Posted on 07/27/2007 5:39:58 PM PDT by neverdem
Why some libertarians don't want to join the Ron Paul revolution.
Republican congressman from Texas (and 1988 Libertarian Party presidential candidate) Ron Paul seems to be doing pretty good for libertarianism these days. He's gotten more press exposure and more Internet buzz than any libertarian movement political figure, and has done so outside the dead-end third party context. A surprising amount of the attention has even been respectful and positive—and for a candidate as ignored and excluded as Paul, any press short of a full-on hostile shredding is good news.
Sure, he still has zero traction (well, 2 percent) in conventional polling. And any respectable reporter would sooner fail to check whether his mother loves him than neglect to mention the apparently settled fact that Paul has no chance of winning the nomination.
But some Ron Paul Revolutionaries insist that the mainstream media are putrid corpses in brackish water, and conventional polls are for losers who still answer their landlines. Paul's support—by more postmodern measures—continues to grow. He's still the king of meetup.com, which does generate real-world crowds, and even real-world food drives. He's also the political king of YouTube (22,157 subscribers). We won't find out for months if these netroots measures mean anything in electoral terms. And that's just fine for a thrifty message-oriented candidate, who psychically benefits from running (and builds up more fundraising resources for any future effort) even if he fails utterly with vote totals.
This past Sunday he hit a political respectability jackpot, with a long, thorough, serious, and critical-but-respectful profile in the New York Times Magazine. Most of the Ron Paul press tells, however questioningly, of a politician dedicated to severely limited government that doesn't want to interfere in our personal lives, doesn't want to investigate us and control us, wants to abolish the income tax, and wants to bring troops home and dedicate our military only to actual national defense—a politician against the federal drug war, against the Patriot Act, against regulating the Internet, and for habeas corpus.
Still, many libertarians are either ambivalent or actively unhappy with Paul's campaign and the public attention it has gotten. They feel either that Paul is not libertarian enough in all respects, or are unhappy with linking libertarianism to certain aspects of Paul's rhetoric, focus, or past. You'll hear: If, after this campaign, whenever anyone thinks of libertarian, they think, oh, you are like Ron Paul?—will that be good for libertarianism in the future? And would you feel personally comfortable with it?
One prominent version of Libertarian Ron Paul Anxiety comes via noted and respected anarcho-legal theorist Randy Barnett in The Wall Street Journal. Barnett has decades of hardcore libertarian movement credentials behind him and is one of Lysander Spooner's biggest fans. (Spooner, the 19th century individualist anarchist, famously declared the state to be of inherently lower moral merit than a highway bandit.) But the mild obstetrician, family man, and experienced legislator Ron Paul is too radical for Barnett in one respect—the respect that is key to most of Paul's traction to begin with: hisconsistent, no-compromise, get-out-now stance against the war in Iraq.
Barnett is eager to dissociate libertarianism writ large from Paul's anti-Iraq War stance, claiming that many libertarians are concerned that Americans may get the misleading impression that all libertarians oppose the Iraq war—as Ron Paul does—and even that libertarianism itself dictates opposition to this war. It would be a shame, he suggests, if this misinterpretation inhibited a wider acceptance of the libertarian principles that would promote the general welfare of the American people.
This is doubly curious. First, because opposition to non-defensive war traditionally is a core libertarian principle (to begin with, since it inherently involves mass murder and property destruction aimed at people who have not harmed the people imposing the harm) and is, in fact, the position of the vast majority of self-identified libertarians. Second, why would one worry that libertarianism can be damaged by an association with an idea that is in fact immensely popular? And, to boot, a popular position in which Paul has unique credibility for being right, and right from the beginning, unlike pretty much every other candidate.
Paul does, though, believe some things many libertarians don't, and some libertarians think these issues are so important that his libertarian credentials should be revoked. For example, he'd like to eliminate Roe v. Wade and would be happy to allow states and localities to ban abortion—and personally considers abortion a moral crime.
But this position, however hard to explain to one's liberal friends who ask a libertarian about this Ron Paul guy, doesn't place him outside the libertarian pale. If you see a living human fetus as a human life the same in morally significant respects as any born human, then supporting a ban on it is as consistent with libertarianism as laws against murder.
On trade, Paul takes a position that is perfectly proper from a radical, no-compromise libertarian position. That is, he's for free trade, but against government managed trade agreements. In practice, though, this seems to block off the only way tariff reductions and eliminations actually happen in the real world, a politically tone deaf stance that makes the perfect the enemy of the good.
