Ron Paul and the paranoid style in American politics

The John Birch Society is a notorious far-right nutcase group, founded in 1958 by a businessman named Robert Welch, whose trademark was paranoid and delusional conspiracy theories. In case you think that I am exaggerating unfairly when I use words like "paranoid" and "delusional," let me just mention that Robert Welch accused President Dwight D. Eisenhower of being "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy" (no, I'm not making that up). That captures the general style of their world-view.

One might assume that the John Birch Society faded away decades ago, but no such luck. In fact, in February 2010 they hit the news as one one of the co-sponsors of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington DC. Now, in my opinion, a lot of the other CPAC participants, past and future, are already hard-right extremists only tenuously in contact with reality. But including the John Birch Society, no less, brought this tendency to the point of self-parody.

Nor is this just my opinion. Even some people sympathetic to CPAC and all its works, including a writer on the right-wing website Pajamas Media, Ryan Mauro, described this as a "monumentally stupid decision." Mauro also explained why even CPAC should continue to regard the John Birch Society as a fringe group beyond the pale of political respectability (as, say, William F. Buckley argued over four decades ago). At the very least, he suggested, "CPAC has made a major PR mistake in forming this alliance with JBS." For more details, including some information on the present-day activities of the John Birch Society, see here:

(In 2011 CPAC cut its ties with both the John Birch Society and the gay-rights Republican organization GOProud, which apparently were deemed equally bad for PR.)

But it so happens that one of the leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination is an open and enthusiastic fan of the John Birch Society. As you can probably guess, I'm talking about Ron Paul, who was a keynote speaker at their 50th anniversary celebration—not back in the 1980s or 1990s, but in 2008. If you like, you can see his speech on video here.



Ron Paul's very public alliance with the John Birch society was one of the points highlighted by James Kirchik in his December 29 piece on "Ron Paul's World" in the New York Times campaign blog. Kirchik has been a useful source of (carefully researched and accurate) information on some of Ron Paul's more unsavory activities and affiliations over the years. These include

the repugnant newsletters that Paul published from the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, which contain a raft of bigoted statements. Paul has denied authorship and implausibly claims not to know who wrote them.

The story of the newsletters is not new. In 1996, Lefty Morris, Paul’s Democratic Congressional opponent, publicized a handful, and in January 2008, I published a long piece in The New Republic based on my discovery of batches of the newsletters held at the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Yet Paul’s popularity in the prelude to the Iowa caucuses, where many polls put him in first place, has renewed attention to their revolting contents.

Recent media reports have tended to focus on the newsletters’ bigotry, which was primarily aimed at blacks, and to a smaller extent at gay people and Jews. The newsletters have complicated the situation for writers who have defended Paul, who point out that there is no trace of such prejudice in his public statements. [....]

But there is one major aspect of the newsletters, no less disturbing than their racist content, that has always been present in Paul’s rhetoric, in every forum: a penchant for conspiracy theories. [....]

Paul is proud of his association with the [John Birch Society], telling the Times Magazine in 2007, “I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They’re generally well educated, and they understand the Constitution.” In 1998, Paul appeared in a Birch Society documentary which lauded a bill he had introduced to force American withdrawal from the United Nations. [....]

Paul has frequently attacked the alleged New World Order that “elitist” cabals, like the Trilateral Commission and the Rockefeller family, in conjunction with “globalist” organizations, like the United Nations and the World Bank, wish to foist on Americans. In a 2006 column published on the Web site of Lew Rockwell (his former Congressional chief of staff and the man widely suspected of being the ghostwriter of the newsletters, although he denied it to me), Paul addressed the alleged “Nafta Superhighway.” [....] Paul wrote that the ultimate goal of the project [JW: which happens to be imaginary] was an “integrated North American Union” — yet one more bugbear of conspiracy theorists — which “would represent another step toward the abolition of national sovereignty altogether.”

In his newsletters, Paul expressed support for far-right militia movements, which at the time saw validation for their extreme, anti-government beliefs in events like the F.B.I. assault on the Branch Davidians and at Ruby Ridge. Paul was eager to fan their paranoia and portray himself as the one man capable of doing anything about it politically. [....]

In light of the newsletters and his current rhetoric, it is no wonder that Paul has attracted not just prominent racists, but seemingly every conspiracy theorist in America. [....] As Paul told The Times last week, he has no interest in dissuading the various extremists from backing his campaign, which is hardly surprising considering he’s spent three decades cultivating their support. Paul’s shady associations are hardly “bygone” and the “facts” of his dangerous conspiracy-mongering are very much “in evidence.” Paul has not just marinated in a stew of far-right paranoia; he is one of the chefs.

Of course, it is impossible to know what Ron Paul truly thinks about black or gay people or the other groups so viciously disparaged in his newsletters. What we do know with absolute certainty, however, is that Ron Paul is a paranoid conspiracy theorist who regularly imputes the worst possible motives to the very government he wants to lead.

I know that some otherwise intelligent and well-intentioned people (I am too polite to mention names, but they know who they are) have resisted acknowledging the undeniable fact that Ron Paul is not just a poisonously reactionary political troglodyte but an out-and-out crackpot. But they should try to face reality. The fact that a number of the other Republican candidates are also dangerous loons is not a good excuse for giving Ron Paul a free pass. And the fact that one might find some of his specific positions, or some of his pseudo-"libertarian" rhetoric, sympathetic is not a good enough excuse either.

Meanwhile, for those of you to whom this information about Ron Paul is news, I recommend reading Kirchik's latest piece in full (below). But this is the tip of the iceberg.

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

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New York Times (Campaign Stops)
December 29, 2011, 12:22 am
Ron Paul’s World
By James Kirchik

Earlier this week, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, said that he would not vote for his fellow presidential candidate Ron Paul should Paul become the Republican nominee. The immediate cause of this dissension – highly unusual in a party primary – was the repugnant newsletters that Paul published from the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, which contain a raft of bigoted statements. Paul has denied authorship and implausibly claims not to know who wrote them.

The story of the newsletters is not new. In 1996, Lefty Morris, Paul’s Democratic Congressional opponent, publicized a handful, and in January 2008, I published a long piece in The New Republic based on my discovery of batches of the newsletters held at the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Yet Paul’s popularity in the prelude to the Iowa caucuses, where many polls put him in first place, has renewed attention to their revolting contents.

Recent media reports have tended to focus on the newsletters’ bigotry, which was primarily aimed at blacks, and to a smaller extent at gay people and Jews. The newsletters have complicated the situation for writers who have defended Paul, who point out that there is no trace of such prejudice in his public statements. Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Beast, for instance, writing last week about “rethinking” his original endorsement of Paul, suggests that

A fringe protest candidate need not fully address issues two decades ago that do not in any way reflect the campaign he has run or the issues on which he has made an appeal. But a man who could win the Iowa caucuses and is now third in national polls has to have a plausible answer for this.

In a long, anguished post on the Web site of The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf wrote that “the question is complicated by facts not in evidence and inherently subjective judgments about politics, race and the norms that govern how much a candidate’s bygone associations matter.” As long as one accepts the most charitable explanation for Paul’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act (it infringes on private property rights) or re-litigation of the Civil War (the government should have bought and released the slaves instead), perhaps there’s something to that argument. Though Paul’s penchant for promoting the cause of secession puts these stances in a dubious context.

But there is one major aspect of the newsletters, no less disturbing than their racist content, that has always been present in Paul’s rhetoric, in every forum: a penchant for conspiracy theories.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters Ron Paul at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington on Feb. 11, 2011.

In a 1990 C-Span appearance, taped between Congressional stints, Paul was asked by a caller to comment on the “treasonous, Marxist, alcoholic dictators that pull the strings in our country.” Rather than roll his eyes, Paul responded,“there’s pretty good evidence that those who are involved in the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations usually end up in positions of power. And I believe this is true.”

