David Boaz argues that there never was any golden age of lost liberty in America’s past, because — wait for it — blacks and women did not have the same rights as white men.
I consider his point true, but disingenuous, because no libertarian is arguing for the return of the entirety of 18th-century law and culture; they’d be happy to cut out the incongruities, as I argued to Aretae:
I think it’s a bit disingenuous to attack a nostalgic longing for the liberty of yesteryear by pointing to the un-free elements of the past.
One can attack, say, the privileged Southern aristocracy as dependent on slavery and be largely correct, but the minimalist government of the 18th century did not depend on chattel slavery, women’s limited property rights, etc.; it merely coexisted with them.
The “typical” white male Christian citizen lived in a fairly libertarian world, particularly with respect to the federal government, and the maltreatment of other groups is easy to see as the aberration, not the core, of the system — and these un-free elements were hardly top-down mandates from some tyrant; they were accepted bottom-up elements of the common law.
Where this all gets ugly and awkward is in the transition toward broader acceptance of the rights of former-slaves, women, etc., because that often involves massive transfers of wealth and power, combined with day-to-day life turning upside down.
And I don’t think democracy necessarily smooths that transition.
That last line wasn’t mean to imply that Aretae had said anything with respect to democracy, pro or con, just to point out that when suffrage becomes a right, then the fight over who deserves (any) rights can get ugly:
You wouldn’t, for instance, have to be the least bit bigoted to fear black suffrage in the South during Reconstruction. A new majority with no property and no prospects deciding who gets taxed how much and how those tax dollars get spent?
Anyway, I don’t think the orthodox libertarian position points to the Antebellum or Reconstruction Deep South as its Golden Age, but to, say, Pennsylvania and New York — and the frontier West, of course, where there’s that pesky issue of Indian Wars, which the common man on the frontier wanted won right quick.