I have already discussed my reasons apart from the newsletters for opposing Ron Paul. I believe his economic policies would be ruinous.
But what about the newsletters? Given Ron Paul's opposition to war and the national secuirty state, should I worry about them? I would say yes, they reflect a troubling tendancy.
Although the libertarian strategy of embracing everyone from the John Birch Society to to the Ku Klux Klan in order to keep libertarianism from being associated with "repellant cultural norms" failed it had a key insight. If you really want to stir up anger at government,calling for the abolition of Social Security or legalization of drugs is unlikely to be effective. A better approach is to call for "tax reduction, abolition of welfare, elimination of 'the entire "civil rights" structure, which tramples on the property rights of every American,' and a police crackdown on 'street criminals.'" Of course, such a strategy is not libertarian but right wing populist, not anti-state, but anti-other, not opposed to government spending on a blanket basis, but only to government spending on the wrong people.
The Mises Institute libertarians chose at their "other" inner city blacks, gays, the Federal Reserve, the United Nations, the Trilateral Commission, and other popular targets of the John Birch Society. They went way too far, embracing racists, anti-Semites, neo-Confederates, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers, survivalists, anti-government militias and the like. This anti-other tone, in all its nastiness, found its way into Ron Paul's newsletters. People reading them today have no difficulty recognizing their "anti-other" tone as the very embodiment of "repellent cultural norms."
But the tendancy to conflate anti-state and anti-other hasn't gone anywhere. Anti-other mindsets masquerading as anti-state live on in a more mainstream form in the Republican Party today, and in the Tea Party. The Tea Party is a more mainstream, less nasty version of anti-other disguised as anti-state, but it is, nonetheless, more anti-other than anti-state. What drives it is not blanket hostility to all government spending, but opposition to that spending going to people they consider unworthy. "Worthy" recipients are seniors who have paid into Social Security and Medicare all their working lives and now want to collect. "Unworthy" recipients are the young, the poor, and immigrants.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with being as much concerned with the composition as the amount of government spending. It seens illogical or hypocritical only when expressed in blanket anti-state terms, as the Tea Party leadership prefers to do.* And it can easily shade off into being anti-other. Tea Partiers are not racist, but may not care to think too hard about the racial composition of the poor. They also have to assume that illegal immigrants are mooching of government benefits, rather than working at jobs most Americans (Tea Partiers included) don't want and hiding in the shadows fearing attracting any sort of government attention. It is hard to read that as anything but anti-other.
But what about the newsletters? Given Ron Paul's opposition to war and the national secuirty state, should I worry about them? I would say yes, they reflect a troubling tendancy.
Although the libertarian strategy of embracing everyone from the John Birch Society to to the Ku Klux Klan in order to keep libertarianism from being associated with "repellant cultural norms" failed it had a key insight. If you really want to stir up anger at government,calling for the abolition of Social Security or legalization of drugs is unlikely to be effective. A better approach is to call for "tax reduction, abolition of welfare, elimination of 'the entire "civil rights" structure, which tramples on the property rights of every American,' and a police crackdown on 'street criminals.'" Of course, such a strategy is not libertarian but right wing populist, not anti-state, but anti-other, not opposed to government spending on a blanket basis, but only to government spending on the wrong people.
The Mises Institute libertarians chose at their "other" inner city blacks, gays, the Federal Reserve, the United Nations, the Trilateral Commission, and other popular targets of the John Birch Society. They went way too far, embracing racists, anti-Semites, neo-Confederates, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers, survivalists, anti-government militias and the like. This anti-other tone, in all its nastiness, found its way into Ron Paul's newsletters. People reading them today have no difficulty recognizing their "anti-other" tone as the very embodiment of "repellent cultural norms."
But the tendancy to conflate anti-state and anti-other hasn't gone anywhere. Anti-other mindsets masquerading as anti-state live on in a more mainstream form in the Republican Party today, and in the Tea Party. The Tea Party is a more mainstream, less nasty version of anti-other disguised as anti-state, but it is, nonetheless, more anti-other than anti-state. What drives it is not blanket hostility to all government spending, but opposition to that spending going to people they consider unworthy. "Worthy" recipients are seniors who have paid into Social Security and Medicare all their working lives and now want to collect. "Unworthy" recipients are the young, the poor, and immigrants.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with being as much concerned with the composition as the amount of government spending. It seens illogical or hypocritical only when expressed in blanket anti-state terms, as the Tea Party leadership prefers to do.* And it can easily shade off into being anti-other. Tea Partiers are not racist, but may not care to think too hard about the racial composition of the poor. They also have to assume that illegal immigrants are mooching of government benefits, rather than working at jobs most Americans (Tea Partiers included) don't want and hiding in the shadows fearing attracting any sort of government attention. It is hard to read that as anything but anti-other.
Ron Paul continues to appeal to that strand of anti-other. His platform on immigration calls for doing "whatever it takes" to secure our borders, tracking and deporting anyone who illegally overstays a visa, no taxpayers funded services (including schools, hospitals and road) for illegal immigrants, restriction on legal immigration, no amnesty, no birthright citizenship. (He is somewhat vague on what he wants to do with the millions of illegal immigrants who are already here). None of this sounds very libertarian (except withholding taxpayer services). Securing our borders sounds very much like the militarism Paul otherwise denounces. Tracking and deporting anyone who overstays a visa is a huge government intrusion. And the whole approach ignores the basic free market principle that labor tends to move from lower to higher wages. Ron Paul speaks eloquently about consequences of opposing the free market by illegalizing drugs. Why doesn't he notice that resisting the free market on immigration leads to human trafficking and a huge underground economy?**
The War on Terror, of course, is about as anti-other as you can get. Candidates strut and beat their chests, boasting how tough they are in their foreign policy. Obama burnishes his credentials by showing how many Others he has killed in his drone war. There are endless calls for more war and ever more intrusive government surveillance, all in the name of protecting us from that dreaded Other. Now Congress has passed a statute effectively requiring the President to lock all Others suspected of terrorism away forever in military custody, even if proven innocent beyond reasonable doubt. And the whole debate over torture is not only about extracting information, but about showing a maximally punitive attitude toward the Other. And now there is the vast anti-Shariah movement that effectively treats any practice of Islam in the United State, and possibly anywhere in the world, as a mortal threat to Western Civilization.
This is what Ron Paul opposes. He also wants to end our War on Drugs and the immense government intrusion it brings about. I altogether applaud him for all that. I also whole-heartedly hope that he makes these things respectable subjects of public debate and creates real political pressure in favor of putting an end to this monstrosity. But the newsletters make me uneasy in entrusting him with this role. See, the anti-other psychology of the newsletters is exactly the same as the anti-other psychology that drives so much of the War on Terror (as well as the implied War on Islam). The newsletters clearly showed that Paul was willing to embrace an anti-other appeal disguised as anti-statism and pander to people's ugliest instincts. He still shows strong tendancies in that direction on the issue of immigration. So I have trouble trusting him to set it aside over the long haul.
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*The Tea Party leadership, by contrast, does have a blanket opposition to all government spending, at least on anything other than Essential Core functions.
**And yes, I realize immigration is a difficult issue and that there are legitimate arguments against unrestricted immigration. But then again, drugs ruin lives, so there are arguments on both sides about drugs as well.
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