Paul then went on to stress the negligible differences between various “Rockefeller Trilateralists.” The notion that these three specific groups — the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller family — run the world has been at the center of far-right conspiracy theorizing for a long time, promoted especially by the extremist John Birch Society, whose 50^th anniversary gala dinner Paul keynoted in 2008.

Paul is proud of his association with the society, telling the Times Magazine in 2007, “I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They’re generally well educated, and they understand the Constitution.” In 1998, Paul appeared in a Birch Society documentary which lauded a bill he had introduced to force American withdrawal from the United Nations. With ominous music in the background and images of United Nations peacekeepers patrolling deserted streets, the film warned that the world body would destroy American private property rights, replace the Constitution with the United Nations Charter and burn churches to the ground.

Paul has frequently attacked the alleged New World Order that “elitist” cabals, like the Trilateral Commission and the Rockefeller family, in conjunction with “globalist” organizations, like the United Nations and the World Bank, wish to foist on Americans. In a 2006 column published on the Web site of Lew Rockwell (his former Congressional chief of staff and the man widely suspected of being the ghostwriter of the newsletters, although he denied it to me), Paul addressed the alleged “Nafta Superhighway.” This is a system of pre-existing and proposed roads from Mexico to Canada that conspiracy theorists claim is part of a nefarious transnational attempt to open America’s borders and merge the United States with its neighbors into a supra-national entity. Paul wrote that the ultimate goal of the project was an “integrated North American Union” — yet one more bugbear of conspiracy theorists — which “would represent another step toward the abolition of national sovereignty altogether.”

In his newsletters, Paul expressed support for far-right militia movements, which at the time saw validation for their extreme, anti-government beliefs in events like the F.B.I. assault on the Branch Davidians and at Ruby Ridge. Paul was eager to fan their paranoia and portray himself as the one man capable of doing anything about it politically. Three months before the Oklahoma City bombing, in an item for the Ron Paul Survival Report titled, “10 Militia Commandments,” he offered advice to militia members, including that they, “Keep the group size down,” “Keep quiet and you’re harder to find,” “Leave no clues,” “Avoid the phone as much as possible,” and “Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

The closest Paul has come in his public statements to endorsing violence against the government was during an interview in 2007, when he was asked about Ed and Elaine Brown, a New Hampshire couple who had refused to pay federal income taxes. In the summer of that year, they instigated a five-month armed standoff with United States marshals, whom Ed Brown accused of being part of a “Zionist, Illuminati, Freemason movement.” Echoing a speech he had just delivered on the House floor, Paul praised the pair as “heroic” “true patriots,” likened them to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and compared them favorably to “zombies,” that is, those of us who “just go along” and pay income tax.

Finally, there’s Paul’s stance on the most pervasive conspiracy theory in America today, the idea that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were perpetrated not by Al Qaeda, but by the federal government or some other shadowy force. While Paul has never explicitly endorsed this claim, there is a reason so many 9/11 “truthers” flock to his campaign. In a recent YouTube video posted by a leading 9/11 conspiracy group, “We Are Change,” Paul is asked, “Why won’t you come out about the truth about 9/11?”

Rather than answer, say, that the “9/11 Commission already investigated the attacks,” or ask the questioner what particular element of “the truth” remained unknown, Paul knowingly replied, “Because I can’t handle the controversy, I have the I.M.F., the Federal Reserve to deal with, the I.R.S. to deal with, no because I just have more, too many things on my plate. Because I just have too much to do.”

Paul knows where his bread is buttered. He regularly appears on the radio program of Alex Jones, a vocal 9/11 and New World Order conspiracy theorist based in his home state of Texas. On Jones’s show earlier this month, Paul alleged that the Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador on United States soil was a “propaganda stunt” perpetrated by the Obama administration.

In light of the newsletters and his current rhetoric, it is no wonder that Paul has attracted not just prominent racists, but seemingly every conspiracy theorist in America. The title of one of Paul’s newsletter series – the Ron Paul Survival Report – was a conscious appeal to followers of the “survivalist” movement of the 1990s, whose ideology blended white supremacy and anti-government militancy in preparation for what Paul himself termed the “coming race war.”

As Paul told The Times last week, he has no interest in dissuading the various extremists from backing his campaign, which is hardly surprising considering he’s spent three decades cultivating their support. Paul’s shady associations are hardly “bygone” and the “facts” of his dangerous conspiracy-mongering are very much “in evidence.” Paul has not just marinated in a stew of far-right paranoia; he is one of the chefs.

Of course, it is impossible to know what Ron Paul truly thinks about black or gay people or the other groups so viciously disparaged in his newsletters. What we do know with absolute certainty, however, is that Ron Paul is a paranoid conspiracy theorist who regularly imputes the worst possible motives to the very government he wants to lead.

James Kirchick is a contributing editor for The New Republic and a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Ron Paul unleashed

No one should complain that American political rhetoric is getting too bland and over-cautious. As Kevin Drum and others pointed out a few days ago, "Ron Paul basically called for armed revolution this week":

Way back in 2012, when he was running for president, Ron Paul seemed to some people like a breath of fresh air. Sure, maybe he was a bit of a crank, but at least he didn't sanitize his beliefs in order to avoid offending people. He said what he meant, and he meant what he said.

But, um, maybe not. At least, not based on this look into Paul's libertarian id, delivered last night at a campaign rally in Virginia for Ken Cuccinelli:

"Jefferson obviously was a clear leader on the principle of nullification," the former Texas congressman said of the third president. "I’ve been working on the assumption that nullification is going to come. It’s going to be a de facto nullification. It’s ugly, but pretty soon things are going to get so bad that we’re just going to ignore the feds and live our own lives in our own states."

....He tore into the Constitution’s 17th Amendment. Ratified in 1913, it’s the one that allows for the direct election of U.S. senators by popular vote. "That undermined the principle importance of the states," said Paul.

He criticized the 16th Amendment, which allowed the federal income tax. After the crowd chanted "End the Fed," Paul decried the printing of more money by the Federal Reserve. "We need someone to stand up to the authoritarians," he said. "They’re dictators."

....He stressed that the constitutional "right to keep and bear arms" was not for hunting, but to allow rebellion against tyrannical governments. "The Second Amendment was not there so you could shoot rabbits," he said. "Right now today, we have a great threat to our liberties internally."  [JW: those boldings are Kevin Drum's]

Huh. I don't remember him being willing to deliver harangues quite like this during last year's debates. I guess he was holding back after all, just another mealy-mouthed politician unwilling to buck the polls and tell the people the raw truth. [....]

This incident suggests three sorts of reflections:

=> There is one curious feature of American political rhetoric over the past three decades to which people have become so accustomed that I think many of them have stopped noticing how odd it is. Since 1980 or so, which of the two major political parties in the US is the one that constantly and proudly uses the language of revolution, rebellion, and revolutionary change? It's certainly not the Democrats. Instead, "revolutionary" rhetoric and imagery now come almost exclusively from the Republicans—and not just from the fringes. We've moved from the Reagan Revolution though the Gingrich Revolution ... up through the Tea Party. Fred Barnes's enthusiastic book about the Bush II presidency, published in early 2006 when Bush still seemed to be riding high, was titled Rebel in Chief. And so on. This rhetorical pattern is one more symptom of the fact that right-wing radicalism, not any sort of conservatism, now sets the tone on the American right. These people (and not just the ultras) confidently boast about their eagerness to blow things up. An interesting question is why they, or anyone else, go on calling this attitude "conservative".

=> Of course, not all Republican politicians and pundits go for this kind of rhetorical radicalism (and substantive extremism), and even some of those who use the rhetoric don't always take it very seriously. Occasionally, they even worry that apocalyptic political theatrics and invocations of "Second Amendment remedies" can become public-relations liabilities that turn off significant numbers of general-election voters. But it is important to bear in mind that a great many right-wing voters and office-holders really do take this stuff very seriously. One reason to pay attention to Ron Paul, reactionary crank though he may be, is that the things he says resonate deeply with the way that a lot of Americans see the world. And in their minds, as in Ron Paul's, a willingness to contemplate extreme remedies is linked to the continuing, widespread vitality of what Richard Hofstadter once called the paranoid style in American politics. When tyranny and national catastrophe are upon us, "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!" (as Barry Goldwater, or rather his speech-writer, once put it).

Furthermore, Republicans who don't share this view of the world (or don't fully share it) usually treat this kind of talk as a normal, acceptable, and respectable part of mainstream political discourse. Yes, there are some exceptions (the most prominent tend to be former Republican office-holders who have retired and will no longer be running for office), but they're exceptions. And the rest of us are too ready to let them get away with it.  There is an interesting asymmetry here. Kevin Drum again:

This comes via Ed Kilgore, who asks, "Can you imagine a statewide Democratic candidate anywhere, much less in a 'purple state,' associating himself or herself so conspicuously with such ravings? No, you can't." This is what I was talking about yesterday: liberals don't have the equivalent of a tea party because there just aren't very many liberals who hold views this extreme—and the ones who do are pretty marginalized. In the Republican Party, however, this kind of thing barely even lifts any eyebrows.

And the most remarkable part of all this is that the rest of us—centrists, liberals, non-insane Republicans, the press, etc.—are expected to shrug off this kind of thing as nothing more than a sort of boys-will-be-boys stemwinder, not to be taken seriously. Remarkable indeed.

=> Then there's Ron Paul himself. When Kevin Drum pointed out that Ron Paul has "seemed to some people like a breath of fresh air" (not just in 2012, but as far back as his 2007-2008 presidential run, which first brought him widespread attention), my first reaction was:  yes, stupid people. But the situation is actually a little more complicated than that. Ron Paul has also attracted indulgence, and even approval, from some ordinarily intelligent and decent people who were beguiled by the fact that he seemed to agree with them on one or another issue they thought was important—legalizing marijuana, neo-isolationism in foreign policy, cutting back military spending, opposing "big government," or whatever. Plus, he did show some disdain for the usual norms of political correctness in presidential politics. A combination of selective attention and wishful thinking led such people to overlook the obvious, unambiguous, and overriding fact that Ron Paul is, and has always been, a poisonously reactionary political troglodyte with consistently demonstrated willingness to use neo-Confederate, racist, and xenophobic appeals.

Some of those people may now be starting to notice what Ron Paul actually stands for. I notice, for example, that on Tuesday Andrew Sullivan, who actually endorsed Ron Paul for the Republican presidential nomination back in 2007 (along with Barack Obama on the Democratic side), got off the Ron Paul bandwagon:

As for Virginia, Cuccinelli’s relatively strong showing suggests to me that the Tea Party is far from dead, and that the prospect of the poor getting health insurance still energizes them enormously. And tonight, I have to say, the respect I had for Ron Paul was obliterated by the following inflammatory rhetoric:

Jefferson obviously was a clear leader on the principle of nullification. I’ve been working on the assumption that nullification is going to come. It’s going to be a de facto nullification. It’s ugly, but pretty soon things are going to get so bad that we’re just going to ignore the feds and live our own lives in our own states.

That’s loaded Confederate rhetoric, and when combined with this statement – “The Second Amendment was not there so you could shoot rabbits. Right now today, we have a great threat to our liberties internally” – it crosses the line to promoting sedition. I’m done with him.

Better late than never. But let's not forget that Ron Paul is just one (slightly exaggerated) symptom of a bigger problem. And although his son Rand Paul has tried to cultivate a less "inflammatory" style, fundamentally he's a chip off the old block. How long will he get a pass?

—Jeff Weintraub

The French Ron Paul?

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Both the US and France will be having presidential elections later in 2012. The structure and dynamics of politics in the two countries are dramatically different in a lot of important ways, and it would be foolish to look for any close analogies. Nevertheless, I feel moved to share some speculative musings—no more than that—about a more approximate possible analogy. My musings were provoked by reading a string of troubling reports about the resurgence of the far-right National Front in France under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, daughter of the FN's founder Jean-Marie Le Pen. For example:

Sarkozy Just Ahead of Le Pen in French Presidency Election Poll

Jan. 13 (Bloomberg) — French President Nicolas Sarkozy is just two percentage points ahead of anti-immigration candidate Marine Le Pen less than four months before the presidential election, an Ifop poll for Paris Match showed.

In the first round, to be held April 22, Socialist candidate Francois Hollande would finish first with 27 percent, followed by Sarkozy with 23.5 percent and National Front candidate Le Pen on 21.5 percent, the poll published today showed today. [Etc. ....]

Obviously, I don't intend to suggest any simple equivalence between Ron Paul and the Le Pens. In many respects, they represent two different varieties of reactionary politics. In the ideological spectrum of the American right, a figure like Pat Buchanan probably corresponds more precisely to the Le Pens, father & daughter, than Ron Paul.* The National Front, for example, is as far away from free-market-fundamentalism as one could imagine. It's true that both Paul and Le Pen are obsessed with protecting national sovereignty against real and imagined threats from multinational institutions, but for Ron Paul that's consistent with being a doctrinaire free-trader, whereas the National Front shares the distrust of free-trade "neo-liberalism" that runs across the whole French political spectrum. It's also true that Ron Paul has a record of appealing to racist and xenophobic sentiments (and his positions on immigration still paint a picture of the "Balkanization of America" caused by an uncontrolled flood of illegal immigrants, he supports a constitutional amendment to abolish birthright citizenship, and so on). But Paul's supporters and apologists are correct when they point out that these themes have not been prominent in his current campaign.

In both cases, however, we're talking about right-wing political tendencies that appeal to widespread beliefs and concerns in public opinion, but which until recently were considered too un-respectable and politically beyond-the-pale to be taken seriously ... and which are now riding a wave of anti-establishment feeling into political respectability.

As a candidate for the Republican nomination, Ron Paul seems to be stuck with a ceiling of somewhere around 20% support, only slightly higher in some states and somewhat lower in most others. But Paul's supporters are, on average, both younger and more fired up with enthusiasm than the supporters of the other Republican candidates (and they include a lot of people registered as Independents and even Democrats, not just registered Republicans). Furthermore, too many people who should know better have lost sight of the fact that he's a dangerous crackpot and are treating Paul and his candidacy with remarkably uncritical indulgence. If Ron Paul manages to keep his campaign active through the rest of the Republican nomination fight, which seems plausible, it may be hard for the Republican establishment to avoid making some accommodations with him and his constituency down the line. And I can't help being struck by the fact that Ron Paul has a smoother-but-equally-far-out son in the Senate, Rand Paul, who could conceivably wind up playing the role of Marine Le Pen.

(Of course, there are other far-right tendencies in the Republican Party that I also find quite scary, and I don't want to give the impression that I'm discounting those, but they can be left for another discussion.)

As for the Le Pens ... In 2002 the Narional Front's founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, got slightly under 17% of the vote in the first round of the Presidential elections. The field was so fragmented by multiple candidacies that, to everyone's shock, Le Pen knocked the Socialist Party's candidate out of second place and went into the seond & final round of voting. But Le Pen was overwhelmingly repudiated by the electorate, who rallied around the incombent Jacques Chirac and gave him a crushing victory. (As one slogan memorably put it: "Vote for the crook, not the fascist.") Le Pen's share of the vote in the head-to-head stage of the election didn't quite reach 18%.

