Category Archives: Political Commentary

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.

Political Commentary

More Guns, Less Crime

It’s now six years into Michigan’s CCW law, and the rate of gun deaths in the state is in decline, while registrations are up. Here’s what I had to say about this about five years ago, a year or so into the program. As Glenn notes, this should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with both the theory and available empirical evidence. Of course, the irrational clueless will always be with us:

Other opponents remain convinced that it has contributed to an ongoing epidemic of firearms-related death and destruction.

Shikha Hamilton of Grosse Pointe, president of the Michigan chapter of the anti-gun group Million Moms March, said she believes overall gun violence (including suicide and accidental shootings) is up in Michigan since 2001. Many incidents involving CCW permit holders have not been widely reported, she said.

The most publicized recent case came early in 2007, when a 40-year-old Macomb County woman fired from her vehicle toward the driver of a truck she claimed had cut her off on I-94. Bernadette Headd was convicted of assault and sentenced to two years in prison.

Hamilton said that even if gun violence has ebbed, it remains pervasive, tragic and unnecessary. At the least, a more liberal concealed weapons law means there are more guns in homes and cars and on the street, she said, and more potential for disaster.

Note: “she believes.” This is a faith-based religion. These people will never be swayed by reality.