Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, January 05, 2012

Ron Paul's Army of One

BooMan gets this just about right:
I'd like to see the Republicans take some of Ron Paul's ideas more seriously. If a third of Republicans thought we ought to end the drug war, I'd be pretty excited about that. But, that's not even close to be being the case right now. The Republicans are experiencing some signs of disunity, but they're still pretty much united in their dedication to being greedhead assholes. Everything else is just details.
BooMan makes this point in a post responding to Norm Ornstein's false belief that Ron Paul's Neo-Confederate viewpoint is shared by a third of the Republican electorate just because he is the beneficiary of widespread but disorganized anti-Romney sentiment (as he is the beneficiary as well, no doubt, of the low inchoate pleasure Republicans take in contemplating anything they think liberals will dislike without giving much in the way of sustained thought to why they should substantially approve it themselves or not, especially if it is offered up in cadences that sound ornery and gim-crack).

I have noticed that Rachel Maddow seems to over-estimate the extent to which Paul represents some sizable GOP constituency in much the same way as Ornstein has (she did it on her show just last night in a discussion with that circus barker Michael Steele, for example). And, you know, I really do think it is important to disabuse people of this nonsense. Few, and ever fewer, people still believe the awful things the angry scared old white dimwits of Movement Republicanism so loudly do, but far fewer still believe the nonsense Ron Paul talks, perhaps only his son comes close to his particular mix of crazy.

In many ways, discussion of the "libertarian" strain among Republicans is just of a piece with the same kind of marketing BS that lead so many journalists to pretend the "Tea Party" was something new rather than the same klatch of John Birch, Silent Majority, Moral Majority, Family Values, Values Voters as it always was, exactly the same white-racist patriarchal-prick fundy-authoritarian know-nothing gun-nut greedhead war-mongering assholes as it ever was, only every year a little diminished by die-off amidst the wholesome browning and secularizing demographics since the Southern Strategy.

But I also think there is a bit of wrongheaded wishful thinking in such attributions, an effort on the part of center-left figures like Maddow and Ornstein to find sense in what remains after all the only viable party apart from the Democratic one and hence a real and abiding force in our public life, where there simply isn't any or much hope of any anytime soon (a radical course correction borne of many defeats will likely be required for that).

I think all this rationalization is not just wrong but dangerously so, especially when it comes to the appalling Pauls.

Ron Paul is not a civil libertarian because, not to put too fine a point on it, he doesn't approve of civics itself, to which in its modern form the legitimate function of a national state dedicated to the administration not only of law but of welfare is absolutely an indispensable precondition before any kind of intelligible political conversation is the least possible.

That might seem an unfair circumscription of the field of discussion but look how what I am talking about plays out the ground when we're talking about worldly realities rather than cartoons mistaken for theories: Ron Paul's advocacy of isolationism is not the same thing as the championing of a principled anti-militarism. Ron Paul's advocacy of universal neglect is not the same thing as the championing of the principle of civil rights and liberties. Ron Paul's comfortable approval of inequity and tyranny as authored by commercial enterprises or individual states is far from the same thing as a principled repudiation of federal tyranny. Ron Paul's declaration that all market or contractual transactions are non-coercive by fiat, whatever the inequity, misinformation, or duress that prevails over their terms is not a defense of non-violence but a justification of violence in the name of a fraud of non-violence.

This is to say, Ron Paul is not really the champion of the principles he is credited with, and the discovery of his many infelicitous opinions, his flirtations with white-racists, queer-bashers, heartless Dickensian capitalists, climate change denialists, and the rest are not accidental or incidental but direct expressions of the rot at the core of his worldview.

These things matter enormously, and should not be fudged. Indeed, this is why I say BooMan is not just "right," but only "about right" in insisting on Paul's marginality. Of course I know what BooMan means when he says he wishes more Republicans would reject the racist war on (some but not all) drugs, like Ron Paul does, but frankly I do not trust Paul's rejection of that forever failing, ugly and unjust prohibitionism enough to regard him as a reliable collaborator in the struggle against the Drug War except in a completely tactical, highly circumscribed, case-by-case sort of way. I disapprove the racist war on (some but not all) drugs -- but think there is a key health and safety role for their testing and regulation by the FDA, think some especially dangerous drugs should still be prohibited and young people prohibited from using almost all of them until they are more likely to handle them reasonably well, think they should be taxed the better to fund programs to educate and rehabilitate those who abuse drugs, and so on. Is Paul's rejection really "like" mine at all, then?

By way of conclusion, I confess that I did not really think I could get away with calling Ron Paul's politics (if his views can properly be said to be political at all rather than simply a form of moralizing confused with politics in the way so typical of reactionary worldviews -- why, Schmitt for one famously crafted a whole systematic anti-politics mistaken for political theory on that very error) not "libertarian," as is usual, but "neo-confederate," as no doubt seem needlessly incendiary -- without a word or two of elaboration!

In saying Paul's views are Neo-Confederate I do not mean simply to indulge in name-calling (though I fully approve ridiculing the ridiculous) but to discern in Paul's views their deep continuity with the long-discredited (in the sense of failure not of unfashionableness) anti-governmental theories yielding both the dysfunctional America of the Articles of Confederation prior to the Constitution, as well as to the white-racist patriarchal plutocrats of illegal immoral idiotic Southern secession. Paul's libertopian chestnuts have actually already been tried... and found catastrophically wanting precisely to the degree that they were taken on in earnest, from regressive taxation, to vacuous federalism, to deregulation and self-policing of enterprise, to for-profit administration of public and common goods, to lawlessness in the streets.

Ron Paul and his energetic fanboys may not have learned anything from those catastrophes, but that doesn't mean the rest of us have to pretend we don't see the obvious. Those who advocate "natural" aristocracy/plutocratic "meritocracy" are either greedy or clueless assholes, and those who advocate not the democratization but the smashing of the state are simply fools. There is a very real sense in which such people are not yet sufficiently educated to benefit from or provide benefit in debate. Pretending otherwise does nobody any good.

No comments: