Liberalism is organically embedded in the racialized nature-value hierarchy

Evidence

In many cultures, including what Guénon called “Eastern civilizations,” life is valued intrinsically, because of the unity of the universe as architecture; and architecture presupposes an architect, a rational/intelligent plan, and an intent to design. The modern distinction obliterated this worldview, using racial theories and social Darwinism in order to classify creatures. … And when the American Constitution declared all men to be equal, the “Black man” was more or less in the rank of animals. Locke’s philosophy and the theory and practice of the American Constitution—two remarkably influential sources of political thought and political practice—are on their own ample evidence of liberalism’s organic embeddedness in the structure of thought I have been discussing. … What led to the Distinction are a host of augmenting factors, eminent among them the political and social revolutions in Europe against the abuses of monarchies and church, secularized Christian concepts, and, quite likely, prior barbarian influences on Christianity itself. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 400 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Racial absolutization exemplifies and embodies Schmittian sovereignty: racial purification and anti-pollution controls, separation, ghettoization, the declaration of emergency law to stave off increasingly successful resistance, a death order for anyone considered a threat to social order and power. Racial secularization, by contrast, seeks to bring sovereignty back under constitutional constraint, “hampering” it in principle by “checks and balances” designed also to ameliorate the paranoia or at least to undercut its likelihood. But this hampering, far from being simply to chain the omnipotent sovereign, constitutes a different conception of sovereignty, one less omnipotent than bounded in conception by guiding principles and generalized delimitations. The latter is the sovereignty of the autonomous, self-determining individual, supposedly guaranteed to reach a common conclusion or outcome by drawing on the universalizing dictates of reasons in the comparable circumstances. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1627 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Lorimer equated national and domestic economic hierarchy with racial hierarchy; Liberal democracy’s neutral ideals mask racial and gendered domination — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 406; Nativism’s ideological enemies got remade as biologically fixed racial ones — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1580 (+13 more)

Broader Connections

• Locke’s liberalism and the American Constitution embedded racial hierarchy in their foundations #corroborates (0.94) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 400
• Racial absolutism enacts Schmittian sovereignty while liberal constraint represents a rival bounded sovereignty #complicates (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1627