[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]
Anyone who can make millions of dollars for years off a notorious
newsletter with their name on it and then later look into a camera and
claim with a straight face: "I didn't write them. I didn't read them at
the time. I disavow them. That's it" -- that man is a liar, pure and
simple. Especially when you can find videos as recent as the above 1995
interview on C-SPAN in which he clearly embraces the content of those
newsletters.
That alone should tell us everything we need to know about the man.
The facts:
Ron Paul had a significant role in determining the editorial direction
of his newsletters, which were edited and largely written by Lew
Rockwell and a staff under his direction. And yes,
those newsletters were ugly, racist, homophobic, and bizarre excursions in right-wing extremism, extraordinarily popular with militiamen and other far-right "Patriots". But then, that would be because
Paul built his political career in pandering to such extremists.
Conor Friedersdorf,
who is inclined to libertarianism and thus has a soft spot for Paul,
has a thoughtful and nuanced take on the matter, but he also makes
excuses for the inexcusable:
Do I think that Paul wrote the offending newsletters? I
do not. Their style and racially bigoted philosophy is so starkly
different from anything he has publicly espoused during his long career
in public life -- and he is so forthright and uncensored in his
pronouncements, even when they depart from mainstream or politically
correct opinion -- that I'd wager substantially against his authorship
if Las Vegas took such bets.
That's probably a safe bet, but it's beside the point: whether or not
Paul did the actual writing, the newsletters were produced at Paul's
behest and written deliberately in a way to make it sound as if it were
Paul himself addressing the readers. More to the point, we also know
that he had a significant role in the editorial decisions, and was
responsible for the newsletters' larger thrust which -- from my reading
of them at the time, picked up at various militia meeting tables in the
1990s -- was largely about "New World Order" conspiracy theories, as
well as various other themes tailored to the far-right militia audience:
Eliminating the IRS and the Fed, returning to the gold standard, and
the usual fearmongering about minorities, crime, and immigration.
And all you have to do is examine
Paul's record in Congress
to realize that his newsletters reflected his actual politics at the
time, since (by way of example), at the time he was viciously attacking
the MLK holiday on his newsletter's pages, he was simultaneously
opposing it on the floor of the House.
Likewise, the newsletters'
extremist content was similar in nature to the bills he proposed -- for
example, his newsletters' paranoid theorizing about the United Nations
and the "New World Order" was reflected in his actual attempts to
withdraw the United States from the United Nations.
This same paranoid worldview came up not merely in the newsletters, but in Paul's other publications, such as his 1988 tract
World Money, World Banking, and World Government: A Special Report from the Ron Paul Investment Letter". The first two pages of this tract give you the flavor:
Paul has never repudiated his conspiracy-mongering ways. After all,
he continues to appear on Alex Jones' "Conspiracy Planet" radio show and
expound on the evils of the New World Order. This is all of a piece
with Ron Paul's longtime embrace of right-wing extremism, of which the
racist elements are only a component.
Indeed, these kinds of things are going to keep cropping up. Now Paul is
denying having written a fundraising letter warning of "race war" that was sent out with his signature on it.
These revelations are significant beyond the merely tawdry and
embarrassing aspects they present. Because they also tell us a great
deal about the kind of president a man like Ron Paul would be.
Friedersrdorf, to his great credit, acknowledges this, but nonetheless concludes:
Should Paul continue to perform well in the polls, or
even win the Iowa caucuses, national media attention is going to focus
intensely on his newsletters as never before, and it won't represent a
double-standard: published racism under any candidate's name would
rightly attract press attention! Paul ought to stop acting aggrieved. He
is not a victim here. Voters ought to do their best to understand the
controversy, gauge Paul's character, and render judgment about his
likely behavior were he elected to the presidency, relative to his
competitors.
The racist newsletters should in fact be part of the calculus.
So should the uncomfortable fact that bygone complicity in racist
newsletters doesn't necessarily make Paul the candidate most complicit
in human depravity (sad as that is), or tell us whose policies, which
candidate, would do the most to square American government with the
highest ideals of our polity. Support for Paul is grounded for many in
the judgment that he is that candidate. That his policies, the ones he
would champion in general election debates and pursue if elected, are
the most moral on offer among the GOP contenders. I remain sympathetic
to that argument.
