Politics and the Realms of Being: a Reply

...There is, consequently, no surer way to prevent acceptance of the principle of equal educational opportunity for the Negro in the South than to push the issue of miscegenation into the forefront at this time...

...For another, in the political as distinct from the philosophical arena, it is the wiser act of statesmanship to address oneself to the realm of the possible...

...Despite the nearly 100 years since the waging of the Civil War, many of the articulate spokesmen of the South have not progressed very far in their political thinking and their social attitudes...

...Miss ARENDT'S CONTEMPT for something she calls "the mob," her solicitude for "natural inequality," her concern for the values of diversity, lead her (incredibly) to advance an argument that sanctions the liberty to deny constitutional liberties, the liberty of whites to deny constitutional liberties to Negroes...

...V In her preliminary remarks, Miss Arendt avows her sympathy for the Negro and her abhorrence of racial discrimination...

...I would agree without cavil that laws prohibiting the intermarriage of peoples of different racial stocks are evil, and outrageously so...

...What desegregation requires is that the state shall not discriminate...

...Liberty is always social...

...Parents are still free to discriminate as well in other ways...

...To fight now, as a matter of first principle, for the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws is, I believe, to give strength to the very contention that is most frequently, and by all accounts most tellingly, employed by those who resist the repeal of segregation laws—namely, the contention that this is but a device to promote sexual intercourse among the races...

...And it is primarily the leaders of the state governments —e.g., Governor Almond and Senator Byrd of Virginia, Governor Griffin and Senator Russell of Georgia—who are most vociferous in opposing such desegregation, even where their view on this matter runs counter to the wishes of a significant, if not a major, portion of the white citizens of localities within their states...

...always they belong to, because they directly or indirectly affect, both the individual and society...

...and it would be curious, indeed, were Miss Arendt to argue (as I believe the logic of her position would require her to argue) that incest and the sexual relationship described in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, for example, are purely private matters...

...As rational men, we try to employ our power wisely...

...It is also a liability to the world...

...But federalism is also a principle that strives to unite people...

...It is clearly impossible to build a fence that can rationally divide human behavior into two compartments—one labeled social, the other individual...

...despite her repeated references to "human rights," her appeal is to the Constitution, which is a socially established standard)—the applications of political power can only be socially determined...

...I think it is time for us to recognize that a good portion of the American South has in fact seceded from the Union...

...In both cases the tyranny of the majority is seemingly involved...

...Law is often, in one sense perhaps always, a restraint...

...The conflict is rather one between national majority and national minority, and be...

...But a third point merits some attention...

...Now, I think it is not unfair to say that Miss Arendt is convinced that she knows better than the Negro people what is good for them...

...I believe the answer is, none...

...Even education and marriage, which Miss Arendt, along with Mill, offers as illustrations of such self-regarding acts, prove on the most cursory examination to be issues of social concern...

...No society permits its citizens the freedoms to steal, to maim, or to destroy other men through slander or physical violence...

...Miss Arendt's attempt to proliferate Mill's artificial and false division by providing for three spheres of action seems to me only to compound Mill's difficulty...

...There are dangers in excessive governmental control...

...Miss Arendt dismisses this desire by cavalierly observing that "oppressed minorities were never the best judges on the order of priorities in such matters...

...The problem of freedom, then, requires at the outset a reduction of liberty to a system of specific liberties and restraints, the latter entering to restrict those liberties which might otherwise impair the existence or free functioning of the liberties that are prized...

...But it is a shallow view of law which neglects to add that law is often a restraint on a restraint...

...but whether the dominant majority is actually tyrannical or not turns on whether it acts in accord with the principles of the Constitution or contrary to them...

...Is this provision observed when a state makes it a crime for Negroes and whites to sit together in public conveyances, or to play together in public playgrounds, or to attend even private schools together, when those Negroes and whites themselves want to do so...

...And if she admits that the community has a legitimate stake in the intellectual development of its citizens, on what ground can she maintain that the give-and-take among students, the exchange of ideas and attitudes and interests that is central to such associations, is not relevant to this concern...

...and, it must be added, that the state should not use its coercive powers to punish those of its white citizens who voluntarily wish to treat their Negro fellow-citizens equally...

...Both groups—national and state—are internally divided, and peculiarly so...

...But if this is true at all (which I doubt), it can only be so in that non-existent world where democratic equality is defined as absolute equality of condition...

...In all that I have said, I do not mean to be taken as implying any skepticism of this claim...

...Things are left free not because they don't affect society, but because society deems it socially advantageous for men in certain circumstances to be unrestrained...

