Ron Paul: Hard Right Loon

Posted on by

I think it’s important to keep pushing back on the “progressives for Ron Paul” personality cult, so I’m pushing — Jonathan Chait has a must-read piece called “How Ron Paul’s Libertarian Principles Support Racism.” It’s all worth reading, but I’d like to address this part —

In a 2004 statement condemning the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Paul laid out his doctrinaire libertarian opposition. “[T]he forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty,” he wrote. “The federal government has no legitimate authority to infringe on the rights of private property owners to use their property as they please and to form (or not form) contracts with terms mutually agreeable to all parties.”

The idea that the 1964 Civil Rights Act increased racial tensions is itself a racist statement. There was plenty of racial tension before the civil rights era; it’s just that it was mostly just racial minorities who were tense.

Paul views every individual as completely autonomous, and he is incapable of imagining any force other than government power that could infringe upon their actual liberty. White people won’t hire you? Then go form a contract with somebody else. Government intervention can only make things worse.

The same holds true of Paul’s view of sexual harassment. In his 1987 book, he wrote that women who suffer sexual harassment should simply go work somewhere else: “Employee rights are said to be valid when employers pressure employees into sexual activity. Why don’t they quit once the so-called harassment starts?” This reaction also colored his son Rand Paul’s response to sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain, which was to rally around Cain and grouse that he can’t even tell jokes around women anymore.

The comment threads are, as usually, full of people defending Ron Paul and saying that discrimination is not a POLIICAL issue unless government does it. What’s missing from this is any connection to the real world, to the actual lived experience of racism and sexism in our culture, and the way a majority faction can use local and state government to impose their bigotry, even to the point of allowing some people to get away with murdering other people. African Americans in many parts of the U.S. were not just being discriminated against; they lived under a literal reign of terror.

Have we really forgotten that? It appears some of us have.

See also Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Banality of Racism”

Kevin Drum, “Crackpots Do Not Make Good Messengers”

Alex Knapp, “Ron Paul Versus the 14th Amendment.”

21 thoughts on “Ron Paul: Hard Right Loon”

  1. Two related things the liberal Paul supporters forget:

    1. when you choose a President you also choose the people he will appoint to the Cabinet, judgeships, White House staff, etc. If you elect Paul you are choosing Republican Party functionaries for ALL presidential appointments. Which means,

    2. there is no way Ron Paul can or will end the War on Drugs or the war in Afghanistan because too many of the Republicans he would be appointing support those things.

    In other words you will get a bunch of people who are (1) opposed to most things liberals support, who will (2) not carry out the few Paul policies (some) liberals agree with.

    So what’s the point?

  4. I think the point is that the people who want to get on this Ron Paul bandwagon were not actually people who thought through their liberalism in the first place.

    Stupid comes from both sides.

  5. Ron Paul is Ron Paul.

    He’s not a half-baked Liberal.
    He’s a fully-baked loon.

    I’m nowhere near jumping on the Ron Paul bandwagon like it seems some Liberals are doing. And never will be.

    I’m told that rattlesnake, when properly cooked, tastes just like chicken.
    But pardon me if I don’t want to find out if they taste like sushi by biting a live one.

    Too many Liberals seem to think Paul is their flavor of the day. But I think what they’re missing is that, at the end of the day, a snake is still a snake.

  6. Paul definitely has the Ayn Rand Syndrome (didn’t he name his son Rand?) Rand informed us that altruism was a disease, an affliction, a scourge and must be eliminated among all populations. Being humane is being altruistic so, in Paul’s pop-philosophy head being inhumane is the order of the day.

    Wonder if his followers would subscribe to this particular Rand pop-philosophy. Wonder how it would be to live in a country headed by an inhumane leader. History tells us in gruesome detail how it would be.

  7. That is, indeed, an ugly baby contest in Iowa tonight, with Mr. Paul as the true Beast among toads. He seems so harmless when he speaks, but that’s how it works.
    Yeh-huh.

  8. I think it’s worth looking at the specific provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Unless the schools are doing a much better job than I think they aegis, a bunch of readers don’t know what the implicit racism is in the doublespeak of ‘forced integration’ and ‘property rights’ and ‘terms mutually agreeable’.

    Until 1964, you could have designated ‘white’ neighborhoods. The exclusion might by realtors who would not show homes in white neighborhoods, or individuals who would not sell to a non-white buyer. The 1964 act required that the racial or ethnic heritage of the buyer could NOT be a factor. This is pretty obvious to you and me – if you list your home for sale, you can’t pick and choose the buyer to suit your bigotry or to satisfy the bigotry of the neighbors.

    The effect of the 1964 act has not erased bigotry in 46 years – but IMO, the vice is greatly reduced due to integration. Libertarians are not usually overt bigots – many argue correctly that tolerance was not the result of legislation (true) – therefore the 1964 Act was not a factor (false). The proof is in history itself. Southern apartheid had become institutionalized in the century from the end of the Civil War to 1964. In the few decades after 1964, institutional racism was irretrievably shattered.

