Sophie: I want to make this abundantly clear: I do not agree with the author of this piece's progressive approach to libertarianism, as I come to libertarianism from the opposite direction, or even some of his theories on the historical roots of libertarianism; however, I could not agree more with him on the importance of the need for every libertarian to completely and utterly reject the Rockwell-Rothbardian paleo-libertarian strategy to play to the worst of man's natures. In fact, I would say that such a rank and pathetic ploy flies directly in the face of our fight for freedom and liberty.
In Federalist #51, James Madison wrote:
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
If angels
were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on
government would
be necessary."
It would seem to me that, if we, as libertarians, want less government, then we should want men to be closer to angels. Appealing to the basest of human emotions like hatred, prejudice, bigotry makes libertarians no better than socialists and Progressives that play to the destructive and divisive venialities of envy, greed, and resentment. Turning away from the principles of the Enlightenment and what we have learned since in order to score cheap political points will not create a learned populace more capable of governing itself, but one more dependent upon government to settle disputes between warring factions of peoples with little or no commonalities.
Libertarianism is a philosophy based in individual liberty, not collective salvation ... nor should it ever be one grounded in any way, shape or form for the collective condemnation of another condemnation or the solicitation of support for a group that engages in collective condemnation.
I also want to say that I was a libertarian before I came to the United States. I didn't know much about Lew Rockwell and I still don't. I did start getting reading Mises some years ago and became a fan of Murray Rothbard on his economics positions although never much on his foreign policy, especially Israel and Islamism, and some of his other ideas. I NEVER KNEW ANYTHING ABOUT HIS ROLE IN THIS VILE DISGUSTING, DIABOLICAL PANDER AND I AM NOT SURE THAT I WILL EVER BE ABLE TO LOOK AT HIM IN THE SAME WAY AGAIN. It wasn't until this whole Ron Paul brouhaha erupted recently that I even put Rothbard together with Rockwell and Paul. To tell you the truth, I wasn't even really aware of the more radical past of the Mises Institute, as I am a reader of the site in only the past 5 years or so. I read the economics pieces, which is all that I ever read written by Rothbard on Mises and I don't recall anything ever on race although I do know that he was not an interventionist and decisively nonchalant on the subject of Israel.
You will find some of his quotes cited on this blog. Those that are posted, I stand by...at least, I do at this moment since I am basing it on my recollection. I doubt that I would have let anything vile past, but if something has, I, as the editor, take the responsibility. I will promptly remove it once it is brought to my attention and remove it as it doesn't reflect my personal beliefs on racism, homophobia, and certainly not Anti-Semitism. I am much more a fan of Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Frederic Bastiat, Eric Hoffer, Jean-François Revel, Raymond Aron (on freedom, but not welfare state), Mark Steyn, Alelsandr Solzhenitsyn, Ronald Pestritto, Vaclav Havel, Stéphane Courtois, Andrzej Paczkowski, Jean-Louis Panné, Winston Churchill's wonderful The Second World War and the
First ENGLISH Edition Set of the Official Biography (1966-1988) [Main Volumes Only (I-VIII)], Theodore Dalrymple, Melanie Phillips, the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, John Locke, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Dietrich Bonhoffer, and enormous numbers of contemporary books written during Nazi Germany by foreign journalists and Ambassadors, as well as German dissidents, tell a much different story that Progressives would like you to believe, as I have detailed in my posts, The Left's Lie About Fascism Will Outlive Cockroaches In A Nuclear Winter, and Progressives Loved Fascism.
Ron Paul may or may not be a racist, anti-Semite, and/or homophobe, but he has been palling around with and profiting from racists, anti-Semites, and/or homophobes for decades.
As some of you might know, I’ve been stirring up quite a bit
of trouble on Facebook the last few days discussing the Ron Paul
newsletters story. Matt suggested I write up some of what I’ve been
saying for the audience here at BHL, which I’m happy to do. First let
me note that the posts by Gary and Jacob
below are right on the money in their own ways. Some of what I will
say below will echo Jacob in particular, but I want to explore the
history of this whole thing a bit more and offer some more reasons why
it should matter to bleeding heart libertarians.
To start, those of us who have been around the movement since the
1980s knew all about this stuff and knew that those newsletters would
never go away. As Jacob says, the attempt to court the right through
appeals to the most unsavory sorts of arguments was a conscious part of
the “paleolibertarian” strategy that Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard
cooked up in the late 1980s. What’s happening right now is that the
chickens of that effort are coming home to roost with large external
costs on all of us as libertarians. In other words, we are experiencing
“blowback,” and Ron Paul supporters of all people should understand
that when you poke at sleeping dogs, you should not be surprised when
they turn around and attack you, even if it takes a couple of decades.
Now Paul’s supporters understand viscerally what he’s rightly argued
about US foreign policy.
