Defending Discrimination in Baltimore County

It started in 2016, when a fight over a local bill to ban discrimination against Section 8 voucher holders in Baltimore County turned into a display of conservative organizers playing to racist fears among White homeowners. The campaign was headed by a local chapter of the libertarian group Campaign for Liberty (C4L), a national political advocacy group founded by Ron Paul using leftover funds from his failed 2008 presidential run.^[7] C4L is best known for opposing taxes, supporting gun rights, and raising money for Rand Paul’s Senate races.^[8] Its activist network is relatively modest: C4L keeps its membership lists off the web and many statewide or countywide chapters have only a few hundred Facebook followers. Some chapters have broader support, including Baltimore County, which has over 2,000 followers as of this writing, although that still represents a small minority of the county’s approximately 830,000 residents. The group’s core commitments—zero taxes and gun rights—are relatively unpopular in centrist Maryland, though gaining ground in recent years. C4L rarely works well with other conservative-aligned groups, preferring to stick to their own anti-public spending and anti-tax agendas.

When the Baltimore County Council introduced the anti-discrimination measure, C4L saw a chance to do some damage to Section 8, and began appealing directly to White homeowners’ fears of Black Baltimore residents moving into their neighborhoods. The Baltimore County C4L chapter invoked this narrative in a petition they spread on social media, arguing, “The continued expansion of Section 8 housing in Baltimore County is ruining our communities,” and that, since “Section 8 has been shown to reduce property values,” “This amounts to stealing people’s property.”^[9] In addition to helping mobilize locals for their immediate political cause, the strategy also gave C4L an opportunity to add to its base new members from throughout the county who may hold views that are racist or fearful toward low-income African Americans. Indeed, some of these homeowners may have been part of the outmigration of White people from Baltimore City in the 1970s and ‘80s, which increased the suburbs’ population to a third higher than that of the city itself.^[10]

The anti-discrimination measure, introduced in July 2016, was intended to bring the county into compliance with federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requirements, following that agency’s finding that the county had routinely discriminated against Section 8 voucher holders for years. This “Source of Income” or SOI discrimination^[11] “is a major problem in the county today,” as Matt Hill, an attorney with The Public Justice Center, a civil rights group, told the Baltimore Sun.^[12] “There are many landlords who will deny all vouchers.”

To connect with homeowners at the grassroots level, Baltimore County and other local C4L chapters used Facebook and email lists to organize regular, in-person meetings at local family restaurants and Knights of Columbus halls, promising a welcoming space for residents to air grievances about the imagined influx of city residents that they thought the new law would unleash. (Maryland C4L statewide coordinator Bob Willick did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.)

The Baltimore County Council is composed mostly of Democrats, and then-County Executive, Kevin Kamenetz, a Democrat, embraced the anti-discrimination bill, working hard to secure the votes of fellow councilmembers. Most supported it in theory. But one councilmember showed the Baltimore Sun a thick folder of feedback from constituents, suggesting that opponents were swamping councilmembers with letters, and saying she couldn’t support the bill, “Until she could receive a guarantee that more voucher holders won’t move into her district.”^[13] In the end, in late July 2016, with no charismatic leaders, no billboards, and no television commercials, the opposition camp prevailed, and only one of the seven councilmembers voted for the anti-discrimination bill.^[14] Half of those councilmembers who voted against it were Democrats, confirming, much as housing discrimination struggles in New York City and California do,^[15] that this is not simply a Republican issue.

Kamenetz died in office in May 2018. His elected successor, John Olszewski, recently introduced a compromise version of the same bill, but C4L has already dug itself in to renew the fight.

Resentment Mobilized

Libertarians tend to adhere to a politics of limited government, property rights, and free enterprise—they believe taxes and government at all levels are both wasteful and unnecessary. Though they sometimes support policies that progressives also do, like spending less on a school security guard force, for example, they tend to do so out of a skepticism of public services, not because evidence shows that counseling is more effective than policing when it comes to children.^[16] Further, many demonstrate a willingness to divide and vilify groups of people in order to achieve their ends.^[17] Libertarian-leaning politicians such as McDonough may not have succeeded in taking formal political power in Baltimore County in 2016, but his camp did manage to weaponize a producerist framework to whip up voters’ resentments against some of those who receive social safety net support.