On the other hand, Marine Le Pen's figures have already reached over 21% in a much less crowded field. If she can maintain that level of support and expand it even slightly, she and her party could well break into respectability. It has been argued that in the period after 2002 the mainstream right has already shifted some of its positions to accommodate parts of the National Front's message and to co-opt parts of its constituency—but that has been true, at most, only unevenly and up to a point. If the cosmetic make-over of the National Front under Marine Le Pen succeeds in making the party politically respectable, that process could well be be reinforced.

Or these speculations could turn out to be entirely off-base, both for the US and for France. I hope so. Stay tuned ....

—Jeff Weintraub

* Although the contrast between the styles of reactionary politics represented by Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul is real and significant, perhaps one shouldn't overstate the gap between them, either. As my correspondent Robert Beckhusen reminds me, Ron Paul supported Buchanan in Buchanan's 1992 bid for the Republican nomination; and although Buchanan can't formally endorse a candidate this year because of his job with MSNBC, in practice he has come about as close to endorsing Ron Paul as he can get without saying so explicitly.

Why Ron Paul condemns the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln

Some of you may be asking yourselves, "Who is Ron Paul?" (you're the lucky ones) and "Why should we be interested in his idiotic opinions?" I grant that the second is a plausible question, but under the circumstances I think his views are newsworthy and merit a bit of attention.

The apparently endless campaign leading up to the 2008 US Presidential election has already thrown up a lot of odd phenomena, but one of the oddest is the candidacy of Texas Republican Congressman Ron Paul. What is odd is not that he's running--anyone can do that, and he's already done it several times in the past--but that this time around he's attracting a respectable amount of favorable attention and support (on December 16 his campaign raised more than $6 million, overwhelmingly from small contributions, in a one-day fund-raising push). There is even some speculation that he might pull off a second-place showing in the New Hampshire Republican primary.

Nor is his appeal confined to a lunatic fringe of far-right Republican primary voters. Andrew Sullivan, who normally considers himself a serious political analyst, has actually endorsed him for the Republican nomination (while favoring Barack Obama on the Democratic side); the anti-Bush Republican TV blowhard Chris Matthews has declared "I love Ron Paul!"; and a surprising number of liberal and progressive types seem to find him attractive, too.

(Speaking of the lunatic fringe, the loony-left Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich even proposed running with Ron Paul on a Kucinich-Paul ticket, and [a 1/4/08 addition] here's an "anti-imperialist" endorsement of Ron Paul from CounterPunch.)

I don't think there's any real chance that Ron Paul will actually be elected President, so some of the other Republican candidates are more alarming in practical terms. But the fact that he's being taken seriously at all is perplexing and a bit depressing.

Paul does appear to be a generally sincere, principled, and ideologically consistent politician. But at the same time--let's not beat around the bush here--he's a reactionary political troglodyte and, on various important issues, a bit of a crank. (I will spell out my reasons for saying this more fully in another post soon, but this conclusion should be obvious to anyone who has taken more than a few moments to look into Paul's record or to listen closely to what he's actually saying. People who want to make their own assessment can start by looking HERE and HERE.)

So what is going through the minds of those who see Ron Paul as an appealing candidate of 'change'? OK, I can understand why some people who opposed the 2003 Iraq war might find it refreshing to hear a Republican oppose it and condemn the Bush administration's overall foreign policy (but so have other right-wing Republicans like Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak and, more sotto voce, Grover Norquist), and there's no question that Ron Paul's across-the-board anti-statism leads him to take some genuinely commendable positions. such as opposing government violations of civil liberties--or, at least, violations of civil liberties by the national government. (This aspect of his anti-statist "libertarianism" is complicated a bit by the fact that he is an anti-abortion absolutist, but I grant that there is not an inherent logical contradiction here.) What seems to be going on with a lot of people is that they selectively notice only a few of Paul's positions that they agree with, while either ignoring or being unaware of the rest, and they're attracted to the anti-establishment flavor of his campaign.

But in the process they often overlook the larger fact that Paul is a free-market fundamentalist, who would like to take us back to the most radical version of 19th-century economic liberalism, and an old-fashioned isolationist. I suspect that the real significance of Ron Paul's appeal, and the deeper problem of which it is only one symptom, is that a world-view of simplistic free-market fundamentalism and wishful isolationism has a lot of seductive resonance for many Americans--including a fair number who who might not embrace these positions in a fully explicit way. If so, then the Ron Paul boomlet helps illuminate some important underlying pathologies in American political culture.

Paul's supporters often get upset when is called an isolationist, and claim that this label is either an exaggeration or a malicious falsehood. It is neither. Yes, it's true that being opposed to military intervention abroad does not, in itself, make someone an isolationist. But Paul also wants to eliminate all foreign aid and opposes any international agreements that restrict US sovereignty in any way. Thus, just for example, he favors withdrawing from international organizations like the UN, the World Trade Organization, and NATO; he rejects any new multilateral initiatives, including US membership in the International Criminal Court or US participation in any international climate-change accords; and he appears to have fallen for the paranoid conspiratorial fantasy that NAFTA is intended as the first step toward merging the US into "an integrated North American Union" that would eventually lead to "the abolition of national sovereignty altogether." All that certainly adds up to a coherent perspective--i.e., isolationism--and it's a perspective that has played an important role in US political history. But I doubt it's one that most self-styled "progressives" really want to get behind. Based on everything that has happened in the world since the end of the 19th century, I would describe this position as unrealistic, unwise, and in some respects a bit delusional.

Yes, one has to grant that Paul seems to be sincerely pro-market and anti-statist rather than simply pro-business, as attested by his opposition to subsidies for big business and agriculture and his support for unilateral abolition of US tariffs. But how many people really think it would be a good idea to eliminate the income tax (without replacing it with anything else), abolish the Federal Reserve System, go back on the gold standard, phase out Social Security and Medicare, eviscerate environmental protection, and in general dismantle most elements of economic management and the public household built up since the 1890s? Paul's commitment to this kind of radical market utopianism is no doubt carefully considered and well-intentioned, but the historical experience of the past few centuries makes it clear than any attempt to put it seriously into practice would have catastrophic consequences.

Then there is the fact that, as Ron Paul himself puts it proudly, he has consistently "opposed all gun control schemes"--even the most basic and common-sensical, such as mandatory registration of guns and gun ownership--and appears to believe that the Second Amendment provides an absolute guarantee for individuals to own weapons of all sorts (including military-style assault rifles and other automatic weapons). I recognize that one can have sensible and legitimate disagreements about gun control policies, but such a position strikes me as a bit extreme.

(Congressman Paul also rejects the theory of evolution ... but, alas, that doesn't separate him from most of the Republican pack.)

=> As I said, I'll put off discussing most of that for another time. For the moment, let's just focus on a few of Ron Paul's more eye-opening views, which were brought to public attention by his recent TV interview with Tim Russert (a transcript is HERE, and a YouTube video that captures part of the exchange I'm about to quote from is HERE), in which he reiterated some long-held positions. Brad DeLong responded to Paul's remarks with a contemptuous "*SNORT!!*", and I agree that this is an appropriate reaction ... but maybe it's worth elaborating a bit.

MR. RUSSERT: I read a speech you gave in 2004, the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. And you said this:

Contrary to the claims of supporters of the Civil Rights Act of '64, the act did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of '64 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty....

REP. PAUL: Well, we should do, we should do this at a federal level, at a federal lunch counter it'd be OK or for the military. Just think of how the government, you know, caused all the segregation in the military until after World War II. But when it comes, Tim, you're, you're, you're not compelled in your house to invade strangers that you don't like. So it's a property rights issue. And this idea that all private property is under the domain of the federal government I think is wrong. So this--I think even Barry Goldwater opposed that bill on the same property rights position, and that--and now this thing is totally out of control. If you happen to like to smoke a cigar, you know, the federal government's going to come down and say you're not allowed to do this.... [T]he federal government's taken over property--has nothing to do with race relations. It just happens, Tim, that I get more support from black people today than any other Republican candidate, according to some statistics. And I have a great appeal to people who care about personal liberties and to those individuals who would like to get us out of wars. So it has nothing to do with racism, it has to do with the Constitution and private property rights.