So why does this matter for bleeding heart libertarians? Indulge me
some history for a bit while I offer an explanation. Classical
liberalism started as a movement of the left, with folks like J.S. Mill
being our standard bearers against the forces of reaction and
conservatism in England, especially over issues of race. We were the
“progressives” of that era, viewing the market as a force for progress
for all, especially the least well-off, and as a great equalizer. It
was Mill who argued that it was a good thing that markets would lead to racial equality
in opposition to people like Carlyle and Ruskin who rejected markets
because they wanted to maintain racial hierarchy. The liberal
revolution was a revolution against privilege and the old order. It was
the radical progressivism of its day.
Unfortunately, classical liberalism never figured out how to respond
to the development of socialism, and especially the state socialism of
the Soviets and others in the early 20th century, in a way
that maintained our progressive credentials. By default, we moved from
the “left” to the “right,” thrown in with the conservative opponents of
the growing socialist wave. From the Old Right of the 1940s through the
Reagan era, libertarianism’s opposition to socialism, especially
interferences in the market, led us to ally with the forces of
reaction. But even with the demise of really-existing socialism, we
have been unable to completely break free of that connection to the
right, though things are better than they used to be.
Even as this happened, though, the liberalism of libertarianism did
not die. Within that libertarianism on the right was a strong strain of
leftism, particularly from the late 1960s into the early or mid 1980s,
both in the broader movement and in the Libertarian Party in
particular. When I came into the movement in 1980, I can vividly recall
meeting members of the Michigan LP and being surprised at how, for lack
of a better word, hippie they were, right down to smoking dope during
the breaks at the state convention.
By the mid-80s though, conservatism was hot, thanks to Reagan, and
the internal strife of the movement pitted Murray Rothbard against the
Koch Brothers, with the accusation by Rothbard that the liberal
libertarians were undermining the movement’s ability to appeal to a
broader audience thanks to their supposed libertinism. Murray wanted
the hippies out. The irony here was that it was the Koch controlled
parts that were (largely) the source of the left-deviation that pissed
Rothbard off. Today, of course, the sin of the Kochs is that they’re
too conservative. (Ever get the feeling that if the Kochs said the sky
was blue….anyway, I digress.)
This led to the paleolibertarian strategy by the end of the decade
after Rothbard broke with the Kochs and helped Lew Rockwell found the
Mises Institute (originally located on Capitol Hill – right smack inside
the hated beltway, it’s worth noting). The paleo strategy, as laid out here by Rockwell,
was clearly designed to create a libertarian-conservative fusion
exactly along the lines Jacob lays out in his post. It was about
appealing to the worst instincts of working/middle class conservative
whites by creating the only anti-left fusion possible with the demise of
socialism: one built on cultural issues. With everyone broadly
agreeing that the market had won, how could you hold together a
coalition that opposed the left? Oppose them on the culture. If you
read Rockwell’s manifesto through those eyes, you can see the “logic” of
the strategy. And it doesn’t take a PhD in Rhetoric to see how that
strategy would lead to the racism and other ugliness of newsletters at
the center of this week’s debates.
The paleo strategy was a horrific mistake, both strategically and
theoretically, though it apparently made some folks (such as Rockwell
and Paul) pretty rich selling newsletters predicting the collapse of
Western civilization at the hands of the blacks, gays, and
multiculturalists. The explicit strategy was abandoned by around the
turn of the century, but not after a lot of bad stuff had been written
in all kinds of places. There was way more than the Ron Paul
newsletters. There was the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, which was another
major place publishing these sorts of views. They could also be found
in a whole bunch of Mises Institute publications of that era. It was
the latter that led me to ask to be taken off the Institute’s mailing
list in the early 1990s, calling them “a fascist fist in a libertarian
glove.” I have never regretted that decision or that language. What
the media has in their hands is only the tip of the iceberg of the
really unsavory garbage that the paleo turn produced back then.
Through it all though, Ron Paul was a constant. He kept plugging
away, first at the center of the paleo strategy as evidenced by the
newsletters. To be clear, I am quite certain he did not write them.
There is little doubt that they were written by Rockwell and Rothbard.
People I know who were on the inside at the time confirm it and the
style matches pretty well to those two and does not match to
Ron Paul. Paul knows who wrote them too, but he’s protecting his
long-time friend and advisor, unfortunately. And even more sadly,
Rockwell doesn’t have the guts to confess and end this whole megillah.
So although I don’t think Ron Paul is a racist, like Archie Bunker, he
was willing to, metaphorically, toast a marshmallow on the cross others were burning.