When it comes to immigration, Paul believes the federal government can legitimately defend the border, and thinks that, in a world of government benefits and minimum wage laws, it is appropriate for government to do so stringently. I strongly disagree with how border defense has been done in practice, as do most libertarians. But as Paul told me, it doesn't mark him as essentially unlibertarian, but rather falls within a potentially legitimate set of actions for non-anarchist libertarians who do believe in the nation-state.
Paul's concern with immigration is of a piece with his right-populist strains, an obsession with "sovereignty" that feeds his fevered opposition to international trade pacts and the UN. Combined with his strong emphasis on trash-talking the Federal Reserve and advocating a return to gold, it's the sort of thing that strikes many other libertarians as, if not inherently unlibertarian, sort of cranky and kooky, and that led me to note to The New Republic that many libertarians (though not me) think of Paul as a bit of a yokel.
And a yokel with some ugly things in his past that no libertarian wants to be linked with. As The New York Times Magazine, among others, reported, Paul's newsletter during his years out of Washington contained some ugly race-baiting comments about the overwhelmingly criminal nature of black males in D.C. Paul says the comments were written by a staffer, but he's refused to say who and hasn't gone through any serious garment-rending and regret about it, though he did disavow them.
Some unhappy with Paul's presence in the GOP race are just Libertarian Party partisans who think no good for political liberty in America can arise from someone flying under the GOP flag. But LP-associated blogger Thomas Knapp presented a more interesting and detailed version of why Paul and the Paul movement can't do good for libertarianism (which he framed, unfortunately, in a jokey 9-11 Truther baiting frame, in which he seemed to be saying that because the GOP will benefit in the long run from Paul's campaign, that Paul was recruited for the task by Karl Rove).
Knapp argues that Ron doesn't always call himself libertarian, selling himself sometimes as a constitutionalist or small-government conservative depending on his audience; that he's accomplished almost nothing specific that furthers libertarian goals as a congressman while sucking lots of money out of libertarian donors; and that because of Paul's campaign, the LP won't do very well in 2008. Of course, there is nothing about these complaints that wouldn't apply to any almost-entirely-libertarian federal politician short of the libertarian revolution. It seems a classic best-enemy-of-the-good maneuver, or perhaps an inadvertent declaration that libertarian electoral politics, LP or major party, is inherently pretty useless for furthering libertarian policy change.
And Paul undoubtedly falls short of his reputation as a hardcore, no-compromise-ever libertarian constitutionalist. For example, he happily inserts earmarked pork spending that benefits his district in spending bills, to keep them happy—and then votes against the bills, to keep his free-market constituents nationwide happy.
Paul argues that the voting against the total bill is enough, that the rules of Congress mean the earmarks don't actually increase total federal spending anyway, and that while he'd rather the government didn't take the money, it's not inherently a crime to try to get some of it back for his constituents.
Sure, he's trying to have it both ways. Something about Paul that sometimes evades both his fans and opponents: He's a very, very successful politician. He's won election to Congress as a nonincumbent three times—an extraordinary record. And he's won as an incumbent 7 times, with steadily growing percentage totals. One of his political skills is a chameleonic quality: Without changing the roots of his message, he's able to seem a lot of things to a lot of people by intelligently strategic choices about which Ron Paul to sell. He's a libertarian, he's a constitutionalist, he's a true conservative. When I saw him speak earlier this month at FreedomFest to an audience of mostly self-conscious libertarians, he never once mentioned immigration, emphasizing rather war and money.
So, yes: Ron Paul is by no means the perfect candidate for most American libertarians. Some find his stance on trade obtuse, his stance on abortion tyrannical; the race-baiting, however disavowed, stupid, wrong, off-putting to most Americans, and dangerous for libertarians to be associated with; his position on earmarks sleazy politician logic-chopping. They envision a horrific Ron Paul's America in which abortion and immigration are banned, the federal drug war ended but a state-level one ongoing, and a financial system wrecked with reckless goldbuggery—and libertarianism tarnished forevermore.
Libertarians leery of Paul should ask themselves (while bearing in mind that of course no one, certainly no libertarian, is under any obligation to support or advocate or vote for any politician ever): Have we ever seen a national political figure better in libertarian terms—better on taxes, on drugs, on spending, on federalism, on foreign policy, on civil liberties? And for the pragmatic, cosmopolitan, mainstream libertarian: Why is Ron Paul the place where making the non-existent best the enemy of the good becomes the right thing to do?
