This brings to mind the debate on a businesses’ right to discriminate. (Well, it’s not much of a ‘debate’, since anybody brave enough to advocate it is quickly dehumanized into a white-hooded cross burning troglodtye ogre)
Many progressive types who frequently entertain utilitarian social planning schemes tend to associate states rights (here they are partially right, but not in ways they necessarily understand) and decentralization as leading to environments of bigotry where the racist majority would quickly rise to oppress gays, blacks, [insert minority here].
It is of their firm opinion that a society full of bigoted behavior which develops to the extent of systematic oppression a la Jim Crow South, (this requires being totally oblivious to irony), can only arise in societies of total voluntary association where employers and businesses are free to discriminate. If not that, they argue that such environments promote and facilitate instituonalized bigotry.
If you are a minority, the argument goes, (say, living in a rural Southern community) your boycotts and protests will do nothing to avert the prejudices of the majority. You are helpless, powerless, because an unregulated society of voluntary association will end up oppressing you. Therefore, a progressive benevolent elite must lay down the law and regulate the business environment to prevent such majorities from oppressing the few.
The irony of such egalitarianism, that societies of institutional bigotry can only be perpetuated and enforced through government, and that such regulations manufacture new prejudices where there previously were none by dividing society and pitting groups against one another, creating new favored elites to replace the old, is entirely lost on them.
They seem to believe the racist South simply arose from a vacuum, that left to their own devices people will simply turn into batshit racists on their own, certainly requiring no legislated Jim Crow education and indoctrination of government enforced apartheid to instill such beliefs…
But, they say, all it takes is to bring the right minds to power, and we can plan and regulate racism and homophobia away, or at least keep it in check, where in a freer society it would run rampant…
This argument is very powerful and convincing to your college demographic (and many older Baby Boomer liberal types). It is a classic chicken- and- egg fallacy, since they are never able to prove that insitutional bigotry was the result of free unregulated association.
For many however, this is unneccessary, and they might even accept the fact that government did in fact prop up and enforce such bigotry. However, they still insist that ‘we cannot go back’ and remove such controls since the racists would simply take over once more. This is similar circular reasoning for opponents of non-intervention and pulling troops out of Afghanistan/Iraq/[insert latest nation here].
Very tough to shake people out of this mindset.