Even after the paleo strategy was abandoned, Ron was still there
walking the line between “mainstream” libertarianism and the winking
appeal to the hard right courted by the paleo strategy. Paul’s
continued contact with the fringe groups of Truthers, racists, and the
paranoid right are well documented. Even in 2008, he refused to return a campaign contribution
of $500 from the white supremacist group Stormfront. You can still go
to their site and see their love for Ron Paul in this campaign and you
can find a picture of Ron with the owner of Stormfront’s website. Even if Ron had never intentionally courted them, isn’t it a huge problem that they
think he is a good candidate? Doesn’t that say something really bad
about the way Ron Paul is communicating his message? Doesn’t it suggest
that years of the paleo strategy of courting folks like that actually
resonated with the worst of the right? Paul also maintained his
connection with the Mises Institute, which has itself had numerous
connections with all kinds of unsavory folks: more racists,
anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, the whole nine yards. Much of this
stuff was ably documented in 2007 and 2008 by the Right Watch blog. Hit that link for more.
Those of us who watched all of this happen over two decades knew it
would come back to haunt us and so it has, unfortunately just as Ron
Paul and libertarianism are on the cusp of something really amazing.
And that only goes to show what a mistake the paleo strategy was:
imagine if the newsletters were not an issue and Paul were to win Iowa.
Yeah, he might get ignored, but he would not be the easy media target
he is now, nor would all of libertarianism pay a potential price. The
legions of young people supporting Paul did not come in via the paleo
strategy; they came because libertarianism in general is on the rise in
all kinds of venues (and yes, the Mises Institute’s post-paleo influence
is important here, but it’s hardly the only institution that matters).
These young people, for the most part, are surprised by all of this
dirty laundry. That, in my view, is the real tragedy: I think
libertarianism could have got to this point just as fast, maybe faster,
without the toxic baggage of the paleo strategy.
So why deal with this now, when libertarianism is so hot? Because those newsletters are not what libertarianism is and the sooner and louder we make that clear, the better.
There are too many young people who don’t understand all of this and
who we need to help see the alternative liberal vision of libertarianism
– and to understand that “liberal libertarianism” is radical,
principled, and humane and not “beltway selling out.” To do that, we
need to confront the past and explicitly reject it. That doesn’t
necessarily mean rejecting Ron Paul in electoral politics, but it does
mean that we cannot pretend the past doesn’t exist and it means that
Paul and the others involved need to do the right thing and take
explicit responsibility for what they said two decades ago. That has
not happened yet. Then we need a complete and utter rejection of the
paleo world-view and we need to create a movement that will simply not
be attractive to racists, homophobes, anti-Semites etc., by emphasizing,
as we have done at this blog, libertarianism’s liberal roots.
What we need right now is Rothbard’s vision of a free society as sketched in For a New Liberty,
but we need it defended better. More carefully. More richly. More
empirically. More humanely. More progressively. More tolerantly. With
better scholarship. And we have to do it in a way that’s immune to the
charge that libertarians don’t care about making the world a better
place, especially for the least well off and those historically
victimized by the color of their skin, their gender, their sexual
orientation, or anything else that’s irrelevant to their moral status as
human actors.
The writings of the paleolibertarians will continue to stain that
project unless and until the rest of the libertarian movement stops
trying to apologize for them (“you don’t understand the context” or “it
was a long time ago” or “Ron’s from a different generation”) or kicking
the can down the road because Ron Paul might win (“why bring this up now
when we’re winning?” or “Libertarians just like the circular firing
squad”) or just plain saying they don’t matter because it’s all media
bias (“it’s just the liberal media trying to destroy the libertarian
candidate”).
It’s time to face our ugly past head on and to explicitly reject it.
And it is the past of every libertarian. It doesn’t matter if you
weren’t there, or weren’t alive, or think it’s stupid: if you call
yourself a libertarian and especially if you support Ron Paul, it’s part
of your past like it or not. That’s how life works sometimes. We can’t
make Ron Paul name the authors or make the authors step forward, either
of which would help immensely. We can, however, take pains to make
clear that some of Ron Paul’s past and current associations are rejected
by libertarians who understand the “liberal” in libertarian and whose
vision of a free society is one that is so clearly in conflict with
racism, homophobia, antisemitism and all the rest that people like
Stormfront would never even consider sending us a donation and we would
recoil at being photographed with them.
Until we can say that with confidence, there’s every reason in the
world to keep talking about these newsletters and what they mean for the
21st century libertarian project, especially in its bleeding
heart version. It’s time to reclaim our progressive history from the
hands of the right: from the Old Right of the 40s, to the Reagan era
LINOs, to the paleolibertarianism of the 1990s. As many of us have
argued from the start on this blog, the heritage of libertarianism is
properly a progressive one. Our roots are in the anti-racism and
proto-feminism of J.S. Mill and others in the 19th century. We believe
in peaceful exchange, voluntary cooperation, progress, enlightenment,
tolerance and mutual respect, and openness to change. That is our
heritage and that’s the libertarianism that I grew up with in the 1970s
and 1980s, and that’s the progressive libertarianism I want to proudly
enter into the debate over the future of human social organization. If
the newsletters fiasco serves to further prod us into reclaiming that
heritage, we will have turned an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan.
I’m going to continue to do all I can to help make sure it happens.
Sophie: Otherwise, we get this....
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