...Then a conflict between them would pit two homogeneous groups against each other, with the triumph of the larger group quite possibly constituting that tyranny of the majority which the framers of the Constitution, and later Calhoun, so greatly feared and sought to forestall...

...And here, once again, we are plagued at the outset by Miss Arendt's perverse use of both these terms...

...Nevertheless, she does not question the superiority of her own practical judgment to the judgment of those who are themselves involved...

...But these are clearly different...

...and by reversing the order of things, indeed, by dragging in the idea of equality of condition at all, Miss Arendt distorts and obfuscates the issue...

...and what is common to them all, what constitutes their bond of unity, is the complex of values that is spelled out in the Constitution...

...In the silence of the national law, the constituent state is free to enact laws that restrain Negroes from enjoying their constitutional rights and liberties, and that restrain even private citizens from not discriminating against them...

...The Negroes, if not Miss Arendt, know this...

...However, this is precisely the sense in which Americans (and democrats generally) have always refused to define it...

...No doubt she could show that incest, at least, was not denied to the immediate descendants of Adam and Eve, or to Lot and his daughters...

...But liberty so conceived is precisely what no society can tolerate...

...No one, after all, seriously contends that what is pursued is absolute equality in all things—in talent, in wealth, in status, in power...

...the political and the private are at most distinguishable, but not separable, strands within the greater fabric...

...But what is frightening, in the years since Brown v. Board of Education, let alone the century since the Civil War, is that in seeking to be deliberate we have made very little speed...

...If we are to overcome this liability, we will require not merely the good will of gentle people but an unrelenting pursuit in all the realms of man's being—political, economic, intellectual—for the im...

...and often, too, a particular liberty (e.g., my liberty to join a labor union) is in conflict with another (e.g., my employer's liberty to dismiss me from my job for having exercised that freedom...

...Clearly there are none...

...No one argues that the democratic state (national or constituent) should compel its white citizens to treat its Negro citizens equally in all relationships at all times—to dine and dance and intermarry with them, for example—any more than it should compel any group of white citizens to treat other groups of white citizens in that way...

...I do not for a moment question her motives or intention...

...And what, in such terms, a democratic society giveth, such a society can (so long as it respects its own democratic principles) take away...

...It does not compel parents (white or Negro) to send their children to schools where they will be required to associate with children they (or their parents) do not like...

...they are intrinsically and inextricably a part of society...

...they have not advanced in their humanity...

...1Y Of Miss Arendt's other points, two—her insistence that racial problems are not restricted to the states of the American South and her indictment of Southern parents who force their children onto a battleground created and maintained but not always manned by the adults—are too obvious, and obviously correct, to require more than repetition here...

...A man who is drunk at home presents an altogether different problem from a man who is drunk while driving an automobile or while (as Mill suggests) on sentry duty...

...But the articulation of such general principles is the beginning, not the end, of political wisdom...

...we distinguish, we discriminate, between its beneficent and baneful applications...

...nor do they exist apart from society...

...but we seek that power for the potential good, not the evil, that its possession affords...

...More than 125 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville concluded the first volume of his Democracy in America by predicting that the great problem of the American future would be the reconciliation of the races...

...What Miss Arendt seems to miss here is that equality of opportunity, far from assuring equality of condition, is the indispensable principle for eliciting true inequality of condition...

...111 We return, accordingly, to the real issue in the struggle before us: the choice between two constitutional values—liberty and equality...

...It is also easy to derive as a corollary from this distinction certain liberties which the state must respect if such voluntary associations are to survivee...

...The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution provides that no state shall "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws...

...g., the liberties of speech and of political association requisite to the existence of political parties, or the liberty of religious worship necessary to the life of churches and synagogues...

...Is the law neutral when it places a double burden on those who seek desegregation, in that it forces such people both to win community support and to bring about a change in the law itself, whereas those who argue for continued segregation can pose as patriotic supporters of the law and have law both as physical coercion and as moral sanc tion on their side...

...We do not, therefore, legislate on all things...

...I do not know by what standard one can say that such laws constitute a greater or a lesser evil than many other laws which humiliate and debase people on the pretense that they are intrinsically inferior beings...

...A woRD MUST BE ADDED on Miss Arendt's specious idea of freedom...

...while the majority within the constituent states finds adherents only among a national minority...

...Societies have always established rules and imposed sanctions to govern sexual conduct and the promulgation and dissolution of marriages...

...11 Scarcely less crucial to Miss Arendt's argument is her quite superficial notion of federalism, from which she derives her peculiar defense of states' rights...

...This, of course, is closely akin to the argument of John Stuart Mill in his celebrated essay, On Liberty...

