Ron Paul and His Enemies
By Scott McConnell
February 2, 2012
An effective antiwar candidate is what the
neocons fear most.
After a strong second-place showing in the
New Hampshire primary, Ron Paul stood
before a young and giddy crowd of supporters.
In a near giggle, he spoke of the many
detractors who had called his campaign
“dangerous.” Paul reveled in their fear. To
cheers, he exclaimed, “We are dangerous to the
status quo in this country.” The candidate was
right about that, if not necessarily in the way he
most wanted.
What is it about Paul’s success that frightens
his opponents? Not fear that Paul will win the
presidency, though polls show him running
strongly against Obama. Unlike his rivals, Paul
hardly pretends the White House is a goal. On
the stump he emphasizes the goal of building
the cause of liberty. Libertarian ideas in
domestic policy have had a secure place in the
GOP for more than a generation, though Paul
has widened the channels for their discussion.
Yet when Paul began to rise in the pre-caucus
Iowa polls—by mid-December, it seemed
possible he would win the state—a shudder of
panic ran through the neoconservative
commentariat. What drove it? The answer had
little to do with the cause dearest to Ron Paul.
A week before New Hampshire, after placing third in Iowa, Paul thanked his backers and referred
to Nixon’s famous “We are all Keynesians now” statement. He asked whether people would soon
be saying, “We are all Austrians now.” What tiny fraction of the national television audience,
some seeing Ron Paul for the first time, had any idea what he was talking about?
Ron Paul was a student at Duke University’s medical school when he first read Friedrich Hayek’s
The Road to Serfdom, a classic argument for laissez-faire capitalism. The book propelled Paul
into study of “the Austrians,” especially the work of Hayek’s mentor Ludwig von Mises. In 1971,
after serving as an Air Force surgeon, Paul was practicing obstetrics outside Houston when he
drove to hear a lecture by the 80-year-old Mises, who had found refuge here from Nazism in
1940. Shortly thereafter, Richard Nixon closed the gold window and imposed wage and price
controls, and Ron Paul decided that someone—himself, actually—needed to bring Mises’s
understanding of sound money and free markets to a larger American audience. In his first
congressional campaign, a 1974 losing effort, he ran on a platform of “Freedom, Honesty, and
Sound Money”; Paul thereafter began his secondary career as an author and publisher of
economic newsletters spreading the Austrian message. Once elected to Congress in 1976, Paul
gained renown as an uncompromising “Dr. No” who refused to vote for any federal program not
explicitly sanctioned by the Constitution. Admired for his integrity—and in recent years, for his
antiwar stands—his passion for sound money was more respected than influential. But the
bursting of the housing bubble in 2008 multiplied the audience for systematic critiques of the
financial system. Since 2002, Paul had given repeated warnings that Freddie Mac and Fannie
Mae, by soaking up unsound money injected into the economy by the Federal Reserve, were
preparing an economic calamity that would strip homeowners of their savings and ruin banks.
His warnings proved prophetic, and as they were replayed on cable news, Paul gained new
stature within the GOP. In 2009, The Atlantic called him the Tea Party’s “Marx and Madison,”
an exaggeration but far from a falsehood.
Important as Paul’s bubble warnings were, sound-money doctrine by itself would not have
enabled him to build the movement he now leads. Virtually alone among prominent Republicans,
Paul opposed the Iraq War, and alone among the current presidential candidates, he stands
against sanctions and military threats against Iran. He has long opposed all foreign aid, a position
with important implications for the special relationship with Israel, in per capita terms by far the
most favored recipient of Washington’s largesse.
Paul’s foreign-affairs perspective is completely different from the prevailing Republican norm.
The Texas congressman avoids heavy breathing about American exceptionalism and expresses
little interest in giving orders to the rest of the world. He frequently seeks to understand global
issues from other nations’ points of view. He has noted that Iran is surrounded by hostile powers,
some of them armed with nuclear weapons, and has seen Iraq invaded and destroyed in the name
of democracy. He finds Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, under such circumstances, natural. A
Paul-associated PAC has produced a viscerally heart-pounding ad asking how Texans would
respond to Russian and Chinese troops occupying their territory—a question that informs Paul’s
perspective on Iraq and Afghanistan.
He is simply different from the others. As Andrew Sullivan wrote before the Iowa caucuses:
“Paul is the only candidate we can be sure will not take us into a third war with a Muslim country
in a decade. And he seems to believe this is a strength. No wonder Washington is still scratching
its collective head.”
How marginal are such positions within the Republican Party? A mid-December Washington
Post-ABC poll reported that 29 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents
considered Paul’s noninterventionism a good reason to support him. That is smaller than the 45
percent who for whom Paul’s dovishness was a turnoff, but it is hardly negligible—nearly a third
of the right-most half of the electorate, a group of millions that can claim no prominent leaders in
Congress, no regular newspaper columnists to shape and focus its thinking, no significant
representation on the cable news shows to validate and amplify its ideas.
