Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary

Doomed To Repeat It

Virginia Postrel, on Michael Barone, and “change”:

I was born in 1960 but remember well the “economic disasters and foreign policy reverses of the 1970s.” On my pessimistic days, it worries me that not only voters in general but the young pundit class don’t understand how much worse things can be. On my optimistic days, I think the lessons of that period have been largely internalized. After all, you don’t hear people proposing wage and price controls. Except on doctors and medicine.

Unfortunately, while I’m generally an optimist about the future, I am a pessimist on the ability of the electorate to be aware of, let alone remember, history. And just as in the nineties, the Obamagasms would indicate that they are clamoring for another vacation from it. Unfortunately, the world often has other plans.

And speaking of remembering history, she also has some thoughts on Ron Paul:

The disclosures are not news to me, nor is the Paul campaign’s dismissive reaction a surprise. When you give your political heart to a guy who spends so much time worrying about international bankers, you’re not going to get a tolerant cosmopolitan.

Nope.

[Wednesday evening follow up]

Virginia does something rare (if not previously unheard of). She says that her former magazine fell down on the job:

…I was never particularly interested in the Paul campaign, which I considered a fringe effort in both its chances (nil) and much of its rhetoric (too many conspiracies). Rightly or wrongly, I didn’t consider Paul “one of the biggest mainstream representatives of libertarian thought.” I’m not sure whether I would have written about him if I had. Life is short, I don’t make my living as a professional libertarian any more, and I don’t feel responsible for commenting on every libertarian-related development that comes along. These days, I am more interested in understanding culture and economics than focusing on policy, much less policing the libertarian movement. Plus, as the Paulites will be quick to note, I disagree with Paul on his sexiest issue, the Iraq war (and on his second sexiest issue, opposition to immigration).

I do fault my friends at Reason, who are much cooler than I’ll ever be and who, scornful of the earnestness that takes politics seriously, apparently didn’t do their homework before embracing Paul as the latest indicator of libertarian cachet. For starters, they might have asked Bob Poole about Ron Paul; I remember a board member complaining about Paul’s newsletters back in the early ’90s. Besides, people as cosmopolitan as Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch should be able to detect something awry in Paul’s populist appeals.

I agree on the differences that she has with the doctor (in addition to his weird hangers on, which include not just racists and anti-semites, but with his opposition to the war, radical leftists, all the way out to International ANSWER). I just happened to get my dead-tree issue of the magazine a couple days ago, and Ron Paul was the cover story, by Brian Doherty (who, for the record, I generally like both personally and as a writer). I didn’t read the whole thing (which I have a tendency to do lately with Reason–I’d prefer more, shorter articles, rather than fewer, in-more-turgid-depth-than-necessary ones–maybe that’s something that will change in the incoming Welch era), but I skimmed it, and it did seem to me to gloss over many of the serious issues with him. It also seemed timed to try to boost him in the primaries. I’m assuming that, given the lead time, this was Nick Gillespie’s issue, perhaps his last for dead tree before taking over the Reason multi-media gig.

While I complain about living in south Florida a lot, one of the (few, to me) benefits is that Bob Poole and his wife moved out here from LA about the same time we did, and live about half an hour away, so we have the occasional pleasure of an opportunity to get together for dinner. I recall a conversation we had a year or so ago, in which we noted that the war really seems to have split the libertarians (though not necessarily the Libertarians). You could see this in 2004, when there was a roundup of libertarian(ish) viewpoints on who they were going to vote for, and Bob went on record as favoring Bush, contrary to many of his Reason colleagues. Bob, Glenn Reynolds, Virginia (and lowly me) seem to have come down on one side of the divide, and many of our friends (and they really are, as Virginia says) at Reason on the other. But I agree with her that they should have been warning off the younger libertarians who aren’t familiar with the history, rather than encouraging them.

It is going to be very interesting to see how this unfolds, and what Ron Paul will do when (despite the fanatical fervor of his supporters) he realizes that he’s not going to get the nomination. Will he run as a Libertarian again (as he did in 1988, when I voted for him)? This is problematic, because I think that there are several states that wouldn’t allow him to do so after having run as a Republican. And no other party really offers him the prospect of being on a large number of state ballots. Will there be a write-in campaign? Heck, as bizarre as the coalition he’s gathered is, he could even run as a member of the Green Party at this point. The thing is, such is the nature of the broad (albeit extreme and eclectic) range of his appeal now that I think he’d likely take more votes from the Dems (particularly if Hillary is the nominee) than the Republicans (depending on who their nominee is, but not that much).

I just think that this is more proof of Jonah’s thesis that the simplistic and conventional wisdom of left versus right is crazy. Unfortunately, there are many ways to split the ideologies. I prefer Virginia’s dichotomy of stasists versus dynamists. And I certainly don’t see Ron Paul as one of the latter.

[Update in the late evening]

Tim Cavanaugh, former Reasonite (and the editor for my dust up with Homer Hickam in October), has some thoughts over at the LA Times. And of course, I should have checked out Hit’n’Run, Reason’s group blog, to see what they’ve been saying about it. Matt Welch, incoming editor of the magazine (and erstwhile LA blogger buddy when I lived there) has a lot of linkage.

[Update a few minutes later]

Following links from Cavanaugh’s piece, I found this one to Matt, with more links to a lot more commentary from yesterday, including some of mine (though not this post).

[Update once more]

Nick Gillespie professes shock.

And I don’t mean to imply that he’s not sincere–I’m sure he is. Virginia’s point (and mine) is that if he’d asked some of the older hands around, they probably could have warned him about this, months (or even years) ago.

