Arnold Kling has a post up about how America was better in the 1940s in which he specifically writes “[n]ote to intellectual bullies: please do not confuse nostalgia for decentralized school districts with nostalgia for ‘separate but equal.’” So I’m not going to say that Kling is a racist who’s nostalgic for the days when segregated schools were enforced by a campaign of systemic terrorism enabled by state authorities. Instead I’ll just observe that Kling, while not nostalgic for the massive disenfranchisement of African-Americans, seems in practice to be blind to the interests of non-whites, of gays and lesbians, and of women. After all, though he disavows nostalgia for Jim Crow he does write that “American government has become structurally less libertarian and less democratic in recent decades” just before citing the centralization of school governance since 1940 as a key example.
(Santa Rosa County School Board, 1950)
I’ll admit right off that I don’t have a mathematical formula that demonstrates that the right of black people to vote in school board elections is an important victory for human freedom that absolutely dwarfs the impact (for good or for ill) of school districts getting bigger. I think it’s just obvious. And I think that the only way to not see it as obvious that the structure of government has become freer and more democratic since 1940 is from inside a very narrow white male frame. I’m old enough to remember when Hillary Clinton faced off against Barack Obama to see who would secure the nomination of a major political party.
It may be that there are good arguments for decentralizing political authority (I think we need more accountable government and the steps to get it don’t fall on an easy centralize/decentralize framework). After all, doing so should be perfectly compatible with social and political equality for women, minorities, and non-straights. But trying to frame the case in terms of comprehensive nostalgia for the free & democratic American politics of the past is just a doomed enterprise.
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