[Peace-discuss] Fw: The Roots of Rand Paul's Civil Rights Resentment

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Sent: Friday, May 21, 2010 9:14 PM
Subject: The Roots of Rand Paul's Civil Rights Resentment


> The Roots of Rand Paul's Civil Rights Resentment
>
>     Lurking beneath the Paul family's libertarian
>     politics is a strategy of pandering to "populists"
>     like Pat Buchanan
>
> By Joe Conason
> May 21, 2010
> http://www.salon.com/news/rand_paul_kentucky_senate_republican/index.html?story=/opinion/conason/2010/05/21/racial
>
> To understand Rand Paul's agonized contortions over
> America's civil rights consensus, let's review the
> tainted pedigree of the movement that reared him.
> Specifically, both the Kentucky Republican Senate
> nominee and his father, Ron Paul, have been closely
> associated over the past two decades with a faction
> that described itself as "paleolibertarian," led by
> former Ron Paul aide Lew Rockwell and the late writer
> Murray Rothbard. They eagerly forged an alliance with
> the "paleoconservatives" behind Patrick Buchanan, the
> columnist and former presidential candidate whose
> trademarks are nativism, racism and anti-Semitism.
>
> Repeatedly during Ron Paul's political career, his
> associates used the same kinds of inflammatory rhetoric
> used by Buchanan in order to attract support and raise
> money, all while Paul himself pretended not to know
> what they were doing and saying in his name. Paul could
> always cover himself by saying, just as Rand Paul says
> now, that his opposition to civil rights statutes is
> purely constitutional and has nothing to do with
> bigotry.
>
> The last time that anyone examined the details of the
> Paul family's gamy history was back in 2008, when the
> New Republic dug up copies of newsletters sent out
> under Ron's name to raise money, and found that they
> were replete with ugly references to blacks, Martin
> Luther King, homosexuals and other targets of the
> racist far right. At the time, Reason magazine, a
> libertarian magazine that opposed the "paleo"
> deviation, gave the most revealing account of its
> movement's degenerate element in a long article by
> Julian Sanchez and David Weigel.
>
> Following Ron Paul's dismal performance in the 1988
> presidential campaign as the Libertarian Party
> candidate, Rockwell and Rothbard "championed an open
> strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to
> build a coalition with populist 'paleoconservatives,'
> producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose
> racially charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored
> the controversial Paul newsletters" uncovered by the
> New Republic. Rothbard died in 1995, but in 2008
> Rockwell was still at Paul's side as a top advisor,
> "accompanying him to major media appearances; promoting
> his candidacy on the LewRockwell.com blog; publishing
> his books; and peddling an array of the avuncular Texas
> congressman's recent writings and audio recordings."
>
> According to Sanchez and Weigel, the tone of Paul's
> newsletters shifted to reflect his political
> circumstances. Between his first presidential campaign
> and his return to Congress in 1996 as a Republican,
> they were filled with slurs against blacks generally
> and Martin Luther King Jr. in particular, including the
> accusation that the civil rights leader "seduced
> underage girls and boys." Rothbard hated King deeply,
> describing him in November 1994 as "a socialist,
> egalitarian, coercive integrationist, and vicious
> opponent of private-property rights ... who was long
> under close Communist Party control," and concluding
> that "there is one excellent litmus test which can set
> up a clear dividing line between genuine conservatives
> and neoconservatives, and between paleolibertarians and
> what we can now call 'left-libertarians.' And that test
> is where one stands on 'Doctor' King." (Then again, he
> hated Lincoln too, whom he disparaged in the same essay
> as "one of the major despots of American history.")
>
> This offensive drivel was calculated to wring
> contributions from a narrowly targeted segment of the
> population. The Reason story quotes Ed Crane, longtime
> president of the Cato Institute, recalling a discussion
> with Ron Paul about the most fertile source of direct-
> mail contributions to his campaign: the mailing list of
> the Spotlight, the anti-Semitic national tabloid
> published by the "populist" Nazi sympathizer Willis
> Carto.
>
> Both Rothbard and Rockwell wrote of their strategy for
> a "right-wing populism" that would bring "the rednecks"
> into the libertarian movement. In an essay that
> appeared in their own joint newsletter in January 1992,
> Rothbard cited Joe McCarthy and David Duke, the openly
> racist former Klan leader, as "models" for this
> approach. (According to Sanchez and Weigel, a 1990
> issue of the Ron Paul Political Report discussed Duke
> and his movement "in strikingly similar terms.") This
> new movement would seek to mobilize an alienated white
> middle class against wealthy East Coast elitists and
> the "parasitic Underclass" spawned by liberal policy --
> identified clearly enough in a regular newsletter
> feature called "PC Watch," which featured news items
> about "interracial sex" and "thuggish black men
> terrifying petite white and Asian women."
>
> As for policy, the paleolibertarians advocated lower
> taxes, abolishing welfare, and "elimination of the
> entire 'civil rights' structure, which tramples on the
> property rights of every American" -- a sentiment that
> Rand Paul echoes in alluding to the right of private
> businesses to practice racial discrimination.
>
> In 1992, Ron Paul joined with Rothbard and Rockwell to
> support Pat Buchanan's insurgent primary candidacy
> against the incumbent Republican President George Bush.
> (Buchanan returned the favor in 2008.) "We have a
> dream," wrote Rockwell, "and perhaps someday it will
> come to pass. (Hell, if 'Dr.' King can have a dream,
> why can't we?) Our dream is that, one day, we
> Buchananites can present Mr. and Mrs. America, and all
> the liberal and conservative and centrist elites, with
> a dramatic choice ... We can say: 'Look, gang: you have
> a choice, it's either Pat Buchanan or David Duke.'"
>
> No wonder Sanchez and Weigel concluded with a
> forthright condemnation of Ron Paul's dishonesty on
> race. "Ron Paul may not be a racist," they wrote, "but
> he became complicit in a strategy of pandering to
> racists." The same polite formulation could be applied
> to the hard-line activists behind the Goldwater
> campaign in 1964, or the "Southern strategists" of the
> Nixon White House, or the "populist conservatives" of
> the George Wallace campaign, many of whom still remain
> active on the right today.
>
> Despite the persistent efforts of Buchanan, Rockwell
> and many others on the far right, their deranged
> "dream" of political advancement through racial
> conflict never developed into a full-scale national
> nightmare. Instead, King's dream has since drawn closer
> to fulfillment with the election of Barack Obama. But
> the profound resentment of the first black president
> symbolized by Rand Paul and his Tea Party supporters
> arose from an old political fever swamp that has never
> been drained.
>
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