Russert was quoting from a speech that Ron Paul gave in July 2004 ("The Trouble with Forced Integration") explaining his reasons for being the only Congressman to vote against a resolution honoring the 40th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He denounced the Civil Rights Act as an unconstitutional violation of private property rights that served no useful purpose and reduced individual liberty.

Part of his argument turns on a dubious empirical claim that any reduction in racial discrimination that has occurred during the past four decades had nothing to do with the Civil Rights Act and similar legislation. And another part of his case against the Civil Rights Act is the claim that it led ineluctably to affirmative action, quotas, and other forms of positive discrimination, which he excoriates at length. But whatever one thinks about affirmative action, focusing on Paul's criticism of it would be a distraction from the main thrust of his argument, which is not an attack on affirmative action but an attack on anti-discrimination laws. With admirable candor, he makes it clear that he believes that any laws prohibiting discrimination by non-governmental agents or organizations are illegitimate in principle.

Such a position is often described by its adherents as "libertarian," but characterizing it this way--as though "libertarian" simply meant "anti-government"--strikes me as an abuse of both language and logic. The belief that laws prohibiting racial discrimination in employment, housing, and so on necessarily reduce individual liberty makes sense only on the basis of two highly dubious assumptions: (a) that restrictions on or threats to individual liberty come only from government (or, in some versions, only from the national government), and (b) that a pervasive structure of racist social and economic discrimination directed against blacks did not restrict their freedom unless it was also legally mandated. But the kindest thing to say about these two assumptions is that they are sociologically naive and convey a severely distorted picture of the real world. More bluntly, they are absurd and, in most cases, ideologically tendentious.

(To avoid any possible misunderstanding, I obviously agree that it makes perfect sense to be nervous about the threats to freedom from unchecked or despotic state power and, more generally, about the dangers that can stem from an excessive and unbalanced role for the state in social life. That's one factor that should concern anyone committed to freedom. But the simplistic equation that "less government" necessarily = "more freedom" is obviously wrong--unless you think it's self-evident that people are more free in, say, Afghanistan or the Congo than in Iowa.)

For the sake of argument, let's assume that Paul is being honest when he says that his position on these issues is not motivated by racism (though he does have a history of blatantly racist statements and associations with white-supremacist & anti-semitic wacko groups). That question is less important than the fact that his position is indefensible and pernicious.

=> Then Russert and Paul turn to the Civil War.

MR. RUSSERT: I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln. "According to Paul, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery."

REP. PAUL: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn't have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. I mean, it was the--that iron, iron fist..

MR. RUSSERT: We'd still have slavery.

REP. PAUL: Oh, come on, Tim. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. And the way I'm advising that it should have been done is do like the British empire did. You, you buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years? I mean, the hatred and all that existed. So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. I mean, that doesn't sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.

It's always nice to see an elected official making a considered historical argument, but in fact Paul's argument here is ludicrous on both historical and logical grounds. However, my impression is that most commentaries have failed to zero in on the central point that makes it so absurd.

Let's leave aside the question of why it would be morally acceptable, from a so-called "libertarian" perspective, to reward slave-owners financially for having successfully enslaved and exploited other human beings (a point nicely addresed here). One could, hypothetically, make the pragmatic argument that ending slavery in the US through a legislative program of compensated emancipation might have been preferable to ending it through a massively bloody and destructive civil war.

But Paul's whole argument rests on the fallacious assumption that at some point these two options--of compensated emancipation or civil war--were available alternatives between which the Lincoln administration or some other US leadership could have made a choice. In the real world, the choices never presented themselves this way. Proposals for compensated emancipation were certainly floating around in the decades before the Civil War (and Lincoln even proposed it, unsuccessfully, for the border states during the war itself), but the point is that the southern slave-owning elites refused to consider it. In the case of the British Empire, once the British government had decided to end slavery, the slave-owners (in the overseas colonies) did not have the political strength to block it. Therefore, legislated abolition could be forced down their throats without the need for military conflict. In the US, the southern slaveocracy did have the political strength to block it, and they were unwilling to accept any peaceful abolition of their "peculiar institution."

How do we know this? Well, in 1860 the election of Lincoln--a candidate who had explicitly and repeatedly declared that he would not touch the institution of slavery where it already existed, but only proposed to limit its expansion to new territories--was enough the provoke them to secede from the US and form the Confederacy. Once that happened, the question of whether the US government should use compensated emancipation to end slavery in the southern states became historically irrelevant, since (as Ron Paul seems to forget) the US government headed by Lincoln no longer had any jurisdiction in the Confederate States--unless, that is, it used military force to prevent their secession.

I suppose it's hypothetically possible that, if the southern states had not seceded in 1860, then at some point in the next few decades the possibility of ending slavery through compensated emancipation might have become a realistic policy option. But in terms of the actual choices facing Lincoln and the rest of the US government in 1860, the scenario presented by Paul (and others like him) is a pure fantasy, and the question of whether a policy of ending slavery in the south by compensated emancipation might have been better than going to war had become irrelevant. The real choice, for Lincoln, was whether to accept the breakup of the Union or to go to war to preserve it. He chose the latter option and carried the country with him--though, at certain low points during the war, just barely.

(Once the war got going, as we all know, it developed its own political dynamics, as massive wars do, and it eventually resulted in an outcome that few people intended or foresaw at the beginning--the comprehensive abolition of slavery in the US. This was the ironic result of a process that the southern slave-owning elite themselves set in motion by seceding from the US in order to protect slavery.)

=> And by the way, to briefly address another canard that obfuscates many discussions of these matters, let's be clear that the Civil War was fundamentally about slavery--not because ending slavery was the prime motive that led most of those on the Union side to support the war (it wasn't), but because the determination to maintain slavery was the crucial and fundamental reason why the southern states decided to secede in the first place.

Southern apologists have tried to deny this undeniable reality for a century and a half, and some people still buy the line that secession had to do primarily with the defense of states' rights and other such principles, in a manner quite unrelated to slavery. There have also been pseudo-sophisticated economic-determinist arguments, often with a Marxist or quasi-Marxist twist, claiming that the war was "really" about such issues as industrial tariffs, public investments by the national government, and the like. (Marx himself was never seduced by such obfuscations, and always described the war as having been caused by a "slaveholders' rebellion.") But in fact these arguments are bunk. (This post has already gone on long enough, so for the moment I will simply point this out rather than defending this assertion in detail.)

Yes, history is complex, and these and other issues generated all sorts of political conflicts within and between regions during the decades leading up to the Civil War. But without the overriding, explosive question of slavery, none of these issues would have broken up the Union. Furthermore, when 11 southern states did secede to form a new country, what they said about their reasons at the time (as opposed to the rationalizations that some southerners offered in retrospect) made it clear that the perceived threat to the institution of slavery was their main impetus for doing so.

One example (among many) is a famous speech that Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, gave on the eve of war in March 1861. After surveying various aspects of the new Confederate constitution, Stephens zeroed in on the key point: "African slavery," based on the natural inferiority of "the negro [....] to the white man," is "the corner-stone" of the Confederacy. And the controversy over slavery "was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution." The second point, at least, is indisputable.

The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution — African slavery as it exists amongst us — the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact.

But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. [....] Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. [....]

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner–stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.

(Links to this speech and some other relevant documents are collected in a useful post on the weblog Reason and Revelation. Another cogent evisceration of Ron Paul's historical absurdities is offered by Ari at The Edge of the American West.)