...And where this is actually done, as it is done in our Southern states today, national laws are required if some among our citizens are not to be thus arbitrarily and unconstitutionally deprived of their democratic rights and liberties...

...Where equality is properly viewed as equality of citizenship and of opportunity, and where the liberties necessary to such equalities—e.g., liberties of speech and of political association—are assured, difference is respected rather than denied...

...The political and the private are not distinct and separate entities...

...What is the political relevance of this ranking of issues...

...What is sought is a rational basis for such differences...

...Society is the web of all human relationships...

...There is the possibility that while we delay, private groups and state government will continue so to subvert those same bonds of community as to destroy the Union from within...

...We must choose between equality, a key value of the federation, and liberty, specifically the liberty to deny some citizens equality of educational opportunity...

...Miss Arendt is wise to remind us of the gravity and complexity of the problem...

...But suppose we grant, for the sake of her argument, that in the hierarchy of human values anti-miscegenation laws are of primary, and segregation laws are of secondary, importance...

...and it is often said impressively...

...plementation of constitutional rights for all our citizens...

...but I doubt that such an appeal to Scripture would carry much conviction...

...And since, for the vast bulk of the Negro people, intermarriage with whites (intrinsically important though this as a right may be) is just about the last of their press ing concerns, the achievement of an immediate important gain is preferable by far to the loss even of that possibility in the vain pursuit of Miss Arendt's Holy Grail...

...Unless, then, we are to appeal to a standard external to society itself— to God or to nature, for example (and Miss Arendt makes it clear that she does not mean to make such an appeal...

...I criticize her basic position, her arguments, and the consequences to which these lead...

...In these respects her argument moves on a level of discourse that raises significant theoretical as well as factual issues...

...There is no such thing as society constituting a "somewhat hybrid realm between the political and the private...

...To answer these questions in the only way that democratic theory and constitutional principle permit, is to make clear that what desegregation requires is not the abolition of social discrimination but the abolition of legal enforcement of social discrimination, of discrimination by law...

...It does no honor to the American to reflect that were a Tocqueville to write this book today, he would have to conclude with a near-identical observation...

...It is relatively easy, to be sure, to distinguish the state as a political association from voluntary groups that are non-governmental in character...

...Unfortunately, however, her notion of what constitutes a valid political principle, along with her recommended course of action, testifies more to her sense of misguided courage than it does to her power of insight...

...It does not, as Miss Arendt thinks, enforce integration...

...Surely Miss Arendt does not mean to plead for the continued punishment in the South of those Negroes who ask not that the Constitution be overthrown but that it should be enforced...

...and among these values, in the American scheme of things, is the principle of equality no less than that of liberty...

...For in this form, the principles are no more than guides to action...

...It was, after all, not the community of Little Rock but the state government, primarily in the person of Governor Faubus, which sought, initially at least, to oppose desegregation in the public schools...

...Her argument might, perhaps, have some relevance if she could show that our federal system rests on a fairly clear-cut division between two sets of geographical interests—one embodied in the national community and its government, the other represented by the constituent state or states and their respective communities...

...Indeed, the fact that artificial privileges are so grimly maintained lends force to the suspicion that those who maintain them do so out of fear...

...Miss Arendt contends, in terms that would gladden the heart of a John C. Calhoun, that federalism is a principle designed to divide rather than to unite peoples...

...Surely Miss Arendt cannot deny that education is the most social, as it is the most socializing, of human activities...

...for while the leaders of the Southern states do not want the national government to interfere in their activities, they do not themselves hesitate to interfere in the activities of local communities...

...If we are not, then, to sacrifice a real social and constitutional interest to a fictional geographic interest, we must ignore the nonsense that is gen...

...Hence, no man or group can claim an absolute freedom to do whatever he or it wants to do...

...It is the virtue of Hannah Arendt's reflections on segregation that they seek both to enunciate "right" general principles and to apply those principles in a "right" resolution of the most pressing and important domestic issue of our time...

...for it is the very meaning of social order that some liberties shall be constrained in the service of other values—whether these be particular liberties that might otherwise be suppressed or the maintenance of order itself...

...So, too, for education...

...But her understanding of that problem, and her suggested course of action, seem neither relevant nor opportune...

...If, then, there is an order of priority in rights, it must come from a source other than the Constitution, in this case from Miss Arendt herself...

...they tell us little or nothing of the substantive merits of any particular issue...

...Nor, again, do we endeavor to act blindly even in pursuit of the "right" things at the right time...

...It is, in fact, not the action but the situation in which the action takes place that gives an act its true meaning...

