Judge Napolitano’s Left-Libertarian Confusion

libertarianism,Paleolibertarianism,Political Philosophy,Race

            

Recently, on TV, Judge Andrew Napolitano sort of walked back his earlier assertion that in Ferguson we saw “the error and perversion of the grand jury,” and a “toxic mixture of a black underclass and a white power structure and the corrupt advantages people on the make and people on the take can exploit from it.”

Napolitano’s early position:

In Ferguson, the law enforcement case is far more straightforward than the racial complexities. A white cop put 10 bullets into the body of an unarmed black youth with whom he was wrestling for control of his gun … The tragedy is the result of the governmental use of race as a basis for decision-making. When cops are hired because they are white, when police suspect criminal behavior on the part of youth because the youth is black …

His is a hot mess of a column.

Napolitano’s later reversal:

Napolitano drew a stark distinction between the Garner case and that of Michael Brown, in which there was a “struggle for the gun.” Instead, he said, “This is a case of a poor, sorry individual doing nothing more than selling untaxed cigarettes and as a result of government intervention, he’s dead.”

Perhaps Napolitano has taken to reading more coherent libertarians, who can draw distinctions free of crappy postmodern, inorganic theorizing?

In any event, that’s left-libertarianism for you: In-thrall to lefty constructs like “power structure,” “white privilege”—the left-libertarian’s tinny, rigid adherence to bogus theory is often foisted on facts that don’t fit. The result: a mass of contradictions their adulating readers, in the habit of celebrity worship, fail to pick up.