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

P.S. [1/8/2008]: Again, nothing I said above depends on whether or not Ron Paul is personally a racist. Nevertheless ... it is worth perusing a round-up of Ron Paul's history of pro-Confederate sympathies, his associations with various lunatic-fringe groups, and the steady stream of bigotry and paranoid conspiracy-mongering that appeared for decades in Ron Paul's newsletters (Paul's spokesmen now deny that he wrote any of it, though he certainly didn't dissociate himself from it) in this New Republic piece by James Kirchick.

The latest from the Republican slugfest in South Carolina — Ron Paul attacks his opponents for being dishonest, corrupt, and insufficiently right-wing

At one point in David Weigel's running commentary on Monday night's Republican debate in South Carolina (The Massacre in Myrtle Beach: Live Thread) he offers this passing comment:

Sort of forgotten in the media's hazy coverage of Paul is that he runs, by miles, the most negative, record-based attacks of any campaign.

That jibes with other things I have read. And my impression is that most of these attack ads go out under Ron Paul's own name (commendably enough), rather than getting outsourced to allegedly 'independent' SuperPacs.

Weigel also offers, as an example, a new ad released by the Ron Paul campaign, which features direct and un-subtle attacks on Newt Gingrich ("Serial Hypocrite"), Rick Santorum ("Counterfeit Conservative"), and Mitt Romney ("Flip-Flopper" and father of ObamaCare):



According to this attack ad, Gingrich & Santorum & & Romney share "One Vision: More Big Government, More Mandates, Less Freedom".

This ad is interesting at a number of levels. Of course, given the character of the Republican primary electorate in South Carolina, most of the candidates are competing with each other to stand out as the most radical-right candidate in the race. (Romney, by contrast, just wants to convince Republican voters that he is reliably right-wing and also the most "electable" candidate to send up against Obama.) But they represent somewhat different strands and shadings of reactionary politics. So it is informative to see the specific grounds that this Ron Paul ad uses to pin the "counterfeit conservative" label on each of the other candidates. They illustrate some of the hot-button issues in current Republican politics, or at least the ones that Ron Paul and his campaign want to emphasize right now.

Most of the themes highlighted here are unsurprising. But it is intriguing that this ad attacks Rick Santorum not only for being insufficiently anti-union (a blemish on Santorum's pro-plutocratic purity that's not surprising for a politician whose political career started out in western Pennsylvania) but also, believe it or not, for being insufficiently hard-line against abortion. Santorum, let us not forget, is a candidate who has outspokenly condemned not only abortion but even contraception.

More generally, this ad helps to bring out the extent to which an obsessive jihad against Planned Parenthood has become a central theme in right-wing political discourse. Many of the attacks against Romney by his Republican opponents have emphasized that RomneyCare in Massachusetts not only paid Planned Parenthood for medical services but (horrors!) allowed a Planned Parenthood representative to sit on a state advisory panel. This Ron Paul ad doesn't even bother to spell that out in Romney's case, but instead charges that even Rick Santorum "funded Planned Parenthood" (double horrors!).

=> Ron Paul does not, in fact, have a "real plan to cut a trillion dollars year one and to balance the budget in three"—and, of course, any attempt to do anything along these lines in the middle of a recession would be economically catastrophic. But not all of his claims about his opponents are inaccurate or unfair. What a crew!

—Jeff Weintraub

What do Rick Perry & Ron Paul know about Canada that we don't?

Governor Perry on the stump in Clarinda, Iowa:

Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don’t have to buy from a foreign source,” Mr. Perry said [....]

Loud applause.

Did Perry simply forget that Canada is a foreign country? That would be a typically superficial, elitist response. But perhaps this apparent blooper has a deeper significance.

Among the various paranoid conspiracy theories endorsed by Ron Paul over the years ... no let me put that a bit less judgmentally ....

Ron Paul and others have discovered that there is a plot afoot to create a North American Union which, according to Paul, "would create a single nation out of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, with a new unelected bureaucracy and money system. Forget about controlling immigration under this scheme.” Ron Paul explained in 2006 that the first step in executing this nefarious scheme was the building of a proposed NAFTA Superhighway ("a ten-lane colossus the width of several football fields") and added that "Governor Perry is a supporter of the superhighway project".

So maybe Rick Perry was just being prescient—or, to put it another way, was prematurely spilling the beans about the forthcoming North American Union?

=> OK, I'm being facetious. In the real world, both the NAFTA Superhighway and the plot to dissolve the US, Mexico, and Canada into a North American Union are quite imaginary. But when Ron Paul denounces these imaginary dangers, he's not joking. And the fact that both Ron Paul and Rick Perry are potentially serious candidates for the Republican nomination for President of the United States is, unfortunately, also no joke.

—Jeff Weintraub

Matt Yglesias and David Frum concisely explain why objections to the 1964 Civil Rights Act by Ron Paul & Rand Paul are wrong and effectively racist

Those kinds of arguments are not restricted to Rand Paul and his father Ron Paul, but are common among various tendencies on the right, including those that call themselves "libertarian".  And some people are too ready to take them seriously, or even to find them plausible and half-convincing. So it's worth taking the trouble to knock them down, since they happen to be wrong and pernicious.

For a broader discussion of Ron Paul's links to the whole neo-Confederate ideological swamp,which his son Rand Paul has tried to fudge but has not really abandoned, I refer readers back to my 2008 post on Why Ron Paul condemns the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln. By itself, a historical  argument that the side fighting for freedom in the American Civil War was the Confederacy, that Lincoln was a tyrant, and that the Union victory was a disaster for American liberties might seem to be of limited significance for current political concerns.  (Like arguments, perhaps, that Stalinism was really "progressive" on balance and has been unfairly misunderstood?)  But when the same perspective also leads people to claim that key provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act were unnecessary, harmful, oppressive, and unconstitutional, then it's clear that this perspective has a lot of practical relevance.

Frankly, the kind of "libertarian" perspective for which Obamacare and Social Security and the 1964 Civil Rights Act are tyrannical but slavery was no big deal is, in my humble opinion, difficult to take seriously on either moral or logical grounds.

=> Here is Yglesias's post from Friday, In Defense of the Civil Rights Act—Against White Supremacy. As he noted, it was actually part of a series of exchanges, but it can stand quite well on its own:

I've been in a long and winding multi-front Twitter exchange over the question of Senator Rand Paul and race. The specific impetus was my assertion that Paul's opinion that democracy "gave us Jim Crow" relates to his white supremacist inclinations. Inclinations that I think are evidenced by, for example, his previous stated opposition to key provisions of the Civil Rights Act. That prompted a debate with some competing strands of conservative punditry, with Charles C.W. Cook taking the view that Paul is right and the Civil Rights Act is bad while David Freddoso thinks that the Civil Rights Act is good but associating Civil Rights Act opponents with racism is slander.

So to return to the beginning, there's no plausible meaning of "democracy" in which democracy gave us Jim Crow.

[JW:  And here Yglesias makes a crucial point that is too often overlooked, so pay close attention.]

Even if you take democracy to relatively narrowly mean majoritarian voting procedures this doesn't work. In the period between the Civil War and World War II, African-Americans were a majority in quite a few southern states and would have been a large—and potentially decisive—voting bloc in the others. If, that is, they were allowed to vote. But instead of voting, African-Americans were disenfranchised via a systematic campaign of terrorist violence. The same campaign that gave us the Jim Crow social system. The point of the Civil Rights Act, including its provisions regulating private businesses, was to smash that social system. And it succeeded. It succeeded enormously. The amazing thing about retrospective opposition to the Civil Rights Act is that we know that it worked. It didn't lead to social and economic cataclysm. In fact, the American south has done quite a bit better since the smashing of white supremacy than it was doing previously.

I think the Cook/Paul view that we should somehow regret this and pretend that everything would have worked itself out on its own is bizarre.