...What is at issue, then, is not whether there shall be a federal or a unitary state—not whether an allegedly covetous (even imperialistic) nationalism shall destroy the virginal independence of our suddenly prim and scrupulous states—but whether we can resolve peacefully and rapidly a conflict of values within the idea of American federalism itself...

...And surely what is today possible, and what is today sought first by those who are oppressed, is not the right to be accepted as a brother-in-law but as a brother...

...neither the state nor voluntary associations have a right to intervene in what are purely private affairs...

...We can argue for liberty only on the ground that certain liberties are essential to the well-being of society...

...Miss Arendt might well consider in this connection the somewhat ridiculous spectacle of a Frank Lloyd Wright who berates "the mob" for its alleged innate inability to recognize and respect distinction at the very moment that it honors him and his achievements...

...The argument is that the state should not itself treat white and Negro citizens unequally...

...In the literal or Hobbesian—and I would add proper—sense, liberty is the absence of chains, the absence of restraints on those things that a man wants, is able, and has the means at hand, to do...

...The argument is for the state, insofar as it distributes its own services, to be a neutral rather than a partisan power, to treat both sides fairly—i.e., equally —and not itself to be a discriminatory agent...

...We must move, no doubt, as the Supreme Court urged, with all deliberate speed...

...erally written and spoken in defense of states' rights...

...But all such associations, and all such liberties are social...

...So much can be said for any sensible theory of just or limited political power...

...Quite properly, therefore, they concentrate on those ends that are politically attainable...

...indeed, by choosing to close some of their public schools to all students rather than admit students of another race, they have made clear their intention to secede not merely from the country but from civilization itself...

...But there are dangers, too, in not doing enough...

...In this respect the South is America's greatest and most dangerous liability...

...It is these values that articulate the meaning of the federation...

...But in the present situation the lines of division are altogether different...

...The argument, finally, is that the state should not penalize those of its citizens who prefer—in what Miss Arendt would call the private and social realms— to deal with other citizens in a non-discriminatory way...

...Now, as one who has had occasionally to read the Constitution, I am not aware of any provision in that document concerning marriage, and certainly none that proclaims as a paramount right the freedom to marry whom one pleases...

...Hence, some caution, some moderation, must be employed in the resolution of this, as of every, great issue...

...For the national majority to coerce the national minority is to prevent a local majority from coercing a local minority...

...Nor does she pause to reflect that her acknowledged inability to understand may have the effect of misleading her terribly here...

...If this is so, liberty cannot be taken by itself and defended on the naive ground that certain parts of a man's life do not affect, and are therefore properly outside the control of, society...

...In the democratic tradition, men are afforded an equal opportunity in order that they may show in what respects they are truly unequal...

...It may be true, as she contends, that the greater the degree of equality, the greater the resentment of difference...

...and if we are to bring Southern white citizens to accept what they regard as a more far-reaching personal association growing out of desegregation in the public schools, it will be, in part, because they accept the argument that intimate sexual relations between the races are no necessary consequence of this...

...Not the act of drunkenness, then, but the situation in which that drunkenness occurs, is crucial...

...To invoke Tocqueville and other gods in support of her diatribe against absolute equality (i.e., equality of condition) is to misrepresent the issue at stake...

...It is interesting to note, parenthetically, that those who are most ardent in defense of states' rights rarely exhibit a similar tenderness toward local and individual rights...

...They seek to remain primitives, and if they are given their way they may well drown the country in that tor• rent of barbarism which is a continuing affront to democracy and to mankind...

...For one thing, it is no vindication of an evil to say that it is not as great as another...

...When she talks of equality, she talks primarily of equality of condition, and hardly at all of equality of educational opportunity...

...for to remove those artificial barriers might well demonstrate that men who are now at the top are there because of those artificial barriers and not for reasons of intrinsic superiority...

...There Mill sought to defend the claims of individual liberty by drawing a line between self-regarding and otherregarding acts, between those things, that is to say, which affect only the individual and those things which affect society...

...that the state shall not compel white and Negro parents to send their children only to segregated schools...

...Thus, the conflict is not properly represented as one of nation versus states, and the issue is not that of preventing a tyranny of the majority...

...Nor do we seek always to control the same things, irrespective of place and circumstance...

...For the majority within the national community is, on the issue of desegregation at least, united with minorities within the constituent communities...

...And on this question, whether we recognize the binding force of judicial interpretation or look to the logic of the democratic principle itself, the national majority is clearly in the right...

...In one respect, too, I would add my voice to Miss Arendt's plea...