What might happen if this group found a political voice? More than any other factor, this
question accounts for the vehemence of the attacks on Ron Paul. His opponents were not afraid
that the 76-year-old maverick would storm his way to the nomination, nor that Paulism would
restore the gold standard or end the Federal Reserve. But they quite rightly feared that Paul’s
foreign-policy ideas could find fertile ground in the electorate and lay the seeds for more forceful
and majoritarian representation within the GOP and the larger conservative movement.
When December polls showed Paul moving into the lead in Iowa, the knives came out. The fear,
as the American Spectator’s Phil Klein put it, was that a good Paul showing would “help
mainstream his noxious foreign policy views—particularly on Israel.” Republicans, added
Commentary’s Alana Goodman, needed to be wary of the idea that Paul’s “unforgivable
flaws—the bigotry-laced newsletters he published for years, his dangerous foreign policy
positions—are somehow more acceptable than Gingrich’s and Romney’s faults.”
Here the reprise of the story of the newsletters published under Ron Paul’s name 20 years ago
proved critical. The New Republic had made a national story of them early in the 2008 campaign.
James Kirchick reported that numerous issues of the “Ron Paul Political Report” and the “Ron
Paul Survival Report” contained passages that could be fairly characterized as race-baiting or
paranoid conspiracy-mongering. (Few in Texas had cared very much when one of Paul’s
congressional opponents tried to make an issue of the newsletters in 1996.). With Paul rising in
the polls, the Weekly Standard essentially republished Kirchik’s 2008 piece.
I’ve seen no serious challenge to the reporting done four years ago by David Weigel and Julian
Sanchez for Reason: the newsletters were the project of the late Murray Rothbard and Paul’s
longtime aide Lew Rockwell, who has denied authorship. Rothbard, who died in 1995, was a
brilliant libertarian author and activist, William F. Buckley’s tutor for the economics passages of
Up From Liberalism, and a man who pursued a lifelong mission to spread libertarian ideas
beyond a quirky quadrant of the intelligentsia. He had led libertarian overtures to the New Left in
the 1960s. In 1990, he argued for outreach to the redneck right, and the Ron Paul newsletters
became the chosen vehicle. For his part, Rockwell has moved on from this kind of thing.
Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that much of the racism in the newsletters would
have appeared less over the top in mainstream conservative circles at the time than it does now.
No one at the New York Post editorial page (where I worked) would have been offended by the
newsletters’ use of welfare stereotypes to mock the Los Angeles rioters, or by their taking note
that a gang of black teenagers were sticking white women with needles or pins in the streets of
Manhattan. (Contrary to the fears of the time, the pins used in these assaults were not
HIV-infected.) But racial tensions and fissures in the early 1990s were far more raw than today.
The Rockwell-Rothbard team were, in effect, trying to play Lee Atwater for the libertarians. A
generation later, their efforts look pretty ugly.
The resurfacing of the newsletter story in December froze Paul’s upward movement in the polls.
For the critical week before the Iowa caucuses, no Ron Paul national TV interview was complete
without newsletter questions, deemed more important than the candidate’s opposition to
indefinite detention, the Fed, or a new war in Iran. On stage in the New Hampshire debate, Paul
forcefully disavowed writing the newsletters or agreeing with their sentiments, as he had on
dozens of prior occasions, and changed the subject to a spirited denunciation of the drug laws for
their implicit racism. This of course did not explain the newsletters, but the response rang true on
an emotional level, if only because no one who had observed Ron Paul in public life over the past
15 years could perceive him as any kind of racist.
If the Weekly Standard editors hoped the flap would stir an anti-Paul storm in the black
community, they were sorely disappointed. In one telling Bloggingheads.tv dialogue, two
important black intellectuals, Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, showed far more interest in
Paul’s foreign-policy ideas, and the attempts to stamp them out, than they did in the old
documents. Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates likened Paul to Louis Farrakhan. He didn’t mean
it as a compliment, but the portrait fell well short of total scorn. It was difficult to ignore that the
main promoters of the newsletters story, The New Republic and the Weekly Standard, had
historically devoted exponentially more energy to promoting neoconservative policies in the
Middle East than they had to chastising politicians for racism.
Thus the newsletters could only serve as a kind of prelude; the main insults would be on the
grounds of foreign policy. The Republican Jewish Coalition excluded Paul from its Dec. 7 debate
because he was “so far outside the mainstream of the Republican Party.” Paul made the
Washington Post’s Richard Cohen (a liberal, except where the Mideast is concerned) think of
Hitler’s conquest of Europe. Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen called Paul’s positions
not conservative, not libertarian, but “nutty.” Also at the Post, blogger Jennifer Rubin asked
Iowa’s governor to make an “Anybody but Ron Paul” endorsement, and columnist Michael
Gerson accused Paul of seeking to “erase 158 years of Republican Party history.”
