Two newsworthy events in the last few months genuinely caught my attention. On June 23rd, the co-owner of The Red Hen - a Lexington, Virginia based restaurant – asked that Sarah Huckabee Sanders leave, citing that the restaurant upholds the standards of “honesty, and compassion, and cooperation.” Sanders subsequently left. In an unrelated incident on July 14th, six Republican campaign volunteers claimed they were kicked out of an Uber. They reported that the driver said: “Welcome to the resistance,” in an apparent condemnation of the volunteers’ political association. I vainly hope these are seminal building blocks to a future in which the freedom of people to associate is both maximized through law and is socially customary. Unfortunately, I fear the left-right paradigm in the United States, as well as a widespread misunderstanding of the meaning and mechanics of the freedom to associate indicate that the end I aspire to will persist as a fantasy.
At the core of classical liberalism are the precepts of freedom of speech and association, as well as a belief in a person’s sovereignty over their rightfully gained property. Among these, the right to associate is the most inherently transactional, requiring by definition the interplay of at least two parties. The West has generally made progress in the sphere of free association over time, granting gradually more independence to the individual and laying the burden on the state with respect to restrictions upon the same. However, the emergence of equity theory in the 1960s appears to have spawned a radical offshoot. This philosophy attempts to not only generate uniformity in outcomes, but also tends to categorize both people and their grievances based on either randomly inherited traits, or a loosely-defined “common history” shared with people who look like or behave like members of a historically oppressed population. While the attempt to rectify the wrongs of history is noble, the cataloging of human beings is not. On the American left, it has problematically led to a nebulous but seemingly amalgamating unanimity that some associations of free people are moral while others are not.
In December of last year, The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission that Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece had been wronged by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission when they failed to apply an anti-discrimination statue in a manner neutral to his religious beliefs. The underlying interaction was that Phillips had declined to bake a cake for Charlie Craig and David Mullins, a gay couple, on the grounds that it would violate his sincerely held religious beliefs. By ruling as they did, they de facto – in the case in question – granted Phillips the right to associate with whoever he chose to, though this case was decided constitutionally on a narrow basis with respect specifically to freedom of religion and specifically to government’s application of anti-discrimination statues in that regard. That is, the Court dodged the more pressing question of whether Phillips had a legal right (and I would posit a moral right) to associate with whomever he chooses, irrespective of any religious ideas. In regards to questions of where the lines should be drawn for when choices of association should be illegal or immoral, I believe the consensus left is on the wrong side of the battle.
If I could be so bold as to try to summarize the progressive movement’s two major grievances in this matter, they would be these: that there exists an emotionally sobering history of prejudice based on unwarranted fear of “the other,” and that some slights are so offensive that they morally equate to physical violence. The first grievance is a problem that extends to private parties, but I would contend that the most egregious campaigns of violence based on unwarranted prejudice have been the product of government: slavery in its incalculable varieties, every significant war, the abysmal treatment of homosexuals in the vast majority of the world throughout much of history, the original Jewish ghetto in Venice, Jim Crow laws, the litany of offenses is immense. The second grievance is a form of thought policing and lexicon restructuring that I think is dangerous.
Progressives may fire back that my interpretation of history is superficial or that my imagination is lacking with respect to how awful the world could be in the absence of a government arbiter. While this point could validly be debated, there is no honest debate that can be had on the second surmised grievance: that some insults to character and some internalized biases are so offensive that the individual who projects them has actually committed a violent act against another. This has been, as far as I can tell, the basis for most legal encroachment on the right to association within the United States. But can there exist true freedom of association without the power to also freely disassociate? Further: is the right to disassociate a real right if we subjectively restrict the rights of others to do so – no matter how asinine the rationale? Can such a subjective protocol be uniformly enforced through time and across populations?
I understand the political and cultural trend is toward more restrictions and greater limitations on peoples’ ability to disassociate with one another. As a result, an aspiration for expansion of freedom in this area is a likely a pipe dream. However, I believe in the short term there is hope that public figures, writers, and intellectuals shining light on this topic will be able to halt the march away from freedom to associate and disassociate.