Ron Paul’s racism, the final end to his presidency?
The liberal blogocube has long known that Ron Paul is a flaming racist. In the 1990s he published a regular newsletter that was full of race-baiting, racist statements more fitting for the 1920s than the 1990s. Of course, most of Ron Paul’s proposed policies seem to hearken back to how things were in the 1920s, so maybe it was just naive of me to think his views on race relations would be different. As Ron Paul has gained a higher profile and news outlets have placed more attention on him (Fox News notwithstanding), though, the news media at large have picked up on the racism story. This should be the final nail in the coffin of the Ron Paul presidency.
The thing is, when I very first heard about Ron Paul, I actually sort of liked him (as much as is possible for me to like a Republican, anyway). But all I knew about him at that point was that he opposed the Iraq War at a time when all of his Republican contenders supported it. The more I learned about him, the less I liked him. All of his talk of liberty and freedom sounds impressive, until you realize he wants to devolve this country to the way it was many decades ago. He hates government even more than most Republicans, and under him, most government agencies (such as the Department of Education) and services would be eliminated. In that way lies madness. The passing of time has warped our perception of how bad things were in past decades. We should keep progressing like the rest of the developed world, not regress.
So it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that, in addition to all of his other regressive views, Ron Paul is a racist as well. Of course, this won’t sink his support amongst White Nationalists, the Ku Klux Klan, etc., but it will torpedo him overall. Americans, for the most part, do not tolerate overt racism any longer. Amongst Republicans it seems to work to disguise racism against the “hordes of brown people” as fighting illegal immigration, but there was nothing disguised about Ron Paul’s racist statements. He’s finished.
Who will be the next Republican candidate to go down in flames? Here’s hoping it’s Huckabee.
January 11th, 2008 at 11:40
Don’t forget to save one for the end: ideally, the last Republican standing should be one who’ll go down in flames against the Democratic nominee. If Huckabee goes down during the nominating process, the eventual candidate should be someone like Alan Keyes.
January 11th, 2008 at 14:15
Oh, I remember Alan Keyes. That was fun. His daughter was in my elementary school class, so I saw him many times. He once even came in and gave a speech to the class and assorted parents that showed up.
I was too young to really understand politics at that age, but as I grew older, I started realizing how crazy he really was. How he treated his daughter after she came out really cinched it for me.
January 14th, 2008 at 23:27
I went to see Alan Keyes while at Duke, and he is a very powerful speaker. Shame that his views basically implode on each other, especially regarding his daughter.
Well, looking at his website, you can see that there’s quite a bit of the survivalist attitude; I can’t think of any major candidate who would waste bandwidth talking about defeating the North American Union, for instance. (Even though NAFTA was intentionally modeled on the predecessor treaties that led to the EU). And of course the whole gold-standard issue is way out on the fringe. I can also say that he has a strong grassroots presence in Arizona, where of course a lot of people have adopted a fortress mentality towards illegal immigration (but then again, he’s the only candidate actually proposing to effectively guard the border).
I have to believe that most of his supporters are not of the survivalist and/or Aryan Nation camps because there aren’t really all that many of those people left — those movements have been in decline since the 90s. Read Louis Theroux’s The Call of the Weird to see what I mean. Turns out that anarchists and extreme individualist libertarians have trouble building functional communities.
Most of what Dr. Paul says in public, especially these days, is focused on his beliefs in constitutional rights and not on his personal beliefs, which are borderline nutcase. It’s especially embarrassing for an MD like him, or Sam Brownback for that matter, to not espouse a belief in evolution. What gets lost in the shuffle is that he more or less only wants the federal government to stop interfering with the states; I would bet that he wouldn’t have desegregated Alabama or used the FBI to dismantle racist groups, and that’s the real reason that all sorts of extremists are behind him. He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person to lie about his beliefs on race, as he has stated in interviews over the last decade or so retracting those newsletters; after all, he’s already said a lot of other politically suicidal things in public, like pledging and end to the Department of Education and Medicaid. (What exactly does the federal Dept. of Ed. do, anyway? When I was working in DC for Dept. of State I remember they had a good cafeteria, but as far as I know they administer education loans and enforce a certain controversial unfunded mandate (No Child…) on the states, neither of which seems particularly meriting of a Cabinet-level department).
Problem is, I think that he needs to make the strongest possible showing just to introduce his libertarian and small-government ideals into the political mindset. Otherwise, I have a feeling that we’ll be hearing nothing but FUD this fall. I would love to see a Paul-Obama debate, since people I respect, like Larry Lessig, have endorsed Obama as an honest guy, and I think that dialogue could move this country in a much-needed new direction.
Plus, I imagine that if he ever did get elected, the mere fact that he would veto every bill crossing his desk would force the Congress to be bipartisan, and/or cause a total government shutdown.
So, I’ve switched my party affiliation from Libertarian to Republican temporarily in order to vote for him in the primary, just to get out the message. I’m a fairly unusual libertarian compared to him, in that I can see the widespread prevalence of market failure in naturally monopolistic industries like telecom and insurance, but what else can I do?
Oh, and re: Huckabee, watch out. If you think he’s too much of a populist, just wait and see if Lou Dobbs enters the ring as an independent.
January 14th, 2008 at 23:31
Not related, but whenever I start discussing politics I have to recommend John Dunn’s The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics, one of the most intellectually dense books I’ve ever read, and one of the most insightful when meditating on democratic government.