Jacob Levy:
Ron Paul continued | Bleeding Heart Libertarians: I want to help rescue libertarianism from the kinds of Confederacy- and Jim Crow-sympathizing, race-baiting and sometimes just plain racist filth.... Murray Rothbard, the activist-author-scholar who was probably the single most influential member of the modern libertarian movement... supported Strom Thurmond for President in 1948. He and his longtime associate Lew Rockwell pushed hard in the 1980s and early 90s for a “paleolibertarian” alliance with white cultural conservatives; they were involved with Pat Buchanan‘s campaign in 1992. Rockwell in particular went in for race-baiting, suggesting at one point that the problem with the Rodney King beating was that it was videotaped, impairing the ability of the police to get away with it. And Rockwell, as many know by now, was Ron Paul’s Congressional chief of staff in the 1970s and, later, partners with Ron Paul on his profitable line of newsletters. As Julian Sanchez and Dave Weigel reported four years ago, Rockwell was widely known to be the ghost-writer for the newsletters, though they went out under Ron Paul’s name.
[T]heir Buchananite, racist, culturally conservative “paleolibertarianism” was always in part directed against other libertarians. But it was also in part a money-making enterprise for Rockwell and Ron Paul directed at a particular segment of the public, a way to sell an ersatz anti-statism to white subscribers who wanted monthly updates on the Trilateral Commission, the Israel lobby, the homosexual AIDS lobby, the Federal Reserve, criminal blacks, and the rest of The Crisis At Hand.
There’s no way to deny that the newsletters are “legitimate” topics to question Paul about…. [T]he real problem isn’t about answering questions about their authorship. It’s about coming to terms with why the people writing under Paul’s name thought (accurately, it seems) that his fans and subscribers wanted this kind of thing, why Paul was associated with that kind of political movement in the first place. Naming the author would be a first step, but no more than that.
And yet, of course… here we are. If you think, as I do, that there’s great moral urgency in ending the drug war, in undoing the militarization of American police and the growth of the carceral state, you have some reason to root for Ron Paul to do well in the primaries. His hands are dirty with racist filth; but Weber taught us that there is no governing with clean hands. And all the other candidates who either have presided over or intend to preside over the drug war have or will have blood on their hands...
If you go to "the issues" section of Ron Paul's campaign web site, you read:
A Pro-Life Champion… The Right Remedy [health care]… Restore America's Prosperity… Strong, Secure, Respected… End the Fed… Lower Taxes Protect Gun Rights… Workers' Rights [i.e., no unions]… Standing Up for Homeschooling… Secure Our Borders… Energy Independence…
The Ron Paul campaign's issues aren't your issues, Jacob--unless, of course, you really do want to define yourself as a one-issue voter...