Political Commentary

Saved By The Gun

A ninety-year-old woman took down a mountain lion with a twenty two. If she’d been out for a walk, it might have been her own life she was defending, and not just her dog’s.

Of course, she did it with one of those evil guns, which some, who think that gun control would work if only we were sufficiently draconian about it, would want to make sure that she doesn’t have.

Political Commentary

Angry White Man

James Kirchik has been digging through some of Ron Paul’s old newsletters. It’s not a pretty sight.

Finding the pre-1999 newsletters was no easy task, but I was able to track many of them down at the libraries of the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Of course, with few bylines, it is difficult to know whether any particular article was written by Paul himself. Some of the earlier newsletters are signed by him, though the vast majority of the editions I saw contain no bylines at all. Complicating matters, many of the unbylined newsletters were written in the first-person, implying that Paul was the author.

But, whoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul’s name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him–and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing–but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.

I voted for Paul for President in 1988, primarily because I tended to vote Libertarian in the eighties. If these existed at the time, and I’d read some of them, I might not have. Of course, I’ve never been a big fan of the Von Mises Institute, either.

[Update a few minutes later]

Having read in more detail, let me amend the above from “might not have” to “certainly would not have.”

[Update a couple minutes later]

A Ron Paul supporter in deep denial. And as Glenn asks, “Did Paul write this? Was it ghostwritten under his name? Is it better if the answer is the latter?”

[Update late afternoon]

Here’s the campaign’s response.

I’m willing to believe that he wasn’t the author, and even that he didn’t endorse the newsletter, but I find it troubling that he let this stuff go out under his own name for so long. The fact that he takes “moral responsibility” for it now is nice, I guess, but it really makes one question his judgment. And his campaign continues to attract many unsavory elements of American politics, including 911 “Truthers,” who he seems to be unwilling to denounce.

[Update on Wednesday evening, after an Instalanche]

There was more discussion on this in a post this morning, from Virginia Postrel. There’s an update from her there as well.

Political Commentary

Another Review

…of Jonah’s book, by someone (shockingly) who has actually read it–Daniel Pipes:

To understand fascism in its full expression requires putting aside Stalin’s misrepresentation of the term and also look beyond the Holocaust, and instead return to the period Goldberg terms the “fascist moment,” roughly 1910-35. A statist ideology, fascism uses politics as the tool to transform society from atomized individuals into an organic whole. It does so by exalting the state over the individual, expert knowledge over democracy, enforced consensus over debate, and socialism over capitalism. It is totalitarian in Mussolini’s original meaning of the term, of “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” Fascism’s message boils down to “Enough talk, more action!” Its lasting appeal is getting things done.

In contrast, conservatism calls for limited government, individualism, democratic debate, and capitalism. Its appeal is liberty and leaving citizens alone.

I’ve been arguing with people for decades that there is little useful difference between fascism and socialism/communism. Certainly what difference there was was pretty transparent to the user. I think that nine out of ten (if not ninety nine out of a hundred) times that the word “fascist” is used (particularly as an epithet) it is utterly mindless. As Pipes notes, “Already in 1946, George Orwell noted that fascism had degenerated to signify ‘something not desirable.'”

Classical liberalism is as far as it’s possible to be from both fascism and socialism. While the notion of a one-dimensional scale to describe political views is ludicrous enough in its own right, the notion that, on such a scale, libertarians and fascists would be on the same side is demented, but many people (particularly ignorant leftists) continue to maintain this delusion.

I’d like to think that Jonah’s book will provide a corrective to this decades-long calumny, but sadly, as is often the case, the people who need to read it the most probably won’t. They’ll just continue to ignorantly fulminate about the cover.

[Late morning update]

Jonah writes in USA Today today about Putin’s role model:

While Time saw fit to linger on “the Russian president’s pale blue eyes,” they left out a fascinating rationale for Putin’s power grab. For much of the last year, the Russian government has been lionizing an American president who roughly seized the reins of power, dealt briskly with civil liberties, had a harsh view of constitutional niceties and crafted a media strategy, which critics derided as “propaganda,” that went “over the heads” of the Washington press corps.

George W. Bush? Nope. Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Putin has routinely invoked FDR as his role model. “Roosevelt laid out his plan for the country’s development for decades in advance,” he gushed at a news conference last fall. “At the end of the day, it turned out that the implementation of that plan benefited ordinary citizens and the elites and eventually brought the United States to the position it is in today.”

“Roosevelt was our military ally in the 20th century, and he is becoming our ideological ally in the 21st,” Putin’s chief “ideologist,” Vladislav Surkov, explained at a state-sponsored conference commemorating the 125th anniversary of FDR’s birth.

There’s a rich irony here. For years, liberals have wailed about the moral hazard of Bush’s supposedly crypto- (or not-so-crypto) fascist presidency. And yet it’s FDR, Lion of American Liberalism, who, some seven decades after his death, endures as the role model for Russia’s lurch toward authoritarianism, if not fascism.

An inconvenient truth.

So, class, is Vlad a communist? A fascist? Both? Neither?

And if you don’t want to take Putin’s word for it, Hitler and Mussolini are involved, too.

Also, he notes the Bush derangement:

Back in the here and now, GWB has done nothing remotely like what FDR did (for good or for ill, some might say). Despite the constant bleating about his hostility to the rule of law and civil liberties, he hasn’t tried to, say, pack the Supreme Court, or round up hundreds of thousands of Japanese (or Muslim) people.

Bush’s critics certainly have a point that our leaders need to think about the example we set. It’s advice liberals should have heeded long ago.

Indeed, though I disagree that they’re liberals.