Classical Values :: Can a small "l" get smaller?

January 16, 2008

Can a small "l" get smaller?

I hadn't realized the true extent of Ron Paul's nuttiness until I read this:

The newsletters' obsession with blacks and gays was of a piece with a conscious political strategy adopted at that same time by Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard. After breaking with the Libertarian Party following the 1988 presidential election, Rockwell and Rothbard formed a schismatic "paleolibertarian" movement, which rejected what they saw as the social libertinism and leftist tendencies of mainstream libertarians. In 1990, they launched the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, where they crafted a plan they hoped would midwife a broad new "paleo" coalition.

Rockwell explained the thrust of the idea in a 1990 Liberty essay entitled "The Case for Paleo-Libertarianism." To Rockwell, the LP was a "party of the stoned," a halfway house for libertines that had to be "de-loused." To grow, the movement had to embrace older conservative values. "State-enforced segregation," Rockwell wrote, "was wrong, but so is State-enforced integration. State-enforced segregation was not wrong because separateness is wrong, however. Wishing to associate with members of one's own race, nationality, religion, class, sex, or even political party is a natural and normal human impulse."

The most detailed description of the strategy came in an essay Rothbard wrote for the January 1992 Rothbard-Rockwell Report, titled "Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement." Lamenting that mainstream intellectuals and opinion leaders were too invested in the status quo to be brought around to a libertarian view, Rothbard pointed to David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as models for an "Outreach to the Rednecks," which would fashion a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition by targeting the disaffected working and middle classes. (Duke, a former Klansman, was discussed in strikingly similar terms in a 1990 Ron Paul Political Report.) These groups could be mobilized to oppose an expansive state, Rothbard posited, by exposing an "unholy alliance of 'corporate liberal' Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America."

Read it all. Author Julian Sanchez believes it is important to discuss this stuff because of its tendency to discredit libertarianism:

...[Paul's] new supporters, many of whom are first encountering libertarian ideas through the Ron Paul Revolution, deserve a far more frank explanation than the campaign has as yet provided of how their candidate's name ended up atop so many ugly words. Ron Paul may not be a racist, but he became complicit in a strategy of pandering to racists--and taking "moral responsibility" for that now means more than just uttering the phrase. It means openly grappling with his own past--acknowledging who said what, and why. Otherwise he risks damaging not only his own reputation, but that of the philosophy to which he has committed his life.

Linking the above, Roger L. Simon observes that it is scary that Paul continues to do so well:

I find it quite scary that Ron Paul continues to do relatively well at the polls, despite the numerous revelations about him and his cohorts. Paul is quite clearly a liar, but this continues to be ignored for the most part by the mainstream media - who give Paul a pass and have not really confronted him at any of the debates - and clearly by many of his adherents, who either choose to ignore or not just not hear the allegations against him. This even though the author of the racist and sexist newsletters that went out under the Congressman's name is evidently one of Paul's oldest and closest supporters.

Paul has of course denied writing what went out under his name. But even if we give him the benefit of the doubt, what kind of judgment does he have letting a group of crackpots say anything they want and put his name on it? Here's Roger in an earlier post:

[If] Paul paid no attention to these people actually writing and publishing under his name for years, he is a remarkably slapdash leader. The idea someone like that would be President of the United States is ludicrous.

If I were a libertarian, I would stay as far from him as possible. In fact, I'd do my best to excommunicate him from the movement.

I can't excommunicate him from a movement because the "l" in my libertarianism is pretty small. To the extent Paul represents libertarianism, he makes my small "l" smaller than ever.

I didn't even address the virulently anti-gay remarks attributed to Paul, but plenty of others have.

Of course, I never supported him. I had this kooky unprovable theory of my own that he was just there to discredit classical liberalism and in general make libertarians look bad. (They wouldn't do something like that, would they?)

I'll just keep on thinking what I think, and if I have to, I guess I can start calling myself a teensy "l" libertarian.

posted by Eric on 01.16.08 at 05:46 PM

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://classicalvalues.com/cgi-bin/pings.cgi/6081

Comments

I had a falling out with Lew Rockwell when he asserted that States Rights trumped the right of free association.

M. Simon · January 16, 2008 06:11 PM

Politicians are bad people. No exceptions.

So I never supported Paul, and none of this matters to me re: him personally, or his campaign, or these entirely imaginary people he and it are supposedly drawing to libertarianism.

That's just not happening. His is a fleeting, expedient coalition of mutual antagonists - a name cult (since so few of them know or care about his personality, or his positions on more than their obsessed-over single issues).

Conveniently, none of this is about any of that anyway.