The barrage continued across the neocon blogosphere. Michael Medved labeled Paul “Dr.
Demento” with “eccentric and detestable views.” David Frum smeared Paul with a photo of
David Duke, whom he depicted as representing Ron Paul’s “base.” Gary Bauer, an evangelical
accessory to Bill Kristol’s war-promoting Project for a New American Century efforts, cut a
commercial for use in South Carolina attacking Paul as “hostile to our ally Israel” and “not a
Reagan Republican.” (An interesting sidelight to Paul’s career is that he was one of a handful of
Texas officials to endorse Ronald Reagan in 1976 and headed the Texas for Reagan delegation at
the ’76 convention. When in the 1980s he faced a right-wing primary challenge for being
insufficiently hawkish, Reagan taped a rousing Ron Paul endorsement.)
Yet the insults were never directed at the issues at the heart of Paul’s career: support for sound
money, opposition to the Federal Reserve, objection to the growth of the federal government on
constitutional grounds. This reflected a reasonable assessment of where Ron Paul might make the
greatest difference. Whether or not eliminating the Federal Reserve is a good idea, it is
considered far-fetched among economists left, right, and center
and is unlikely to be on the national agenda very soon.
Foreign policy is a different matter. Paul’s skepticism about
American military interventionism—the Iraq War, the Afghan
War, the war Israel and the neocons are trying get America to
fight with Iran—resonates far more among foreign-affairs
specialists, the military, the intelligence community, and the
Republican rank and file. Paul’s campaign has the potential to
begin bringing that skepticism into the inner reaches of the
GOP—where the interlocking web of big donors and
neoconservative-run think tanks and media have managed to
keep the doves, realists, and other skeptics at bay.
This may be recorded as neoconservatism’s most singular
achievement: to have their disastrous strategies enacted in Iraq,
see them thoroughly discredited, and yet nonetheless retain their
spots as the Beltway arbiters of “responsible” conservative opinion, with the power to exclude
those who dissent. But the neoconservatives understand better than anyone how tenuous is this
hold on the Washington discourse, how necessary it is to crush dissident movements before they
can grow beyond the cradle. Thus a septuagenarian congressman who is an outlier in his own
party must be treated as a mortal threat, his ideas not debated or refuted, but obliterated,
presented as so far beyond the pale that no sane person could entertain them.
By the night of the New Hampshire primary, it was clear that Ron Paul had torn a hole in the
matrix. On top of his third place in Iowa, where he doubled his 2008 vote percentage, Paul had
finished a strong second in New Hampshire, tripling his share from four years earlier. In both
contests, Paul won the under-30 vote going away and scored better with independents than any of
his rivals. The congressman was the only Republican connecting with young people and bringing
new voters into the GOP. While it is surely too soon to speak authoritatively about “Ron Paul
Republicans,” as we do about Reagan Democrats or evangelicals, such a voting bloc appears to
exist. Whether they become part of the GOP coalition is critical to the party’s future. If, as the
Economist suggested, they came for the anti-imperialism and civil liberties and grew interested in
the fiscal and monetary package, that would be telling as well. When in Iowa and New
Hampshire a young crowd cheered a liberty-based campaign with chants of “Bring them home,”
it was hard to imagine more full frontal repudiation of the Bush/Cheney vision of the party.
After New Hampshire one could see the wheels of the establishment begin to recalibrate. Paul
now seemed likely stay in the race for the duration and might arrive at the Tampa convention
with a horde of delegates. GOP politicos began to muse over about how he might be
accommodated. It was possible to imagine a Paul prime-time convention speech, but only, said
David Frum, if it was subject to Romney pre-approval. (Frum might hope it focuses on Paul’s
gold coin collection.) Commentary’s James Tobin, dipping into the favorite neocon trope,
warned that Ron Paul could not be “appeased.” Paul has denied any interest in a third-party bid.
But while the Republican Party could easily find a way to make rhetorical and platform
concessions to the economic parts of Paul’s agenda, a potent “bring them home” foreign-policy
movement cannot long coexist alongside the GOP’s regnant neoconservatism. What Paul’s
enemies fear is that his early success may herald the beginning of the end of their own
dominance. About this, at least, they are entirely correct.
RESTORE AMERICA NOW! Ron Paul 2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bn_kY3U0pa8
I Am Ron Paul: Restore America Now
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0MPSeAP2vI
END THE WARS VOTE RON
PAUL 2012