    Get my point? In 100 years, under libertarian rules, there was no racial equality – and no movement towards equality. Libertarianism enshrines the status quo. Those at the bottom are teased with the promise of a fair chance, but the deck is stacked, marked, and froze solid. Education and jobs will be allocated by birthright. I prefer the honest hate of Lester Maddox to the dishonesty of Ron Paul. To empower racism in the guise of personal liberty is a cruel deception.

  9. Excellent article. One article I’d recommend to add to the list is Michael Lind’s article in Salon titled “Race, Liberty and Ron Paul.”

  10. I like what Ian Welsh wrote about Paul,

    ….The reason Ron Paul causes hysterics is he pits interest group against interest group, morality vs. morality. He’s a different kind of lesser evil. If Afghans got to vote in the US election, who would they vote for? How important is Habeas Corpus to you really? What about pot legalization? Etc… Ron Paul is awful on some issues, and very good on others. Are abortion rights more important than dead Afghans and Pakistanis at weddings? (I don’t claim they are, or aren’t, I simply note Paul forces you to make that choice.) And Paul would end all bank bailouts. Hate the banksters? Think they’re the key problem? Paul’s your man…..

    And that’s why many progressives are attacking any other progressive who says anything good about Paul, because Paul threatens to split the left, and because Paul makes progressives decide what they value most.

    It’s much more than just civil rights. There are some genuine reasons to like Paul, and many to hate him. He is saying good things that nobody is saying.

    It’s very unlikely he’ll win, and even if he did, nobody in Congress would follow him. I hate to raise his name, but Jonah Goldberg wrote a whole column about this – that there simply isn’t anything resembling a Ron Paul caucus in Congress.

    But rather than demonize the guy, I choose to focus on the good ideas (my opinion of course) that he brings to the table. For they do indeed exist, and nobody is talking about them.

    • Where Paul agrees with progressives, he nearly always does so for reasons that support disastrously bad ideas also. How he arrives at his opinions are just as important as the opinions; don’t look at the opinions in isolation. The Ron Paul personality cult terrifies me, because to me it looks like the grossest form of groupthink. It’s like people have given up their critical thinking skills, assuming they ever had any, to the Hive Mind.

  11. Paul actually believes much of what he says. It’s not an act, as with Mitt or Newt. Or mental illness, as with Santorum and Bachmann. I suppose he also provides some amusement by holding some positions not cloned directly from the GOP script. That said, he believes in lots of VERY BAD things, like hating women and darker-skinned people.

    Not a person I would EVER support. But, I hope he wins Iowa. A longer primary means even more time for the GOP hopefuls to rip each other to shreds. Or, better yet, Santorum. He’s even less electable a general election than Paul.

    • Or mental illness, as with Santorum and Bachmann.

      I don’t know about that. Ron Paul definitely has built a kind of fantasy world around himself; he doesn’t see anything except his projected ideology. That some bits and pieces of his policy ideas seem reasonable is purely accidental; he arrives at what seem to be rational conclusions via irrational means. In that way, he’s in the same class as Bachmann. Santorum lives in a projected ideology also, but he strikes me as more of an old-fashioned religious bigot than the rest of them.

  12. Hope it’s not posted already but there was a good one by Michael Lind that resonates with much here. In particular the quote from Abe Lincoln demonstrates, among other things, that danger lurked, in the past as today, when we focus on a single word or the allure of a few positions in isolation of the bigger picture.

    The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name———liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names———liberty and tyranny.

    The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty…

  13. khughes1963 beat me to it and I’d googled this site for Michael Lind. Their crawlers must be overworked and behind.

  17. Where Paul agrees with progressives, he nearly always does so for reasons that support disastrously bad ideas also. How he arrives at his opinions are just as important as the opinions…

    Good points. It’s normal at this point to simply be stunned by someone who, on the surface, espouses such a strange mix of good and bad, particularly because these particular goods are rarely ever mentioned – so impoverished is the range of our political discourse – “you mean, we could actually have X?“.

    But then there is the large set of people who never go past this, and who are taken by the fatherly looking doctor, simply because he is so different from the usual politician, and yet his libertarianism sort of fits with the the common right wing hypnosis that so rules the public’s mindspace, which feels so ordinary and common, that it’s not even questioned. And so on that count, Paul doesn’t seem all that out of place given this mindset.

    And yet I agree with you that there is some mighty strange and disturbing psychology driving Ron Paul. He is extremely ripe fodder for a Matt Taibbai kind of feature or book length expose.

    • Good points. It’s normal at this point to simply be stunned by someone who, on the surface, espouses such a strange mix of good and bad, particularly because these particular goods are rarely ever mentioned – so impoverished is the range of our political discourse – “you mean, we could actually have X?“.

      You must read Ta-Nahisi Coates’s blog post on this.

  18. Pat – thanks for the Lincoln quote – the sheep/wolf example is priceless.

    (Now that the Republicans should start running, full time, against Obama rather than against each other we can expect the word ‘socialist’ in connection with Obama to become their platform leader – ad nauseam. Like ‘liberty,’ it means different things to different people, but of course we’ll only get a pejorative definition.)

Comments are closed.