law has metastasized into a ‘second Constitution; that has led inexorably to left-wing radicalism as the nation’s new orthodoxy.

 

This critique has merit. The modern civil rights movement has assumed unprecedented power to reshape public and private life, regulating not only instances of outright discrimination but also the minutiae of thought, behavior, speech, and association. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 appealed to the noble principle of equality, but over time the legal structure that it helped establish has metamorphized into an ‘intrusive ‘diversity and inclusion’ bureaucracy that discriminates against supposed ‘oppressor groups—namely whites and Asians—and imposes left-wing ideology.”

 

My response: We only are a society of individuals, and group affiliation must be no legal discriminatory importance. Only each citizen, as an individual, must be granted legal protection against favorable or disfavorable, unlawful discrimination. We must end this persecution of white and Asians in the name of left-wing ideology.

 

R: “The question is what to do about it. Libertarians have long argued that the Civil Rights Act compromises cored freedoms of speech and association to such a degree that only repealing the law can restore them. Another faction argues that the solution to minoritarian identity politics is majoritarian identity politics—that is, if the legal regime has become a racial spoils system, then Americans of European descent must develop ‘white racial consciousness’ and fight for their share.”

 

My response: No, keep the Civil Rights acts but send it back to what it was to be used for, guaranteeing equality of the law under the law, equal opportunity for all, and promoting a colorblind society. We must firmly reject majoritarian and minoritarian identity politics whose ideologues spread discriminatory racial preference, in the name of group rights. Only the rights of individuals with individual rights, and the practice of individual identity politics is constitutional or tolerable.

 

R: “Both these approaches are misguided. Some conservatives seem to have forgotten that the Civil Rights Act was a response to state-sanctioned racial injustice in the United States, and that, at its best, the civil rights movement appealed to the ideal of the Declaration of Independence and the language of the Fourteenth Amendment. The libertarian proposal for abolishing the Civil Rights Act, like most libertarian proposals, is unfeasible. The white identity proposal, which I have previously criticized, is a recipe for permanent racial division, more akin to ‘prison gang politics’ than republican virtue.”

 

My response: Rufo’s rejection to both liberation reaction and white majoritarian thinking to the excesses of the woke that have perverted the intent of the Civil Rights act seems logical and constitutional to me. His solution below is the way to go.

 

R: “Happily, another is open to us: reform. The ideological capture of the Civil Rights Act  is neither fixed or inevitable. Rather than argue for its abolition, Americans concerned over the excesses of the DEI bureaucracy should appeal to higher principles and demand that our civil rights law conform to the standard of colorblind equality.”

 

My response: The civil rights law must be reformed as Rufo recommends as the conforming to the standard of colorblind equality, and this is the standard of individual rights, individual identity, as the nation is populated by 330 minorities, all one person in numberf or legal, discrimination consideration: any group status, oppressor or oppressed, haves or have nots, white or non-white, have no legal standing whatsoever and will not be used going forth to assess equality or inequality under the law.

 

R: “The answer to left-wing racialism is not right-wing racialism—it is the equal treatment of individuals under the law, according to their talents and virtues, rather than their ancestry or anatomy. This policy does not require radical innovations. Embracing the philosophy of the American Founding—with its emphasis on natural rights and liberties—will suffice.”

 

My response: Well said; I concur.

 

R: “What would this new civil rights agenda look like in practice? First, reformers should outlaw affirmative action and racial preference of any kind.”

 

My response: We must go that far and farther: henceforth, we must outlaw group affirmative action and preferences of any kind, ever. We do not want government power and bureaucracies using state power to put any individual or group above or below any other individual or group for reasons of being bigoted and unjust, or by affirming one ‘oppressed’ group over another in the name of justice or righting wrong.

 

We want pure equality only under the law: all are individuals with equal rights, but not outcome guarantees, and we will regard them with colorblind orientedness, and all that will matter is judging them by the content of their character and the merit of their prior performance.

 

R: “Both policies are euphemisms of racial discrimination. The next President should rescind Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Executive Order 11246, which established ‘affirmative action’ and marked the initial deviation from the standard of colorblind equality. Congress should strengthen this principle by amending the language of the Civil Right Act to make indisputably clear that the law will not permit state-sanctioned discrimination toward any racial group whether in the majority or the minority.

 

Second, reformers must eliminate the ‘disparate impact’ provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and overturn Griggs v. Duke Power Co., both of which have entrenched the doctrine of disparate group outcomes are de facto evidence of racial discrimination.”

 

My response: The State must not longer discriminate for or against any racial group, or any other kind of intersectionally identified group, and the doctrine of disparate group outcomes must be overturned.

 

R: “This is a preposterous standard: a system of equal rights necessarily means unequal outcomes, as different groups have different preferences, talents and capacities.”

