Ron Paul's Roots: The Old Right (Confederacy Old)

[tekisui]

Although not a single vote has been cast, it's safe to say that Ron Paul has run the most successful libertarian presidential campaign in American history. Sure, the Libertarian Party nominates a candidate every term, but said candidate struggles to garner money and media attention. Paul, however, has become a legitimate phenomenon, if not a particularly likely GOP nominee. With his full-throated rejection of the imperial project in Iraq and a radical vision of a stripped-down state (though, oddly, one that still forces pregnancy), he's attracting large crowds at campaign events and polling at a healthy 8 percent in New Hampshire. In November he broke the single-day fundraising record with a $4.2 million haul.

So you would think that the circle of DC-based libertarians centered around the Cato Institute would be ecstatic. Not quite. "He doesn't strike me as the kind of person that's tapping into those elements of American public opinion that might lead towards a sustainable move in the libertarian direction," says Cato vice president for research Brink Lindsey.

Self-identified libertarians may be a tiny portion of the electorate, but small numbers have never stood in the way of bitter intramural sectarian disputes. When Lindsey says that Paul "comes from a different part of the libertarian universe than I do," he's referring to the libertarian version of the Trotsky/Lenin split, which opened up in the early 1980s and continues to echo through libertarianism today.

In 1981 American libertarianism's founding father, Murray Rothbard, had a falling out with Cato leaders over their weak-kneed conception of libertarianism as "low tax liberalism." After being kicked off the board of the organization he had helped found, Rothbard, a Jewish, Bronx-born economist who'd studied with Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, helped found the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. The institute became the intellectual center for what Rothbard protégé Lew Rockwell termed "paleolibertarianism," a worldview rooted squarely in the populist Old Right tradition. Paleolibertarians tend to be culturally conservative (attracting, on the edges, a fair share of Confederacy nostalgists and white supremacists), zealously against imperial foreign policy and the Federal Reserve. "Ron Paul has shown that the core of the state is the Pentagon and the Federal Reserve," says Rockwell, who was Paul's Congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982.

more at link: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071224/hayes

I read this in the hard copy of The Nation this week, and found it online to post. Paul is of the wacko-Right wing of Libertarianism. Any Progressives thinking they like his anti-war talk should realize how he got there and what else he stands for. Ron Paul is very bad for America, and his support should not be tolerated here.

[Perry Logan]

1. When are libertarians going to notice IT'S NOT CATCHING ON?

[whistle]

2. Just when you think the depths of stupidity has toughed, along come

....yet stupider people to set the stupidity bar deeper. These stupid people have adnored Ron Paul's campaign with $18.0 million so far and the man will never draw more than 5% of the popular vote

[baldguy]

4. Because too often assholes use "libertarianism" as an excuse to be assholes.

And we'll always have assholes around.

[Anna Lee]

5. When are liberals going to notice the infiltration?

Libertarians are quietly infiltrating the upper echelons of the government agencies, especially the ones that provide data on the health of the economy, budget and entitlements. There is a revolving door between think tanks in DC and government.

[originalpckelly]

3. So Imperial Wizards are against imperial foreign policy?

Whoda thunk?

[Anna Lee]

6. Easy to sell to young people

Many people go through a libertarian period in their teens through 30's. It takes a few doses of hard knocks to move them to another ideology.

Libertarians attract skinhead types simply because of a seeming support for states rights. They think that they can turn back the Civil War and Civil Rights. They are attracted to the "do as your please" tone of the libertarians as are those lobbying for legalization of drugs.

[Hippo_Tron]

10. It's delusional more than anything

The White Supremacist crowd is nuts and more than anything they have a nostalgia for the "good old days" that never really existed. It just so happens that in the "good old days" we didn't have an imperialistic foreign policy and so yes they oppose that, but they don't really oppose it for rational reasons.

Take Ron Paul's stance against the WTO. He's under the delusional impression that it actually tramples on the sovereignty of the United States, despite the fact that we control the organization. Progressives take issue with the WTO because of what it does to people in the third world. Ron Paul doesn't give two shits about the third world.

[comradebillyboy]

7. The contradictions of Ron Paul

I like his positions on brining all of our troops home, ending the war on drugs and corporate fascism, but

his fundamentalist, neo-confederate, no income tax, no federal reserve, no regulation ideals put him way out on the wing nut fringe.

[tuckessee]

8. So many Ron Paul posts.....

and he's only a 3rd place or so candidate in the Republican primaries. Not even running against a Dem yet.

He's scaring the hell out of yellow dogs everywhere.

This is fun. I bet Freeperland is in a tizzy over Dr. Paul's run as well.

[freeplessinseattle]

9. yeah, it's a blast

I, too, get such a kick out of seeing nutjobs come out of the woodwork and becoming cultivated by a major nutjob with potentially frightening power.

wheeee!!!!