As political scientists Joseph E. Lowndes and Daniel Martinez HoSang write in their new book, Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity, in the producerist “makers and takers” narrative, some citizens are declared productive members of society, while others are cast as “parasites” feeding off them. Within this narrative, race is often deployed to target and demonize the so-called parasite group, in service of the larger goal of dismantling and destroying the social safety net.^[18] In 2016, C4L targeted Section 8 voucher holders as underserving “takers,” much as welfare recipients were attacked during the Clinton years.^[19] The culmination of the welfare debates, of course, was the total dismantling of the cash assistance welfare program; one wonders if a similar dismantling of Section 8 housing vouchers is part of C4L’s larger goal. Of course, as McDonough’s chilling Facebook post about “get[ting] ready to be on the alert” suggests, it is also a dangerously hostile tactic that puts people of color’s physical safety at risk.^[20] We have seen the catastrophic results of such rhetoric before, in communities where White supremacists have murdered Black and Muslim people (or those trying to defend them), as in Portland, Oregon, and College Park, Maryland, or committed similar violent acts.^[21]

Indeed, the pushback against anti-discrimination measures in housing is about maintaining segregated communities. Evidence suggests that where landlords are prohibited from discriminating against Section 8 voucher holders, outcomes improve. A 2011 Columbia University study commissioned by HUD found that where SOI laws were in place, voucher utilization rates went up significantly, meaning that voucher holders were better able to find stable housing.^[22] Additionally, the study found that, to a lesser degree, “locational outcomes” also improved, meaning voucher recipients were able to find housing in more advantaged neighborhoods. The study’s author concluded that, where upheld by local statutes, housing voucher programs function at least modestly well to desegregate communities along economic and racial lines.^[23]

At the same time, the actual number of housing vouchers per capita in affluent regions such as Baltimore County remains vanishingly small. A 2016 Baltimore Sun article about the Section 8 fight in Baltimore County found that voucher holders represent only about 0.7 percent of the county’s population.^[24]

Taken together, this data suggests that C4L’s alarm is vastly overblown, and is characterized by the panic and vitriol that White affluent communities expressed in response to the desegregation laws of the mid-20^th Century.[25] It’s enough to make the group’s campaign look like Massive Resistance 2.0—a 21st Century version of the violent anti-integration protests in White communities that followed the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.^[26] And it’s a sobering lesson that the conservative movement’s nationwide infrastructure still has the capacity, funds, and person-power to mobilize individuals’ racist resentments into a grassroots campaign against public policy.

National Launchpad, Localized Infrastructure

After his 2008 presidential campaign failed, Ron Paul, a former Congressmember and libertarian icon, used the leftover funds to start the Campaign for Liberty, a 501(c)(4) group meant to continue developing the grassroots support his campaign had tapped.^[27] Today, the network’s web of local and statewide chapters use branding and websites provided by the national group, but it’s unclear how much financial support they get, since the parent organization doesn’t disclose its donors or funding structure to the IRS—a model popularly referred to as “dark money.”^[28] While the organization largely stopped doing national campaign work after 2012, its network of chapters remains active, with state and countywide coordinators, online campaigns, and those family restaurant face-to-face meet-ups. In March 2019, Maryland’s statewide C4L chapter held an all-day Liberty Activism training for those wishing to learn organizing skills.[29] According to a Facebook page for the training, only about a dozen people planned to attend and fewer than 100 more listing themselves as “interested”—hardly a conservative army.

Partly that’s because C4L’s Maryland chapter has persistently adhered to a purist libertarian policy agenda—including coming out against all tax schemes, even subsidies and grants aimed at supporting business development[30]—that has hurt them within Republican circles. And the group may overestimate how much hard-right ideology local voters will tolerate. In 2018, Anne Arundel County councilmember Michael Peroutka, who’d been a guest speaker at the Maryland C4L meetings,[31] lost his race as an incumbent because of his association with the League of the South, a neo-confederate, White supremacist group, and with disgraced Alabama judge Roy Moore.^[32] 

And yet, this is the group that managed to sideline an otherwise popular anti-discrimination bill that might have helped hundreds of Baltimore County residents. Despite C4L’s strategic weaknesses and its inability to form lasting coalitions on the Right,[33] organizers and activists on the Left—especially those within labor and racial and economic justice circles—would do well to pay attention to their tactics and complexities. Although they represent just a sliver of the voting public, they’ve demonstrated their ability to use creative means, as well as to tap into long-held resentments and prejudices, in reaching a broad audience.