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

Sun May 23 09:26:05 CDT 2010

The Democratic (and Republican) administrations after the Second World War 
attacked their domestic critics as communists. There were of course communists 
in the civil-rights and anti-war movements, but "Red-baiting" was a way to 
avoid answering the demands for social and political change.

The present situation is similar. The Obama administration and its toadies 
attack their domestic critics as racists. There are of course racists in the 
anti-bank and anti-war movements, and "race-baiting" is a calculated way to 
avoid answering demands that come from real social distress.

But frenzied race-baiting in the media may not be enough to protect the criminal 
policies of this administration, at home or abroad. Torture in AfPak and 
dispossession in America may forge an effective opposition to it. --CGE

On 5/22/10 10:52 PM, Jenifer Cartwright wrote:
> Good post, thanks for sending it. --Jenifer
>
> --- On *Sat, 5/22/10, unionyes /<unionyes at ameritech.net>/* wrote:
>
>
> From: unionyes <unionyes at ameritech.net> Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fw: The
> Roots of Rand Paul's Civil Rights Resentment To: "Peace-discuss"
> <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> Date: Saturday, May 22, 2010, 8:31 AM
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: <moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG
> </mc/compose?to=moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG>> To: <PORTSIDE at LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
> </mc/compose?to=PORTSIDE at LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG>> 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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