There's a longstanding split between essentially pro- and anti-establishment self-described libertarians that maps fairly well onto the groups stuck with the "beltway" and "paleo" labels. The "beltways" have seized on this flap - and Rockwell's supposed authorship of these things, which is highly doubtful to anyone familiar with his writing style (not that it's not his fault, but the scapegoating's missed its goat, and is creepily reveling in it) - to make a grand display of dissassociation from the "paleos," and, preferably, to excommunicate the "paleos" from libertarianism, at least in the minds of their lefty media associates.
They want that for their own weird technocratic omni-minarchism, and it alone.

They don't deserve it. Though neither do their opposites.

And it's all entirely dishonest - Sanchez's contribution especially, since he's the least libertarian of all the "beltways," and is only trying to wish this "damage" into being.

It's politics. It's bullshit. And it's evil bullshit.

Don't sign up for it.

guy on internet · January 16, 2008 07:07 PM

They want that name, I mean.

guy on internet · January 16, 2008 07:09 PM

OK time for a new band.

Ron and the Schismatics

M. Simon · January 16, 2008 07:39 PM

I used to correspond with Zundel in Canada. The "Nazi" guy.

He was always making subtle fun of the Nazis.

What he proved was that there was a good market for that stuff. He should have stayed out of Germany.

Evidently Ron found a similar niche market and milked it for all he could get.

It is pretty much his attitude in this campaign. Nazis sending me money? Better I have it than them.

I don't know if I can handle politicians that cynical.

M. Simon · January 16, 2008 07:45 PM

"His is a fleeting, expedient coalition of mutual antagonists - a name cult (since so few of them know or care about his personality, or his positions on more than their obsessed-over single issues)."

The facts on the ground, in the primary states and on the Internet would seem to contradict your statement.

He is the only candidate with clearly stated positions on the issues. His positions have not changed for 30 years and are well documented and posted for all to see. The number of web hits he receives seem to indicate that some people, at least, are trying to understand his positions. He polls consistently the same numbers so they probably agree with him. The fact that he polls the same numbers would not be indicative of a fleeting coalition. Huckabee's declining numbers, since Iowa, would be indicative of a fleeting coalition. Thompson's and Giuliani's implosion would be indicative of a coalition which isn't just fleeting but fled.

Jardinero1 · January 16, 2008 08:51 PM

The fact remains that Ron Paul is the only significant (and, yeah, that means not Kucinich) candidate of either major party who wants to immediately end the War in Iraq and the War on Some Drugs. That, by itself, earns him my support.

Yep, he profited from racist diatribes, even if he didn't write them. Yep, he is tapdancing much more than I like about equal legal status for gays. Yep, it is sort of odd to have a medical doctor say that he doesn't "believe" in evolution (then why do surgeons practice on dogs and pigs?). But, bottom line, he is the only Republican or Democratic Presidential candidate who comes even close to a pro-freedom policy.

Best case is that Dr. Paul gives a real stem-winder of a speech at the GOP convention and kicks off a renewal of a libertarian/Constitutionalist wing in the Republican Party.

Fritz · January 16, 2008 09:57 PM

Ron - Right on one war wrong on the other.

Ron never explains why there was no declaration of war against the jihadis in 1801 and 1815 and why we need one now.

In fact if you read the AUMF from that time and compare it to the current AUMF it would be hard to tell the difference.

He never explains how letting Al Q have free reign in Iraq is in our long term interest.

And you know I voted for the guy in '88 so I am not unsympathetic to his positions. However, I changed my mind on 9/11 about a couple of things.

Evidently dear leader Ron is incapable of changing his.

Most unfortunate.

Fritz - a stem winder at the R convention? That has as much chance as Al Sharpton being invited to the podium at the Ds.

I must remind all you Paul fans that the L party lost 40% of its membership in the aftermath of 9/11.

Also it might be wise to read the communists idea of American foreign policy. You couldn't tell it from Ron's. I should know. I was a Trot in my youth.

Ron Paul is a communist.

M. Simon · January 16, 2008 10:34 PM

Simon -- your syllogism boils down to:

Communists want America to have a non-interventionist foreign policy.

Ron Paul wants America to have a non-interventionist foreign policy.

Therefore, Ron Paul is a Communist.

The fallacy of that attempt at reasoning is a subject for an introduction to logic course.

The LP has lost membership because it is utterly ineffective. I have been involved, off and on, with the LP since 1975. I know the ineffectiveness from personal experience.

We should have declared war against Al Qaeda in 2001. But that has nothing to do with Iraq.

Fritz · January 17, 2008 12:26 AM

Having read the Turner Diaries to see what the hoo-ha was all about, these articles seemed very similar. One of the insidious things about the Turner Diaries is that it starts out with, "blacks and Mexicans are bad" because presumably you believe that when you pick the book up, and then tries to slide you into, "but wait until you hear about the JEWS!!!" I'm wondering if that is where Lew/Ron/WhoeverWroteThem was on his way to.

Phelps · January 17, 2008 11:04 AM