But it's not only bizarre. It seems to me that it necessarily has to stem from not taking the interests and history of African-Americans seriously to even be comprehensible. The "respectable" thing to say about people like Paul or the late Barry Goldwater, I suppose, is simply that they are ideologues rather than people driven by some kind of racial animosity. But I think it's selling free market ideology short to suggest that government regulations meant to undo the outcome of a century long campaign of terrorist violence is just a straightforward consequence of a general support for free enterprise. You need to combine that ideology with a sincere indifference to black people's welfare to reach that conclusion, just as you need to combine Paul's ideology with genuine indifference to the history of race in America to reach Paul's conclusion about democracy's relationship to Jim Crow.

=> In April the dissident conservative Republican David Frum, who has made it his business to tell inconvenient truths to his fellow Republicans, explained those points quite forcefully in the course of a review essay on Joseph Crespino's political biography of Strom Thurmond, Strom Thurmond's America.  Frum's piece is very intelligent and illuminating, and I recommend reading it in full.  But for present purposes, here are the key passages:

"How did the party that elected the first black U.S. senator, the party that elected the first 20 African-American congressmen, become a party that now loses 95 percent of the black vote? How did the Republican Party, the party of the Great Emancipator, lose the trust and faith of an entire race?"

Rand Paul posed that question in his speech last week at Howard University.

Coming from him, it does seem a singularly naive question. He might have found an important piece of the answer at RonPaul.com, where he will find this statement by his own father on the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, explaining the Texas congressman’s continuing opposition to that law:

[T]he forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government unprecedented power over the hiring, employee relations, and customer service practices of every business in the country. The result was a massive violation of the rights of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of free society. ...

Etcetera.

Rand Paul is right of course that the Republican party is the historic party of civil rights; the Democratic party the historic opponent. In 1964 as in 1875, it was Republican votes that enacted civil rights laws; Democratic votes that overwhelmingly opposed them.

[JW: To be more precise, in 1964 it was Southern Democrats who voted overwhelmingly against the Civil Rights Act, along with Southern Republicans, whereas Northern Democrats voted overwhelmingly in favor, even more overwhelmingly than Northern Republicans. It's just that in 1964 there weren't that many Southern Republicans in Congress.]

But those Democrats who voted “no” in 1964 lost the struggle for control of their party. And the single most ferocious of the Democratic “no” votes, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, would soon switch to become a Republican himself, leading to the realignment of the American party system that Rand Paul lamented at Howard.  [....]

Goldwater’s platform issues were anti-communism and anti-statism. Yet we make a mistake if we forget, or choose to forget, that he not only opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but also the Brown v. Board of Education decision and its subsequent enforcement by the Eisenhower administration.

Goldwater explained his stance by invoking his libertarian philosophy. In the words of his famous book, The Conscience of a Conservative:

[T]he federal Constitution does not require states to maintain racially mixed schools. Despite the recent holding of the Supreme Court, I am firmly convinced - not only that integrated schools are not required - but that the Constitution does not permit any interference whatsoever by the federal government in the field of education. … It so happens that I am in agreement with the objectives of the Supreme Court as stated in the Brown decision. I believe that is both wise and just for negro children to attend the same schools as whites, and that to deny this opportunity carries with it strong implications of inferiority. I am not prepared, however, to impose that judgment of mine on the people of Mississippi or South Carolina, or to tell them what methods should be adopted and what pace should be kept in striving toward that goal. That is their business, not mine.

In assessing those words, begin with this one fact. Until the 1920s, both Mississippi and South Carolina had black majorities. In the year Goldwater published, blacks made up more than 40% of the populations of the two states. In what sense can we say that “the people” of a state have adopted a decision if the majority or near-majority of those people have by violence and threat of violence been excluded from participation in that decision? Goldwater probably never thought very hard about that question, but the logical implication of his words is that their author - or at least the author’s expected audience - did not consider black people as belonging to “the people.” [....]

Etcetera.

Back when Larry Summers was President of Harvard he made himself unpopular in some circles by pointing out, correctly and pertinently, that certain positions can be anti-semitic in effect without necessarily being anti-semitic in intent. (Fans of Mearsheimer & Walt and BDS, please take note.) The same is true for white-supremacist anti-black racism.

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

Romney cruising toward victory? — Maybe not quite cruising

Well, the answer may be getting a little more complicated than it seemed. Romney is still at the head of the pack in New Hampshire, and it would be surprising if he doesn't wind up winning the Republican primary there. But the latest polls suggest that his lead is less dramatic than it used to be. According to the well-regarded Suffolk University poll, Romney's numbers have been slipping, from 43%, less than a week ago to 35% on Sunday, while Ron Paul's are increasing. Santorum's support is still in single digits, but support for John Huntsman (!) has inched past the 10% mark.

The latest 7 News/Suffolk University poll of likely voters in the New Hampshire Primary is great news for the Paul campaign and troublesome news for the Romney campaign. Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX), a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, surged 3 points to 20 percent of the votes in a 7 News/Suffolk University poll released Sunday. On the other hand, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney dipped 4 points to 35 percent of the votes in the same poll.

Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman is the only other candidate to earn double-digit support in the latest New Hampshire poll. Mr. Huntsman garnered 11 percent of the votes to finish in the top-tier, but former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who has been riding a recent wave of momentum following his 2nd place victory in the Iowa Caucuses, pulled in 8 percent of the votes. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who once was a serious contender for second place in New Hampshire, earned just 9 percent of the votes.

Furthermore, the Sunday morning GOP candidates' debate, unlike the one on Saturday night, included some sharp attacks on Romney ... though it remains to be seen whether they did much damage. Jonathan Bernstein, for one, thinks not ...

Last night on ABC, none of the Republican candidates seemed very interested in attacking Mitt Romney in person. This morning, NBC moderator David Gregory didn’t give them any choice: The first three questions, and the first 15 minutes of the debate, were devoted to Gregory begging the candidates to attack the front-runner. What did they show? That a few attack lines in a debate aren’t going to change the structure of the nomination race.

... though some others are not so sure.

The upshot is that even if Romney does come in first in New Hampshire, which I think is what everyone expects, it may not be the crushing victory he was hoping for. The overall anyone-but-Romney constituency seems to be resilient, and when the votes are counted, one candidate, Ron Paul, may pull close enough to Romney to spoil his party. (If Ron Paul can't do that to Romney in New Hampshire, he probably can't do it to him anywhere.) Or perhaps not. Stay tuned.

—Jeff Weintraub

Herman Cain & Ron Paul on torture

I don't feel I have either the time or the inclination to keep watching the seemingly endless series of televised "debates" between the Republican presidential candidates, so I rely on news reports and on trustworthy analysts like Fred Kaplan ("If you like watching something scary, you would have liked Saturday's Republican presidential debate about foreign policy.") and Jonathan Turley. And even if I were watching them, I wouldn't feel moved to try to comment on them in detail. But one set of exchanges from the latest Republican debate does seem worth highlighting.

The candidates were asked whether the US should resume the Bush/Cheney policy of torturing suspected terrorists. Almost all of them said yes with alacrity, but a few of the answers were more bizarre and convoluted than the others.

Herman Cain is opposed to torture, period ... except that he isn't, exactly:

Herman Cain: I believe that following the procedures that have been established by our military, I do not agree with torture, period. However, I will trust the judgment of our military leaders to determine what is torture and what is not torture. That is the critical consideration.

Moderator: Mr. Cain, of course you’re familiar with the long-running debate we’ve had about whether waterboarding constitutes torture [....] In the last campaign, Republican nominee John McCain and Barack Obama agreed that it was torture and should not be allowed legally and that the Army Field Manual should be the methodology used to interrogate enemy combatants. Do you agree with that or do you disagree, sir?

Herman Cain: I agree that it was an enhanced interrogation technique.

