nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst

As Ron Paul rises in the primary, a 15-year-old controversy rises again in the news: that of the newsletters published under his name, and the questionable content therein. A torrent of articles now pours forth from the pens of both the left and the establishment right, raising to a deafening roar the cries of racist! homophobe! antisemite! that, predictably, resurface whenever the machine deems it necessary to dismiss one of its components without calling into the slightest question its undoubtedly shoddy construction. A Twitter account tweeting lines from the newsletters has almost six thousand followers, and the prominent left-liberal magazine Mother Jones says, accurately, that the newsletters are Paul’s “one problem”.

This itself is a problem, and a serious one.

I am not denying here that the newsletters contain content that is, to say the least, highly problematic; I just see no reason why they are relevant. In similar cases of politicians’ personal beliefs or actions being called into question, there are two arguments that I have seen for their consideration: that those beliefs or actions can be used to predict the political behavior in office of the candidate in question, and that the personal character of politicians reflects on, or otherwise affects, that which they govern. These arguments are certainly not always invalid, but their validity in this particular situation is dubious at best.

For the first argument to be valid, there must not be a body of evidence significantly more useful for making such predictions. Expressed personal beliefs are certainly better than nothing, but as we all know, politicians say things to get money, votes, or media attention that they neither believe nor intend to implement while in office. Ron Paul is no unknown Chicago one-termer; in fact, as he said in tonight’s debate, he has served twelve terms in the House. One cannot spend over two decades as a politician without accumulating some sort of record, but Paul’s record appears to be a non-issue here. As for the second argument, any ‘racist’ message that Ron Paul’s election may send must be contrasted with the message of toleration for the disastrous neoliberal status quo that any other candidate’s election certainly would send.

Another argument, peculiar to this case, is that Ron Paul’s claims that he was not aware of the articles run under his name show a lack of management skill that makes him unfit for the presidency. This commits the same error as the first: it assumes that Ron Paul, a politician, does not lie. It is possible, of course, but it is far too convenient to simply assume incompetence, especially since Paul has not mentioned that the only byline on any article published in the newsletter was not his.

I suspect that the issue of the newsletters came about thus: Ron Paul, after being defeated in the 1984 Republican primary, agreed to the ‘paleolibertarian’ support-building strategy of Lew Rockwell, chief of staff for Paul in the House, vice president of the corporation that published the newsletters, and suspected ghostwriter, in an attempt to get back into office. This strategy consisted of, as reason put it, “exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist ‘paleoconservatives’” by including in the newsletters the rhetoric that is now being used against him. This explains the time table: Paul was defeated in the 1984 Republican primary and reelected in 1996, and almost all of the citations in the two TNR attack articles are from that period: (the only citation after 1996 is a 2007 campaign letter “invok[ing] the Branch Davidians [by questioning the necessity of the Waco siege, although TNR declines to mention that] and ‘the mysterious death of Hillary’s pal Vince Foster’”)

In other words, what we have here appears to be a politician playing politics, and then, in refusing to admit it, playing more politics, and if we take this at face value, the concept of playing politics is so new to the entire media establishment that they are scrambling to do something else with it. But if this concept is not new to them, their statements are not to be reflexively taken at face value; they are to be seen as a political strategy, the most thoroughly unsurprising thing in the history of voting, and the surprise of the pundits shows their utter lack of comprehension of the voting public, and most likely a disdain for democracy. (A disdain which I share, albeit for different reasons, but at least I admit it.)

My respect for libertarianism of the odd liberal, market-fundamentalist sort that seems to be the only sort practiced today is only slightly greater than the same for left-liberalism or Stalinism, but I’m starting to think supporting Ron Paul might not be all that bad an idea.

I have next to no respect for that particular sort of libertarianism because it makes the patently absurd claim that the only source of power, or at least the only one worth worrying about, is government. The market libertarian argument is that market forces will ensure that this is true in the long run; worrisome uses of power by private corporations will cause those corporations to lose market shares to others less abusive of their power. But, since we are not ‘rational’ in the economists’ ridiculous sense of the word, not all non-governmental use of power is motivated strictly by the drive toward higher profits, and even if it were, as John Maynard Keynes, the devil of the market libertarian pantheon, said, in the long run we are all dead.

However, the most significant area that the president has control over is foreign policy, which is an area that Paul definitely gets right. Considering that neither Obama nor any of the ‘mainstream’ Republican candidates show any signs of reducing our military activities in foreign countries, and that the issues that Paul is worst on are the ones that the president has minimal control over (Obama’s use of his position and personality cult as motivators for specific legislative action notwithstanding), Paul could turn out to be a net asset to the country.

The ideal, I think, would be Paul as president and a Democratic majority in both houses, so the ideologue’s inevitable idiocy could be overridden when necessary, but bills could (and almost certainly would) be vetoed when not. In an ideal situation, I’d have no problem with a president as veto-happy as I’m sure Paul would be, but this is not an ideal situation and I do not trust ideologues.

I do not trust this specific ideologue because, among other reasons, he ‘knows’ things I do not; namely, that federal government intervention will not be necessary to deal with our economic situation, or any other situation that falls outside the boundaries of his own rather idiosyncratic reading of the Constitution. My paranoid tendencies lead me inevitably to the desire to hear a proof of that piece of knowledge, but government is not mathematics, so such a proof is clearly not possible.

What would it take for your belief to be falsified? I do not think Paul could answer that question, but I am not sure how relevant that is. After all, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and utility must take precedence over ideological purity, especially since any ideology I could be said to hold is fringe enough to be not only unelectable, but utterly unheard of in the American political scene.