Well then, let us consider whether or not Paul's policies would be
moral ones. And we know, as he has expressed over many years on many
occasions, what the outline of his policies would look like: eliminating
the income tax, dismantling the IRS, dismantling the Fed, returning to
the gold standard, and radically gutting the federal government and its
power, notably including its power to enforce civil-rights laws and to
protect minorities. It was only recently, after all, that
Paul reaffirmed that
he would have voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
That agenda, as it happens, matches up with the agenda that has long
been promoted by the most racist elements in American politics of the
past two generations and more -- the Posse Comitatus, the Aryan Nations,
the Klan -- as well as by a variety of extremists with deep roots in
far-right anti-Semitism, such as the John Birch Society (with whom Paul
has enjoyed a long association).
And while they may employ vicious racism and bizarre extremism in
their rhetoric supporting this agenda -- something largely absent from
Paul's -- their reasons for pursuing an agenda identical to Paul's
supposed "freedom" agenda have to do with the way they define "freedom"
-- that is, as
the freedom to oppress other people.
The roots of this lie in the Civil War, which was fought on one side
by people who were willing to take up arms to defend their freedom to
enslave other people. They clothed it in the language of "states'
rights," but in the end the right in question was essentially
the right to deprive other people of their rights.
It should go without saying, at least in this day and age, that the
very concept is not only laughably illogical but profoundly immoral as
well -- not to mention fundamentally anti-democratic.
The whole panoply of subsequent court rulings (think
Plessy v. Ferguson)
and legislative miscreancies that created and supported the system of
Jim Crow in the South and the Sundown Town phenomenon in the rest of the
country, as well as the many failures of Congress to enact
anti-lynching legislation -- the roots of institutionalized racism, as
it were -- were likewise couched in the language of preserving "freedom"
and "states rights". The America that Ron Paul's long-enunciated agenda
would return us to, as it happens, would closely resemble the America
of 1900. If Americans really understood what America looked like then,
they would realize that this would not be a good thing at all.
As
Bruce Bartlett sagely observed when the same issue arose regarding Ron Paul's son, Rand:
As we know from history, the free market did not lead
to a breakdown of segregation. Indeed, it got much worse, not just
because it was enforced by law but because it was mandated by
self-reinforcing societal pressure. Any store owner in the South who
chose to serve blacks would certainly have lost far more business among
whites than he gained. There is no reason to believe that this system
wouldn't have perpetuated itself absent outside pressure for change.
In short, the libertarian philosophy of Rand Paul and the Supreme
Court of the 1880s and 1890s gave us almost 100 years of segregation,
white supremacy, lynchings, chain gangs, the KKK, and discrimination of
African Americans for no other reason except their skin color. The gains
made by the former slaves in the years after the Civil War were
completely reversed once the Supreme Court effectively prevented the
federal government from protecting them. Thus we have a perfect test of
the libertarian philosophy and an indisputable conclusion: it didn't
work. Freedom did not lead to a decline in racism; it only got worse.
The handwringing over whether Paul is a racist or not really is
beside the point. Labels really become inconsequential when the real
issue is how their politics would play out on the ground if they
achieved power. And in the end, there is a reason racists support Ron
Paul's agenda: It would be a dream come true, a return to the days when
the freedom to oppress others was protected by the American legal
system.
To the extent that Paul's agenda really reflects a libertarian
agenda, then this same problem reflects on the great shortcoming of
libertarianism as a political philosophy.
Friedersdorf objects to this strenuously,
but he does not provide us with an adequate explanation for what
amounts to a monstrous blind spot in libertarianism -- namely, their
apparent belief that the only element of American political life capable
of depriving Americans of their rights is the government, while
pretending away the long and ugly history of Americans being deprived of
their rights (including the simple right to live) not by the
government, but by
their fellow Americans.
What is utterly missing from libertarianism -- and particularly the
libertarianism of Ron Paul -- is a recognition that their love of
freedom is easily perverted into the freedom to deprive other people of
their freedoms. When confronted with it, they simply try to shrug it off
as a problem that freedom itself will eventually overcome -- when
history, of course, has proven them wrong time and time again.
As we
observed back then:
Ron Paul and Rand Paul both like to present radical ideas
in reasonable clothing. But the consequences of their ideas have
outcomes that we have seen proven in our own history as toxic and
destructive to our democratic ideals. Their ideas were long ago
discredited, and simply fluffing them up in new language will not make
their real-life consequences any less horrific.
There is, after all, a simple reason the Pauls attract racists to
their campaigns: Their ideologies would make racist discrimination legal
again. You can call it a matter of deep intellectual consistency if you
like. I call it selling cheap rationalizations for real evil in the
world.
