Not in the article, but very much in CNN reports, RP
criticized Reagan for
approving the MLK holiday --which he characterized as "Hate
Whitey Day"
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Nearly four years ago, on the eve of the New Hampshire
Republican presidential primary, The New Republic published
my expose of newsletters
published by Texas Congressman Ron Paul. The contents of
these newsletters can best be described as appalling. Blacks
were referred to as “animals.” Gays were told to go “back”
into the “closet.” The “X-Rated Martin Luther King” was a
bisexual pedophile who “seduced underage girls and boys.”
Three months before the Oklahoma City bombing, Paul praised
right-wing, anti-government militia movements as “one of the
most encouraging developments in America.” The voluminous
record of bigotry and conspiracy theories speaks for itself.
And yet, four years on, Ron Paul’s star is undimmed. Not
only do the latest polls place him as the frontrunner in the
Iowa Caucuses, but he still enjoys the support of a certain
coterie of professional political commentators who, like
Paul himself, identify as libertarians. Most prominent among
them is Daily Beast blogger Andrew Sullivan, who
gave Paul his endorsement in the GOP
primary last week, as he did in 2008. But he is not alone:
Tim Carney of The Washington Examiner recently bemoaned the fact that “the
principled, antiwar, Constitution-obeying, Fed-hating,
libertarian Republican from Texas stands firmly outside the
bounds of permissible dissent as drawn by either the
Republican establishment or the mainstream media,” while
Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic argues that Paul’s ideas
cannot be ignored, and that, for Tea Party Republicans, “A
vote against Paul requires either cognitive dissonance—never
in short supply in politics—or a fundamental rethinking of
the whole theory of politics that so recently drove the Tea
Party movement.”
To be sure, these figures, like the broader group of Paul
enthusiasts, don’t base their support on the Congressman’s
years-long record of supporting racism, homophobia,
anti-Semitism, and far-right militias. Quite the opposite:
Like the candidate himself, they manage to mostly avoid
making any mention of his unsavory record at all. It’s an
impressive feat of repression, one that says volumes about
the type of enthusiasm Paul inspires.
Ultimately, Paul’s following is closely linked with the
peculiar attractions of the libertarian creed that he
promotes. Libertarianism is an ideology rather than a
philosophy of government—its main selling point is not its
pragmatic usefulness, but its inviolable consistency. In
that way, Paul’s indulgence of bigotry—he says he did
not write the newsletters but rather allowed others to do so
in his name—isn’t an incidental departure from his
libertarianism, but a tidy _expression_ of its priorities:
First principles of market economics gain credence over all
considerations of social empathy and historical acuity. His
fans are guilty of donning the same ideological blinders,
giving their support to a political candidate on account of
the theories he declaims, rather than the judgment he shows
in applying those theories, or the character he has evinced
in living them. Voters for Ron Paul are privileging logical
consistency at the expense of moral fitness.
But it’s not simply that Paul’s supporters are ignoring the
manifest evidence of his moral failings. More fundamentally,
their very awareness of such failings is crowded out
by the atmosphere of outright fervor that pervades Paul’s
candidacy. This is not the fervor of a healthy body
politic—this is a less savory type of political devotion,
one that escapes the bounds of sober reasoning. Indeed,
Paul’s absolutist notion of libertarian rigor has always
been coupled with an attraction to fantasies of political
apocalypse.
A constant theme in Paul’s rhetoric, dating back to his
first years as a congressman in the late 1970s, is that the
United States is on the edge of a precipice. The centerpiece
of this argument is that the abandonment of the gold
standard has put the United States on the path to financial
collapse. Over the years, Paul has added other potential
catastrophes to his repertoire of dark premonitions. In the
early 1990s, it was racial apocalypse, with Paul dispensing
“survivalist” tips to the readers of his newsletter like the
admonition to stock up on guns and construct fall-out
shelters. More recently, he has argued that America’s
foreign policy was a “major contributing factor” to the
terrorist attacks of 9/11, an argument that has earned him
admiration from some liberals. The 2008 financial crisis,
the Obama administration’s continuation of many Bush
anti-terror policies (and the launching of the Libya War),
and the formation of the Tea Party have all boosted Paul’s
image as a prescient sage.
And so it’s not hard to see why Paul’s more ardent
supporters stand by him: They too find it seductive to
believe that the United States is on the verge of utter
collapse. The benefit of indulging in such visions is that
it sets the stage for the arrival of a savior: This is the
role that Paul himself plays, of course. Fiercely
independent, uncorrupted by the “establishment,” speaker of
unpopular truths, only Paul is capable of saving the
country. What are a handful of uncouth newsletters really
worth when the stakes are so high?
What’s important to realize is that this sort of political
myopia is endemic to libertarianism. The movement’s
obsession with consistency is actually a mark of paranoia.
If you’re already persuaded by Paul’s suggestions that fiat
money is what ails our economy, that our country’s foreign
policy is rotten to its very core, it’s tempting to take the
next step and interpret his failure to be nominated as the
result of political persecution. Sullivan, thus, complains
of a deliberate media blackout against the Texas
Congressman, blaming “liberals who cannot take domestic
libertarianism seriously and from neocons desperate to keep
the Military Industrial Complex humming at Cold War
velocity.” There is a bitter irony of course in the fact
that a movement so devoted to individual responsibility is
so apt to be on the search for others to blame. Paul of
course is the prime example: Here is an absolutist
libertarian who advocates the ideals of individual rights
and responsibility, yet cannot own up to the words that were
published under his name, instead blaming it on a variety of
as yet unnamed aides.
Some Paul supporters acknowledge the newsletters but
dismiss them as “old news,” arguing that there is no trace
of the racist and conspiratorial ideas he promoted for
decades in his speeches today on the campaign trail. But
while it’s true that Paul has not said anything explicitly
racist in public, the same cannot be said for his promotion
of conspiracy theories. He appears regularly on the radio
program of Alex Jones, perhaps the most popular conspiracy
theorist in America (profiled by TNR in 2009),
where he often indulges the host’s delusional ravings about
the coming “New World Order.” He continues to associate with
the John Birch Society, the extreme-right wing organization
that William F. Buckley denounced in the early 1960’s after
it alleged that none other than President Dwight D.
Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the
Communist conspiracy.” Asked about the group in 2007, Paul told the New York Times, “Oh,
my goodness, the John Birch Society! Is that bad? I have a
lot of friends in the John Birch Society.” Indeed, Paul delivered the keynote address
at the organization’s 50th anniversary dinner in September.
In May, Paul said President Obama’s order
to execute Osama bin Laden “was absolutely not necessary.”
This statement earned a rebuke from Judson Phillips, founder
of Tea Party Nation, a movement one would presume would be
quite favorable to Paul. “If there is any doubt that Ron
Paul should not even get near the Oval Office, even on a
tour of the White House,” Phillips said, “he has just
revealed it.”
If Paul is responsible for conjuring the apocalyptic
atmosphere of a prophet, it’s his supporters who have to
answer for submitting to it. Surely, those who agree with
Paul would be able to find a better vessel for their ideas
than a man who once entertained the notion that AIDS was
invented in a government laboratory or who, just last
January, alleged that there had been a “CIA coup” against
the American government and that the Agency is “in drug
businesses.” Why, for instance, do these self-styled
libertarians not throw their support to former New Mexico
Governor Gary Johnson, who, unlike Paul, can boast executive
experience and doesn’t have the racist and conspiratorial
baggage? At this late stage, that Ron Paul’s supporters
haven’t found an alternative candidate says more about them,
and the intellectual milieu they inhabit, than it does about
the erstwhile publisher of racist newsletters.