 

My response: not just different groups of individuals but all individuals populating any group, each has different, unique, preferences, talents and capacities, but all as individuators need liberty from blocking them to have equal opportunity, but, beyond that point, all are and should be on their own, to self-realize and work hard with applied personal industry, ingenuity and consistency to prosper over time. It is the individual’s responsibility to make his living, and it is his blame if he does not. There are disabled people and mentally ill people that are a limited exception to this rule, but we can just give them some welfare subsistence living, and they can use their ingenuity to make money beyond that point.

 

I want Rufo and legal experts denouncing group legal discrimination, as an unconstitutional, illegal mode of anti-individualistic colorblindness in treatment under the law, to make sure the law does not favor anyone from any group—no group rights—but that there will be constitutional protections for each individual suffering from criminal, legal or economic discriminations from groupists or other individuals, in their school, workplace, community, house of worship or in government employment.

 

R: “Under a just system, the criterion for assessing biased treatment would not be disparate outcomes, but specific, concrete discrimination, driven by animus. Much as libel law requires actual malice, anti-discrimination law should require proof that an individual or institution sought to discriminate. The change in standard would have immediate effect, reducing the number of frivolous lawsuits and changing the incentives that have driven institutions toward racialist ideology as a defensive strategy.

 

Third, legislators should abolish the DEI bureaucracies in all American institutions, which openly discriminate against disfavored racial groups, impose ideological orthodoxies on American citizens, and restrict freedoms of speech and association.”

 

My response: Legislators should abolish DEI bureaucracies from all American institutions, disallowing favoring, or disfavoring anyone from any group, or any individual or individuals being favored or disfavored by hostile groups or other individuals.

 

Legislators can also work to protect radical free speech (while retaining the reasonable free speech exceptions of defamation, yelling fire in a crowded theater, or violently agitating online or in the street to overthrow the government, to kill police officers or assassinate and terrorize government officials) and radical free association.

 

R: “In addition, federal legislators should radically reduce the size of federal government departments of civil rights enforcement. Bureaucracies are designed to discover—or, if the supply is low, fabricate—whatever the transgression they are tasked with eliminating. While a large civil rights enforcement apparatus may have been necessary to enforce non-discrimination law in the past, it is no longer necessary. Americans are a tolerant, cooperative people; a ‘night watchman’ civil rights state and a competent court system should be sufficient to resolve disputes and ensure compliance with the law.”

 

My response: Dennis Prager always announces that America is the least racist, multi-ethnic country in the world, and this is what Rufo is seconding when he describes accurately and objectively that Americans are a tolerant, cooperative people. He is brilliant and insightful in urging that a ‘night watchman’ civil rights state and a competent court system should be sufficient to resolve disputes and ensure compliance with the law.

 

I would add some recommendations. Once we rear up a generation of moral agents, exceptional/unaverage, average citizens that transform themselves of their own free will and have much improved and enhanced their personal, utilized, fabulous abilities, maturing as anarchist (close to being a minarchist, night-watchman state, yet still a federal system, our free-market constitutional republic with citizens privately armed to the teeth)-individuator supercitizens, these hyper-individualists will be so smart, so skeptical of authority yet living as law-abiding citizens who will obey the minimum, reasonable, necessary laws they have made through their legislators, so courageous and unwilling to accept authoritarianism of any kind (and morally horrified,  deeply repulsed and angered by the possibility of exploiting, abusing, tyrannizing or enslaving any other human being), that these supercitizens will do and endure absolutely no discrimination against any group (legally, morally or socially) or individual in favor or disfavor of anyone.

 

Their private self-control will make discriminating of all kinds a historical memory only. When individuating supercitizens, motivated by a love of the Good Spirits and the good deities, and practicing egoist-altruist ethics, there will be little need for federal discrimination, additional-lawmaking or grow departments of investigation and enforcement.

 

R: “The goal of these reforms is finally to realize a regime of full colorblind equality. The principle, first promised by the Declaration and supported today by a large majority of Americans, would mean that the state would treat all Americans equally, regardless of ancestry, and leave as much discretion as possible to individuals to determine their own futures, without the government imposing or requiring racial favoritism of any kind. Rather than pit ourselves against one another, we should aspire to a higher standard that subordinates racial faction to a broader nation identity.”

 

My response: Rufo is eloquent here. The higher standard to aim for and bring about is to insist that not only racial faction but any group-rights or group-identity factions be without legal standing. Only individual-identity and individual-rights should have legal standing and individual identity as hundreds of millions of happy, thriving American adult individuating supercitizens present an civilized archetype for broad national and international identity to lift millions and perhaps billions out of the legal quagmire of groupist favoritism for and against rival factions.

 

R: “Americans do not have to accept the bigotries of the past or present. In a vast and diverse country, colorblind equality is the only way forward.