There is something unusual happening in the blogosphere and the Twitterverse as I write. In response to Rand Paul’s problematic take on federal authority and racial segregation, self-avowed libertarians like Washington Post’s Dave Weigel and The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle are falling all over themselves to say things like “for the record, I would have voted for the Civil Rights Act.”

Well, of course you would have. De jure racism is an evil. I would have voted for the Civil Rights Act too. And while we’re at it I would have never signed off on the Corrupt Bargain that ended Reconstruction by installing Rutherford B. Hayes in the Presidency. Better yet, I would have killed John Wilkes Booth during one of his early performances of Richard III or vacated the appointment of Roger B. Taney to the Supreme Court.

But at the end of the day, isn’t this counterfactual game sort of pointless? There is certainly a “correct” answer to all these historical questions — side with the angels on every significant civil rights debate since the founding — but that’s not the same as the thoughtful answer.

See, as far as I’m concerned, the whole point of asking historical counterfactuals is that our distance from the events gives us an opportunity to test our principles against the data in a context that isn’t clouded by the preoccupations of our own time and place. I think that’s what Rand Paul was trying to do when he talked about the Civil Rights era and the reach of the government — though he bungled the job to be sure. But liberals and progressives like Matt Yglesias, who think that Paul is at best stupid and at worst evil for using the abstractions of libertarian theory to justify the great historical crime of segregation are missing the point that the whole exercise is an abstraction, and one that doesn’t map neatly to current policy debates. In other words, my opinion that the Three-Fifths Compromise and the 1808 stuff in the Constitution were probably justified, because forging a union was worth a temporary compromise on slavery, does not mean that I’d rather there have been slavery. Just as my belief that the conspirators in the Roman Senate were wrong to assassinate Caesar doesn’t mean that I support dictatorship.

Nobody worth talking to thinks we should go back to Jim Crow, but the method by which Jim Crow was dismantled can and should be interrogated — that’s sort of the point of history — as part of a healthy political discourse. Otherwise we’re just congratulating ourselves for our 20/20 hindsight.

UPDATE: Dave Weigel points out, quite rightly, that my rhetorical condensation of his position to “for the record, I would have voted for the Civil Rights Act” is a caricature. Weigel has written at length, and subtly, on this Rand Paul business here and here.