Doug J explains why he’s baffled by the idea that the Left should be conflicted about — rather than overtly hostile to — Ron Paul:
For a liberal like me, who is primarily interested in the well-being of the American middle-class and in providing opportunity for everyone in the United States, regardless of race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion etc., I just don’t see why I should be “challenged” by Ron Paul. I understand that if you’re a liberal who is primarily interested in civil liberties and a less bellicose foreign policy, then you might be conflicted about Paul. But to me, he’s just another racist asshole who wants to fuck the American middle-class.
I gotta say that, to a significant degree, I’m with Mr. J on this one.
I say this with a nagging sensation in the back of my mind that by co-signing this I am in some way revealing myself to be intellectually or morally lacking; but I feel deeply ambivalent about devoting my political energies to battling-back American empire. And it’s for entirely fatalist reasons. It seems sadly inevitable to me, at least for the foreseeable future and until the United Nations or some other form of global governance becomes supreme, that the world will be run by at least one Great Power.
That’s not to say I’d not rather it was otherwise; but rather it is to say that I feel my passion, time, and capacity is finite. I wouldn’t for anything wish that those who have devoted themselves to challenging, exposing, and attacking the American imperium stop. I just can’t honestly say that this goal moves me as much as does the cause of economic and social justice. Just as I often find the ideologies of leftist anarcho-syndicalism deeply appealing — but determine that, pipe dreams being what they are, I’d rather work for a more accountable Big Government — I hope for a more transparent and accountable neo-empire.
I’m not discounting the idea that an accountable empire is no less a fantasy than rolling back empire entirely. I’m merely sharing my gut feelings, and an explanation as to why I find Ron Paul’s appeal utterly minuscule when compared to his defects.
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He isn’t racist, and saying that is just name calling. If you are deeply offended that he didn’t review all of his newsletter before it went out, that is an odd thing to me to weigh against civil liberties. NDAA rendered Obama unacceptable, as far as I am concerned.
DNC to The League: We must do everything possible to keep Progressives on the farm. Ignore Obama’s record of war, bail-outs, and eroding civil liberties. Generate as much fear as possible to keep Progressives supporting a president who long ago abandoned them.
A Ron Paul presidency means that tens of thousands of African American men will be returning to their families, communities and churches. They can begin working and re-building their lives. That is precisely what will happen when Ron Paul ends the Drug War, pardons non-violent drug offenders, and returns narcotics policy back to the states.
A Ron Paul presidency means that the bombs and drone missiles will stop dropping on Arabs, Africans, and Asians.
A Ron Paul presidency means that the Federal government will no longer threaten the interests of gays who want to pursue marriage in their respective states.
No Republican or Democrat (not even Obama) is promising these things; they neutralize the “Ron Paul is a racist” charge, and they expose Obama (and the GOP) for the damage they have allowed the War on Drugs to do to African American communities.
Yeah…throwing tens of thousands of people out of jail at the same time as removing social safety nets….that sounds like it’d be a great way to improve access to jobs and security…And let’s not even bring up the fact that presidents can only pardon or commute federal offenders…
Or that cops in Texas or Mississippi or Alabama or Illinois will suddenly stop arresting and DAs stop prosecuting blacks and latinos at a far greater rate than white offenders…
And we’ve seen too, that states just loooooooooove letting gay people get married and be recognized for it….right California? Oh wait, no?
I mean come on, what sort of deluded fantasy world do you live in?
“Yeah…throwing tens of thousands of people out of jail at the same time as removing social safety nets….that sounds like it’d be a great way to improve access to jobs and security…”
Seriously? You don’t think minorities would be better off liberated than in cages when the government isn’t there to provide for them? This is probably my failing, but I’m really struggling to find a charitable interpretation of your comment here.
“And let’s not even bring up the fact that presidents can only pardon or commute federal offenders…”
If Paul were to immediately pardon all nonviolent offenders, you can be sure there’d be a lot of pressure for states like New York and California to follow suit.
“Or that cops in Texas or Mississippi or Alabama or Illinois will suddenly stop arresting and DAs stop prosecuting blacks and latinos at a far greater rate than white offenders…” If you don’t expect the state’s enforcement apparatus to ever be racially egalitarian, why are you so opposed to undermining its power?
“And we’ve seen too, that states just loooooooooove letting gay people get married and be recognized for it….right California? Oh wait, no?”
As a native Californian who was in-state in 2008, I can assure you that Prop 8 only passed because its proponents were better able to characterize it as a pro-local-rights measure. I can’t tell you how many middle-aged moderate Christians supported the Proposition because they thought it would force churches to officiate over gay marriages… and immediately changed their minds after I pointed them to the clear constitutional impediments to this. That’s both a failure of the No on 8 campaign (which was mind-bogglingly inept on several different levels) and a testament to the truth-stretching capabilities of the anti-equality crowd.
Let me be a bit less flippant and unpack the overall argument.
Initial disclaimer:
I do not, in fact advocate mass incarceration, particularly for non-violent drug offenders.
Now back to the argument.