..sure wants Bush impeached because he's removeing our north and south borders."
Does she mention the NAU in your conversations?
"Obviously, I missed that in the news."
That's right. You will not hear much about The North American Union in the MSM.
I left those out because this is an ostensibly conservative forum. I imagined that the actions of those Democrats was already pretty self-evident and didn’t need mentioning.
Well, there you have it, folks; possibly the best single argument against the candidacy of Ron Paul that you will ever hear.
Yup. Been there. Done that myself.
Quite frankly, ontap, I found myself getting nowhere with it.
I haven't given up, I'm just changing tactics.
The “wake up” call comment was probably unnecessarily vague. It, as was the whole rant, targeted at those who attack Ron Paul and similar so vehemently without first considering thoughtfully what he has to say or by offering arguments instead of mocking him, violating our historically prudent 11th commandment (save the venom for the Democrats, puh-lease ;-) ).
Take the association with Alex Jones. Bad choice. But even so successful a conservative as Phyllis Schlafly spoke to Democrats when she was campaigning against the Equal Rights Amendment, and no one would accuse her of being a traitor. Bush (or was it Buchanan, it doesn’t matter) spoke to Bob Jones University—so what. It didn’t make him a racist. You have to bring people around. If Billy Graham decided to preach to a gathering of the KKK, that wouldn’t make him a close personal friend of David Duke. Right?
That guilt by association thing is so stupid.
No offense you sound like a reasonable guy ,but how does cowtowing to a rather insignificant fringe group help us achieve anything. While I philosophically agree with most of what they say they are so far out there that it is the kiss of death to be seen with them. Some on this post are trying to say they make up 10% of the voting public that is just plain silly.
Oh yes. That Ron Paul is the only candidate, other than the Dems, who doesn't want to bring about the end of the United States of America. She said he is the only one who believes in the Constitution.
Especially with his absolute stupidity in standing side-by-side with the likes of Kucinich. Being "anti the way this war is being fought" and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a Communist a$$hole are two completely different things.
Anyone willing to give their political detractors that much publicity ammo to use against them does not deserve the High Office.
If your friend the RP-supporter would vote for Hillary, then she would vote for Pelosi, don’t let her kid you. And she might even vote for Sheehan... she’s just not ready to admit it.
That’s the thing about RP supporters. They claim to be the only true conservatives on the planet, and yet they have absolutely no qualms with teaming up with the worst of the leftist traitors in our country to make common cause against Bush.
RP is just another form of BDS.
See NOTHING in life is ever perfect. To be effective in politics you have to accept that basic factual reality. The 100%er club, who wrongly call themselves “Conservatives”, are too arrogantly stupid to realize that fact. So they simply drag everyone down with their perpetual pouting because their political glass is 30% empty.
Better they simply go away and fight among themselves then waste our time with their fundamental political incompetence and rabid whining.
He isn’t even remotely in the ball park of Conservative thought. He is a fringe wack job. People are so busy being mindlessly angry with everything they have simply blinded themselves to the fundamental unworkability of the Political Dogma according to Der Paul.
The problem here is too may people kid themselves that they can ignore all of Paul’s fleas because he happens to cater to their emotional dogma on this or that issue.
Too bad for the 100%ers, elections are not one by the most dogmatically pure but by the candidate best able to forge a working political coalition.
See their are not enough of you 100%ers to elect anyone. You fundementally inablity to accept anyone who is NOT 100% pure as yourselves, renders you politically irrelevent and impotent.
That’s actually pretty funny. Even Libertarians are turning against Ron Paul. Now he’ll be stuck with nothing but truthers and nutroots.
“And yet still Ron Paul isn’t good enough. His position on Iraq blinds pro-occupation conservatives to his other positions and renders him merely a crazy, demented kook.”
I don’t believe Ron Paul is a ‘crazy, demented kook’. I agree with the author that Paul is a very clever politician trying to have things both ways. I believe his supporters have drank too much of the Ron Paul kool-aid and need to seriously examine his positions on issues.
He claims to be against the war in Iraq because we ‘didn’t declare war but voted to invade Afghanistan without declaring war. (But he really wanted us to hire pirates instead.)
