Hurston was a Republican who aligned herself with the politics of the Old Right and she was also a supporter of Booker T. Washington. Although she once stated her support for the "complete repeal of All Jim Crow Laws", she was a contrarian on civil rights activism and she generally lacked interest in being associated with it.[88] In 1951, she criticized the New Deal by arguing that it had created a harmful dependency on the government among African Americans and she also argued that this dependency ceded too much power to politicians.[64] She criticized communism in her 1951 essay titled Why the Negro won't Buy Communism and she also accused communists of exploiting African-Americans for their own personal gain. In her 1938 review of Richard Wright's short-story collection Uncle Tom's Children, she criticized his communist beliefs and the Communist Party USA for supporting "state responsibility for everything and individual responsibility for nothing, not even feeding one's self". Her views on communism, the New Deal, civil rights, and other topics contrasted with the views of many of her colleagues during the Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes, who was a supporter of the Soviet Union and praised it in several of his poems during the 1930s.
John McWhorter has called Hurston a conservative, stating that she is "America's favorite black conservative".[88][89] David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito have argued that she can be characterized as a libertarian, comparing her to Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson, two female libertarian novelists who were her contemporaries and are known as the "founding mothers" of American libertarianism.[90] Russell A. Berman of the Hoover Institution described her as a "heterodox and staunchly libertarian thinker".[91] The libertarian magazine Reason praised her, claiming: "What Hurston wanted, in both life and literature, was for everyone, of every race, for better or worse, to be viewed as an individual first."[92]
In response to black writers who criticized her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God because it did not explore racial themes, she stated: "I am not interested in the race problem, but I am interested in the problems of individuals, white ones and black ones".[93] She criticized what she described as "Race Pride and Race Consciousness", describing it as a "thing to be abhorred", stating:
Suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but in the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable? The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. If you are under the impression that every white man is an Edison, just look around a bit. If you have the idea that every Negro is a [George Washington] Carver, you had better take off plenty of time to do your searching.[92]
Although her personal quotes show disbelief of religion, Hurston did not negate spiritual matters as evidenced from her 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road:
Prayer seems to be a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life, as it is, does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it, and bow to its laws. The ever-sleepless sea in its bed, crying out "how long?" to Time; million-formed and never motionless flame; the contemplation of these two aspects alone, affords me sufficient food for ten spans of my expected lifetime. It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such. However, I would not, by word or deed, attempt to deprive another of the consolation it affords. It is simply not for me. Somebody else may have my rapturous glance at the archangels. The springing of the yellow line of the morning out of the misty deep of dawn is glory enough for me. I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is the matter, ever-changing, ever-moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe does not need finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance.[94]
In 1952, Hurston supported the presidential campaign of Senator Robert A. Taft. Like Taft, Hurston was against Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies. She also shared his opposition to Roosevelt and Truman's interventionist foreign policy. In the original draft of her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston compared the United States government to a "fence" in stolen goods and a Mafia-like protection racket. Hurston thought it ironic that the same "people who claim that it is a noble thing to die for freedom and democracy... wax frothy if anyone points out the inconsistency of their morals... We, too, consider machine gun bullets good laxatives for heathens who get constipated with toxic ideas about a country of their own." She was scathing about those who sought "freedoms" for those abroad but denied it to people in their home countries: Roosevelt "can call names across an ocean" for his Four Freedoms, but he did not have "the courage to speak even softly at home."[95] When Truman dropped the atomic bombs on Japan she called him "the Butcher of Asia".[90]
Hurston opposed the Supreme Court ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954. She felt that if separate schools were truly equal (and she believed that they were rapidly becoming so), educating black students in physical proximity to white students would not result in better education. Also, she worried about the demise of black schools and black teachers as a way to pass on the cultural tradition to future generations of African Americans. She voiced this opposition in a letter, "Court Order Can't Make the Races Mix", that was published in the Orlando Sentinel in August 1955. Hurston had not reversed her long-time opposition to segregation. Rather, she feared that the Court's ruling could become a precedent for an all-powerful federal government to undermine individual liberty on a broad range of issues in the future.[96] Hurston also opposed preferential treatment for African-Americans, saying:
If I say a whole system must be upset for me to win, I am saying that I cannot sit in the game and that safer rules must be made to give me a chance. I repudiate that. If others are in there, deal me a hand and let me see what I can make of it, even though I know some in there are dealing from the bottom and cheating like hell in other ways.[89]