So the overall claim I’m trying to refuge is as follows:
“Ron Paul is the only candidate who can help minorities out of the costs of the drug war and rebuild their communities. Ron Paul is also the only candidate who is offering equality for gay people in terms of civil equality.”
I am going to assume for the moment that Ron Paul will be able to enact the promises he places on his campaign positions website. This post is not meant to be a comment on the feasibility of actually conducting said policies or enacting them.
In terms of this specific debate the resultant corollaries of Paul’s policies are:
1. Commutation/pardon of all federal non-violent drug offenders.
2. Elimination of most of the social safety net. (This is cleverly hidden on his website, it’s in his immigration policy section rather than his economy section)
3. Creation of right to work laws and removal of most business regulations, including environmental and wage laws.
4. “Federalism” in terms of devolving more policy to the states by expliciting forbidding the federal court system from hearing cases on a set of issues. (We The People Act)
Now, presently in the current US economy, we have an unemployment population of 13.3 million with another 1.2 million marginally employed people. We’d be adding perhaps half a million people into that labor force, predominantly focused in inner city and urban minority populations. The available statistics that we have on unemployment rates for young african-americans in the US for example are staggering. Adding a sudden influx of new labor while simultaneously removing social safety nets, federal civil rights enforcement (protections are likely still on the books) and deregulating labor standards is likely to cause a sharp reduction in the price of labor.
Moreover, as the economic conditions in these areas deteriorate, municipal and county police as well as prosecutors are more likely to call for draconian law enforcement measures on one pretext or another.
I’m not seeing how this is an improvement. Intentions may be noble, but it’s certainly not going to materially make conditions better on the ground.
I really hate people invoking the black folks to boost Ron Paul. He doesn’t give a crap about black people. He would make the same argument for whites — who, by the way, are the largest incarcerated population in the nation. The racism in these comments — assuming that most or all drug-related inmates are black is amazing. Also, most inmates are in STATE prisons, and Paul believes states are virtually omnipotent. Notice, his antidrug arguments only apply to the federal government. Paul is not a libertarian. He is an extreme proponent of states rights.
…unless advancing social and economic justice anywhere, but especially in America, eventually relies on the advancement of social and economic justice everywhere.
Yeah; a discussion worth having.
It’s the one element of 18th Century utopianism, the American Idea and American political science as understood and implemented by Jefferson and generally among the Founders, that Ron Paul discounts. It may also be the best part.
I don’t think Jefferson was a particularly good example of this. His complete blindness to the outrages of the French Directorate, his ignoring of the Haitian revolution, his general desire to seem to want to keep people agrarian…
I think modern humanitarianism and charity is more founded on the Holy Roller tradition of the 19th century British, particularly those of the Wilburforce-model who advocated advancing a good even past the economic interests of a particular state.
In referring to Jefferson & Co. I was thinking less of humanitarianism per se than of the belief that popular sovereignty would take over the world, following and extending upon the American model. I think you can make the argument that they were right, though it took much longer and did so in ways they could scarcely have imagined.
You’re right that Jefferson and his party were very late in acknowledging that the French Revolution had gone in directions they could not defend. I don’t think he and most of his fellows, even his political adversaries, ever gave up their belief in America’s potential importance to the world.
I do think the Founders all basically had an idea that they were putting into practice a new vision of the state. And I think you’re right that they saw a belief in the rise of popular sovereignty.
But on the whole, I am in agreement that the liberal international order is perhaps the best legacy of the United States. And will remain so, even if American power does decline.
…and in an increasing globalized world, I fail to see how this isn’t seen as an immediate, experiential, undeniable fact.
Look at the 30 years of personal commentary, speeches, writings and legislation and THEN tell us he is racist. No, the evidence is overwhelming: Ron Paul is for all the citizenry. I don’t know why he alluded so many of us in 2008, and it just dawned on me recently how amazing it would be to live in a country where we can pursue our own sense of right and wrong right where we live and thrive – in our own states! The Federal government is merely supposed to provide the even playing field for all races, creeds, religions, etc. Have you noticed how much time we have spent over the past decades dissecting the personal shortcomings of every politician at the federal level? No, let’s focus our gaze and critiques on the local level, the state level where policy really matters for our day-to-day lives. Ron Paul 2012!
I just can’t honestly say that this goal moves me as much as does the cause of economic and social justice
If you’re not moved by my issues as much as I am, you are an evil defender of tyranny. Didn’t you get the memo?
There’s a difference between Elias’ honesty here & what the Dem partisan swamp is saying lately. “My priority is honestly domestic issues, primarily economics, sorry”, much as the resulting futility on those issues is richly deserving of criticism, doesn’t quite have the sting of “anyone remotely pointing out anti-empire sentiment is a white privileged racist Paultard imbecile, shut up and vote Obama!”.
The problem is that “anti-empire sentiment” doesn’t tell you much. The critique of “imperialism” can be, as Lenin put it, the critique of the highest stage of capitalism, implying and calling for an equally global response, or it can be, as with Paul and with, in my view, too many of his leftwing and independent sympathizers, merely negative and effectively isolationist, failing to distinguish between America and capital, or between America’s essentially non-revocable and multi-sided, possibly indispensable role in the world and the peculiar configuration of inherited American commitments. It reaches a height of contradiction when, on the left, an essentially American neo-imperial creation like the UN and the associated international law regime is invoked against “American” policy.