He believes abortion is wrong but opposes a law to stop it and would allow the legalization of murder of an unborn in some states and making it a crime of murder in another.
He believes pork barrel spending is un-Constitutional but still asks for several million a year for his district.
Now tell me again why I should support this man.
Hey, no offense taken! And thank you, sir!
I actually don't see myself "cowtowing" to anybody or any group, but rather following my own beliefs.
I have been on "the fringe" for so long that I don't even notice anymore.
I couldn't say what percentage, and it could go either way. 2% or 20%, nobody really knows. I will probably caucus (Iowa resident), as I have for some years now. I have no idea what will happen after that.
FYI; if the Republican nominee turns out to be a RINO, then I'm outa here. Sorry if that bothers some of you, but I have held my nose to vote for a globalist RINO for the last time.
I hold dual membership, and have already resolved to never waste my vote ever again.
I have also posted here several times my predictions, not that those predictions will change anybody's mind, but I have put it all out there for FReepers to see.
So for me at least, I have chosen the "fringe" because that is where my allegiance takes me.
I understand.
There are probably some things that I wish were different, but they just aren't, so I take what is available.
I take it that it's too bad there isn't somebody like Dr. Paul, but just not actually Dr. Paul who could take his place. Would that person then be your favorite candidate?
Just for the sake of talking, what point or points would you throw out of Ron Paul's platform, if you could?
Closer. But not quite it. We need a persuader. An orator. Someone with charisma. Someone who could articulate Dr. Paul's ideas better without the politically suicidal gaff of appearing at the press podium with a "blame America first" moonbat.
Just for the sake of talking, what point or points would you throw out of Ron Paul's platform, if you could?
It's not the platform, it's the presentation. I'm a libertarian philosophically. However, I'm also a big fan of the Constitution as laid forth by Jefferson, Mason, Henry, et al. Not this bastardized semi-fascist oligarchy we are operating under.
Hunter is still my ideal balance on this one. Staunchly conservative, a good orator, hasn't stuck his foot in his mouth or allowed his political enemies to make such hash out of his statements. Well, not yet any way...
Well the libertarian web site claims 200,000 total members so do the math. i understand your disappointment with Geo. Bush but how would you be feeling now if it had been Al Gore. Think about it man don’t go off the deep end and throw a temper tantrum only to wake up Nov 9th with President Hillary.
I have never voted for a Democrat in my entire life. I doubt I ever will.
Too much to reply to. The Luisitania was sailed into waters known to be choked with German U-boats and the Germans were well aware it was carrying munitions....facts not in dispute with any historian I know of. I didn’t raise a single conspiracy theory about Pearl Harbor. I believe Wilson and Roosevelt were culpable the same way Clinton was culpable for 9/11. Also no conspiracy theory.
Peace through strength, absolutely, but there was an enormous difference in the way The Gipper employed the military.
http://www.amconmag.com/2004_07_05/buchanan.html
My idea of peace through strength involves pointing a few nuclear-tipped missles at Mecca with the understanding that Mecca would be vaporized if the hair of an American were so much as mussed by an angry Muslim. Likewise I’m ok with a few thousand rednecks coming out of the Ozarks and Idaho on Harley’s to pull down some mosques where they teach the kiddies to hate Americans should we endure another 9/11. No pacifist am I and that makes more sense to me than Homeland Security, The Patriot Act, TSA and a whole host of other bureaucracies.
Here’s one for you: In the event that we are on the cusp of World War III, knowing that your “excellent leaders” in Washington have committed the country to $66 trillion in federal spending, where do you think we’ll get the funds to wage it all? China? Print more money? The US dollar is sinking against that joke currency called the Euro and the Japanese yen.
RFLMAO? Before you accuse me of getting my info off the Internet, you may want to clean up that puerile use of the Internet chat room phony acronym business. But then, that’s the kind of lowbrow dialog I was complaining about in the first place.
I'm sure we would all be in deep doo-doo. But then; aren't we in it now as well? I mean what with our President pushing us into the NAU and all? I'm not happy about that.
"Think about it man don’t go off the deep end and throw a temper tantrum only to wake up Nov 9th with President Hillary."
I have thought about it, and have concluded that the Republican party is apparently hell-bent on self-immolation. We'll see who the nominee is by this time next year.
If the nominee is a big-government globalist RINO, then we will lose the general. There aren't enough Republicans to carry it without significant help from some independent and cross-over voters.
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