Moderator: And then you would support it at present. You would return to that policy.

Herman Cain: Yes, I would return to that policy. I don’t see it as torture. I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique.

Then there's Ron Paul. I happen to consider consider Ron Paul a dangerous crackpot and a poisonously reactionary political troglodyte. I don't share the view, unfortunately too widespread, that he should be treated with sympathetic indulgence merely because his chances of actually becoming President are negligible. However, one should give credit where credit is due. His answer to that question about torture was on-target and commendably straightforward:

Ron Paul: Well, waterboarding is torture. And– and many other– it’s ill– it’s illegal under international law and under our law. It’s also immoral. The– and it’s also very impractical. There’s no evidence that you really get reliable evidence. Why would you accept the position of torturing 100 people because you know one person might have information? And that’s what you do when you accept the principle of a– of– of– of torture. I think it’s– I think it’s uncivilized and prac– and has no practical advantages and is really un-American to accept on principle that we will torture people that we capture.”

Fred Kaplan sums it up:

Only Paul and Huntsman spoke up for the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Army Field Manual on interrogation. Huntsman noted with a grave expression: “This country has values. I’ve lived overseas four times.… We diminish our standing in the world when we engage in torture. Waterboarding is torture.”

Gingrich wasn’t asked the torture question, but he did say that the nation needs to throw out all the CIA reforms that the Church Committee passed in the 1970s.

Romney wasn’t asked the question (too bad) [....]

By the way, Fred Kaplan's roundup of this debate is worth reading in full. And it's hard to disagree with his overall impression:

God help us if any of these jokers makes it into the White House.

=> And speaking of giving credit where credit is due, here are two examples of John McCain talking about torture and US policy, earlier this year ...



... and as part of a wider conversation in in 2009 ...



One can agree or disagree with McCain on various other issues that come up in these two discussions. But not, in my opinion, on these central points: "Waterboarding is torture". And a policy of torturing prisoners violates the Geneva Convention, US law, elementary decency, America's highest values and traditions, and our genuine national interests.

—Jeff Weintraub

Obama and Huckabee win in Iowa

And now, the Iowa caucus results (from Talking Points Memo, which also has a good collection of other relevant items). Barack Obama came out the clear leader on the Democratic side, Mike Huckabee on the Republican. The early front-runners, Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney, trailed significantly--and Clinton even seems to have gotten just slightly fewer votes than John Edwards. Among the Republican candidates, Giuliani got only 4% of the votes, less than half as many as Ron Paul.

Obama's victory speech is HERE. (It gets better as it goes on.)

It may be significant that the Democratic turnout was a lot higher than the Republican turnout: "Just under 220,000 Democrats caucused tonight. About 115,000 Republicans did." [Update 1/4/08: In the end, 239,000 voters participated in the Democratic caucuses, compared with 124,000 in 2004. This year's participants apparently included a lot of registered Independents and even Republicans. According to one AP-commissioned survey, about 20% were Independents; Clinton and Obama got roughly equal support from registered Democrats, but the Independents went heavily for Obama.]

What does all this mean? Josh Marshall's immediate speculations (see below) sound about as plausible and sensible as any I've seen so far--which doesn't mean they will necessarily pan out. At least Marshall is willing to make a bold prediction:

McCain had a pretty poor night tonight, coming in fourth behind the comatose Fred Thompson. But let's not kid ourselves. Romney took a big blow tonight. And if he can't come back strong in New Hampshire his collapse will be McCain's gain -- not because McCain's on fire or has any money or really is in any kind of strong position by most objective measures. The truth, though, is that there's simply no one left. It ain't Thompson; ain't Rudy. You can't say Huckabee's out of it but put me down with those that just don't think he can overcome the twin hurdles of a) running amongst more moderate and cosmopolitan Republican electorates and b) running against almost the entire GOP establishment. And that leaves you with McCain.

The truth is that the Republican party tonight is in complete disarray. The best financed candidate just fell on his face. Their big winner of the evening is opposed by almost the entire establishment of his party. The frontrunner of recent months is lost down in Florida shakily repeating '9/11' under his breath like a hobo who needs a stiff drink.

McCain's just the only guy left. And that ain't nothing. Because one of them does have to win. And I'd rather see the Dems face Romney than McCain.

Could that turn out be right? It is true, of course, that McCain is the only candidate of serious presidential stature running on the Republican side, and he has been having a recent surge of support in New Hampshire (along with getting endorsements from the state's biggest newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader, and a major regional newspaper, the Boston Globe. . But he is so passionately (almost irrationally) hated by strong sections of the Republican right that it's hard to believe he can actually get the nomination. On the other hand, what do I know?

--Jeff Weintraub
-------------------------

HUCKABEE AND OBAMA WIN BY BIG MARGINS Romney trails Huckabee as Giuliani is beaten by Ron Paul. Edwards apparently edges Hillary for second.

Edwards: Change Won, Hillary Lost

Obama Wins the Woman Vote

Record-Shattering Dem Turnout

Result Leaves GOP Field In Disarray

last updated: 12:04 am ET

Democrats (1,781/1,781 reporting)

Republicans (86% reporting)

candidate	state del.	percentage	candidate	votes	percentage
Biden	0	0.93%	Giuliani	3,613	4%
Clinton	0	29.47%	Huckabee	35,621	34%
Dodd	0	0.02%	Hunter	458	0%
Edwards	0	29.75%	McCain	13,693	13%
Kucinich	0	0%	Paul	10,184	10%
Obama	0	37.58%	Romney	26,524	26%
Richardson	0	2.11%	Thompson	13,932	13%

-------------------------
Talking Points Memo
January 3, 2007 - 11:34 p.m.
Where We Are
By Josh Marshall

It's always hard to explain in advance, particularly to people who aren't political junkies, just how it is that a victory in a small and not very representative state like Iowa can powerfully shape the race going forward. Why does someone in Florida or New Hampshire or New Mexico care one way or another what people in Iowa do? But you're already beginning to see it.

Some of it is simply crowd instinct. We're social creatures. Victory is attractive, especially if you don't have clear commitments -- ideological or partisan -- going in. But there's something more than that too.

Barack Obama's speech sounds very different now that he's talking from a position of political strength, rather than where things were a few months ago, when he seemed like he was getting lapped by Hillary. And let's face it, it was quite a speech. It made me think again of 2004.

The difference is even more striking and perhaps more realistic with Romney. Purely for my own reasons, I would have liked Romney to do better tonight, because I think he'd be a very weak national candidate. Rudy's already toast. Trailing Ron Paul tonight was just a confirmation of that. He's not even relevant. With Romney though, he spent tons, tons of money, absolutely put his all in to Iowa and he got smoked by Huckabee who barely spent anything by comparison.

On various levels, Romney put his all into Iowa. And he got thumped.

McCain had a pretty poor night tonight, coming in fourth behind the comatose Fred Thompson. But let's not kid ourselves. Romney took a big blow tonight. And if he can't come back strong in New Hampshire his collapse will be McCain's gain -- not because McCain's on fire or has any money or really is in any kind of strong position by most objective measures. The truth, though, is that there's simply no one left. It ain't Thompson; ain't Rudy. You can't say Huckabee's out of it but put me down with those that just don't think he can overcome the twin hurdles of a) running amongst more moderate and cosmopolitan Republican electorates and b) running against almost the entire GOP establishment. And that leaves you with McCain.

The truth is that the Republican party tonight is in complete disarray. The best financed candidate just fell on his face. Their big winner of the evening is opposed by almost the entire establishment of his party. The frontrunner of recent months is lost down in Florida shakily repeating '9/11' under his breath like a hobo who needs a stiff drink.

McCain's just the only guy left. And that ain't nothing. Because one of them does have to win. And I'd rather see the Dems face Romney than McCain.