...White men even in the North who agree to work together with Negroes in factories and in offices still resist attempts by the latter to move into white residential neighborhoods...

...With respect to self-regarding acts, Mill argued, society is properly unconcerned...

...The argument, further, is that where access to public facilities is concerned, the state should not abet that part of its citizenry which seeks to limit or to deny such access to others...

...And it is a most strange concern for diversity that leads, in effect, to a position that defends the continuation of a near caste-like system, one that institutionalizes differences between races but precludes or renders extraordinarily difficult the possibility of differences across races...

...it is only a question of which majority is to prevail...

...And this, I venture to suggest, is to ask no more than what Miss Arendt herself demands —the application rather than the abrogation of the Constitution...

...In both cases the rule of a majority is involved...

...Parents are still free to send their children to private schools, whether denominational or military or otherwise...

...Even Mill, who would not have the state provide a good education for its children, insisted that it is the obligation of the state to require that a good education be provided for every child...

...1 Consider, first, what I understand to be her central principle: that a meaningful distinction must be drawn and maintained between the political, the social, and the private life...

...for the genius of a federal system is that it brings together people who seek also in some respects to retain their differences...

...She is an aristocrat, not a democrat, at heart...

...Then if we concern ourselves, as I think we must, with the order of political priorities, the issue is between the judgment of public opinion or of majorities (in this case of the Negro people) and that of Miss Arendt...

...It is a strange plea for natural inequality that ignores the realities of human existence in the South, realities that make it impossible to judge whether the inequalities that actually exist are the result of natural differences or of artificial privileges...

...This is her view that Southern laws against miscegenation and not laws denying equal access to schools and other public facilities are the first order of business...

...This, of course, is partly true...

...And it is on this latter function of the law that the issue of desegregation turns, complicated, alas, by the fact that two sets of laws are here involved...

...Is the law neutral when it thus forestalls local or private action that seeks not to discriminate...

...She insists that "the order of priorities in the question of rights is to be determined by the Constitution, and not by public opinion or by majorities...

...For politics, once again, is the art of drawing distinctions...

...Is it observed when a state makes it a crime for local school boards, in line with community sentiment, to operate their schools on a desegregated basis...

...It is surely an odd notion of freedom, not to speak of human values, that Miss Arendt entertains when she argues in effect that the freedom to discriminate is more important than the freedom not to discriminate...

...In such circumstances, for the national majority to abstain from coercing the national minority is to permit the latter, in the form of a local majority, to coerce a local minority...

...Miss Arendt's reverent invocation of the South's ever-convenient communal ghost, states' rights, is in these terms an evasion of the issue...

...There is the possibility that through rash action we may disrupt the bonds of community, the grounds of consensus, that make possible the perpetuation of the Union...

...it creates before everything else a state that is national rather than parochial in character, that represents the common rather than the dividing interests of its citizens...

...But this distinction, so plausible and appealing on its face, collapses as soon as we attempt to specify those acts which affect only the individual...

...Anything less than this is an argument for artificial, and therefore false, inequality...

...And in the present situation, no democratic society can give legal sanction to those liberties which, if unrestrained, would enable some men (our white Southern citizens) effectively to suppress the constitutional liberties and rights of other (Negro) citizens...

...and that it is not the business of political power to invade the non-political—i.e., the social and the private—realms of being...

...But it is a strange conception of the mob that identifies it in the North with the protection of democratic rights, and in the South with the suppression of those rights...

...She is also, as she admits, an outsider, in the sense that as a European she finds herself unable even to understand "the common prejudices of Americans in this area...

...Liberty is a complex and ever-changing system of liberties and restraints, in which law by restraining some men who would restrain others, guarantees to those others the enjoyment of certain prized freedoms...

...In this as in her other writings, Miss Arendt has always sought to dissociate herself from the masses of the people...

...And in the attempt to resolve political (including racial) conflicts, we must carefully dis tinguish what it is possible to obtain now, and what sources of public support we can marshal...

...For human acts are not separable on such terms...

...Miss Arendt also misrepresents what is involved in the immediate situation...

...Liberty, that is to say, is not to be regarded as a given and permanent whole out of which, with each utterance, the law extracts a vital piece...

...What is sought is that measure of equality of opportunity that will allow men, by starting the race on equal terms, to discover and to display their true worth...

...that the state shall not prevent white and Negro students from associating with one another...

...In all societies differences, and hence inequalities, of some kind must always exist...

...From this standpoint, desegregation in the public schools and in other public facilities does no more than remove the state as a discriminatory power...

...tween local majority and local minority, but in that odd concatenation of forces which unites the majority in one place with the minority in another...