I don’t think it’s true that Paul “fails to distinguish between America and capital.” Ron Paul only denies a distinction between American WARS and capital, which is incidentally what rattles the establishment so thoroughly. It’s a critique with a fundamentally Marxian flavor.
Besides, Ron Paul is no isolationist. If he were, he would not repeatedly call for a strengthening of the economic bonds between America and the rest of the world. And your mistake here compounds into another: You shouldn’t suggest that Paul doesn’t believe America should have a unique role in world affairs when you only have evidence that he doesn’t think such a role should stem from its powerful military.
Isolationism as a political position isn’t the same as autarchy. It usually is applied to political figures – Buchanan, Lindbergh, and precursors – who wish to “isolate” the U.S. from involvement in other people’s problems and in particular from “entangling alliances,” not from other people’s money.
If Paul has an uplifting and ambitious “shining city on a hill” vision for America’s role in the world, I haven’t heard it – and I wouldn’t accept that a belief in peace-through-trade and trade-through-peace would amount to the same thing.
Not really sure what you see as Marxian in Paul. Please do tell.
The main similarity is that both Ron Paul and Marxists identify wars as fought mainly for the benefit of economic elites who must create false consciousnesses in the population in order to successfully fight them. Of course, the difference is that while Ron Paul would say that this happens because the government is too powerful (that damned Fed), Marxists would be more likely identify this in private actors. But when one considers the nexus formed between the finance industry and the government in recent years, the two strains of thought blur together.
I don’t quite understand how these are replies to my tongue-in-cheek comment, but thanks, I guess, for thinking it was worth responding to.
more mass-murder of women & children
Bloodthirsty hatred, and war profiteers !
all done in your name
But not in our names.
For any government to remotely approach “accountable”, it would have to be SHARPLY more representative, with as little detachment from those claimed to be represented as possible. It would have to be thrown completely open, no secrets no double-talk no backroom dealings, so that the slightest hint of cronyism or self-serving would be FURIOUSLY slapped down on sight, and NO claim of power could be pursued even an inch that overrode the will of the public. It would have to be extremely easy for your average resident to step in and not only watch the entire process but voice their complaints at any time, on anything, anywhere, which would pose an obvious problem of scale.
Break this down far enough, and you might as well toss the middle men entirely. Do that, and you’re pretty much towards leftist anarcho-syndicalism anyway.
There’s a reason so much was made of how the OWS protesters organized during the occupation phase, even though most talking about them didn’t comprehend the What of it. “Huh? Direct, spontaneous organization? That’s crazy!”
Some expect highly ambitious people who don’t know them to act primarily on their behalf, and trust them with a grant of use of force to accomplish vaguely defined “public goods” with the expectation they won’t turn the gun on them. Frankly I think that is the utopian pipe dream.
Reality is, Ron Paul is not only anti-American but anti-Semitic and anti-humanity. His core followers also tend to be the most vile of individuals and conspiracy theorists including such radical and fanatics as the Nazi Stormfronters, the 9/11 truthers, the Islamic terrorists and their supporters, the Libertarian advocates of child molestation and hard drug legalization, and other enemies of western civilization. I personally hope he wins Iowa so the media finally starts to focus on his fringe and wacky conspiracies, positions, and fanatical ideas and beliefs.
Source or this is bullshit.
(S)he may be talking about Mary Ruwart http://reason.com/blog/2008/04/23/suffer-the-little-children
Ok, she’s an idiot. Children can’t consent to sex because in general they’re mentally incapable of understanding the decision. I’d be surprised if a remotely significant portion of the libertarian movement sided with her on this.
I think to some extent it depends on what she is talking about when she says “children” whether she is thinking of six year olds or sixteen year olds. If she’s thinking of the latter, it makes her response dumbly worded or poorly thought out rather than morally disgusting (at least in the molestation case).
Who pays you to say these things?
The fact is that Ron Paul was one of two congresspersons to vote against funding for malaria immunization and prevention in Africa which saves millions of lives a year is also “wise”. Away from the vital humanitarian concerns (as we are a hope and beacon for liberty, freedom, and human rights) imagine the void that this would create in which Islamicists would quickly fill without avoiding an eyeblink. And then, Islamicists would control and run a new terror haven called AFRICA.
It’s possible for something to be at once a very good idea and also beyond the legitimate scope of governmental activity.
I urge people to watch this short video clip with Ron Paul answering a question on “why won’t he come out on the truth about 9/11″. It is astonishing and it makes a rational observer conclude that Ron Paul indeed is a truther. Watch for yourselves: http://youtu.be/3u0tgNUfOL8
Ron Paul’s utility is in allowing us to see what leftists mean when they say that they consider the War on Drugs and foreign interventions to be the two biggest concerns. What they mean is that they don’t actually mean it.
The ppl on the left I know who would actually say that are Ron Paul supporters.
As Elias said, I don’t know many leftists who actually say that. They’re both problems, but in the year of somebody’s Lord 2012, they’re not the top two.
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