Some Notes of Possible Relevance to Some Recent Unpleasantness Regarding Tolerance and Libertarians
Brian Doherty | January 17, 2008, 2:59am
I invite all fellow admirers of a tolerant, dynamic, vibrant, liberal, varied and growing world of ideas, expressions, and ways of being to consider, for a moment, that there may indeed have been some wisdom in that famous epigram said to sum up the spirit of Voltaire (though never, apparently, written by him in such words): “I disagree with what this man has said, but I defend to the death his right to say it.”
As ugly and embracing of intolerance as such an epigram may seem in practice, perhaps there are reasons, reasons vital to the flourishing of an interesting, varied, free world of expression, that those summing up the spirit of Enlightenment tolerance did not choose to express the appropriate attitude toward things said with which he disagreed—even strongly and passionately disagreed—like this: “I disagree with what this man has said, and I consider him evil for saying it; furthermore, I consider him having said it the most significant thing about him, and that it overshadows any other accomplishment or statement he has ever made. I fervently wish to have him driven from polite society, and consider that anyone who does not enthusiastically join me in so driving him to themselves be evil, or at least incredibly idiotic and not to be trusted—but don’t worry, I don’t think he should be arrested for saying it.”
It may be that the more famous saying indeed embodies the spirit of a lovable, valuable, rich world of discourse; and that the second one perhaps embodies a less open, free, and dynamic, and thus less valuable and interesting, world of discourse.
Also worth considering might be that libertarians in America have had, for reasons that might be somewhat understandable on reflection, to cultivate (perhaps to a fault) that original Voltairian spirit, as unpopular as it is in America. Among libertarians’ intellectual background is the likes of Nock, who believed that it wasn’t enough for a judge to refuse to convict girls for walking naked down the street; that true liberal freedom meant no one even noticed. Also, of course, in libertarians’ intellectual background is Mises, who wrote that “Liberalism…must be intolerant of every kind of intolerance,” but that statement might be seen to have a strange loop in it.
Libertarians have a set of peculiar beliefs about the proper use of force, generally based in a moral vision as well as a vision of human wealth, happiness, and flourishing. They consider their ideas of liberty and free markets salubrious, even glorious. They also find that almost everyone around them—generally including dearly beloved friends and family—hews to an alternate set of beliefs about what is proper and how to treat other human beings, beliefs utterly opposed to theirs in important respects. Indeed, the very common view that it is proper to use violent force against nonaggressors is one that the libertarian could fairly, from their perspective, consider evil.
And yet, somehow it rarely seems proper to the libertarian to hew with grim consistency to some of the conclusions about how to behave in the social world that might follow from that. They have never managed, for the most part, to be sternly and angrily opposed in high moral dudgeon to most of the people around them.
Indeed, looking at those who have chosen that path, they see models that seem inappropriate There seems something worth mocking and rejecting in the traditional Objectivist’s sense of a duty to practice harsh lordly disdain and refusal to truck with those who reject reason and liberty for irrationality and evil. Neither does it seem prudent or lovely to most libertarians to emulate the driven-to-his-compound-with-guns style of the man who decides to finally and firmly remove himself from the statist world’s endless evils of theft and oppression, back to the wall, prepared to fight if need be to show how he refuses to give any sanction to evil ideas—and evil practices.
For reasons perhaps difficult to articulate in a raw moral calculus, such ways of dealing with ideas—and practices!—that harm innocents by the millions seem even to most libertarians unlovely and impractical. It would lead to a social world, as long as they have failed to educate the rest of the world around them in libertarian principles, too ugly and divisive to warmly embrace. Such a hardline approach of complete moral disavowal and disengagement from people who advocate bad ideas is generally eschewed, even when those ideological differences aren’t merely about words or thoughts, but actuate in what the libertarian sees as actual theft, assault, tyranny, and murder on a daily basis.
This might shed some light one why many American libertarians tend toward such serious and dedicated classical Voltairianism, even when the rest of the world thinks them foolish, misguided, or evil to think, and behave, in that overly tolerant manner.
Joe Allen | January 17, 2008, 3:19am | #
by Phil Manger
(Libertarian)
Try, for just a minute, to imagine the following scenario. The New Republic, or some other stronghold of neocondom, has just discovered the website of the church Ron Paul has been attending for the last 20 years. At the very top of the site's home page is the following statement:
We are a congregation which is Unashamedly White and Unapologetically Christian...Our roots in the White religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are a European people, and remain "true to our native land", the mother continent, the cradle of civilization...We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a White worship service and ministries which address the White Community.
It doesn't take a lot of imagination to guess what would follow. The story would be on all the evening newscasts, the neocon and Beltway libertarian talking heads would be all over the cable news channels expressing their disgust, and even the paleolibertarians would jump ship. No explanation he could offer would be acceptable. Ron Paul's campaign would be dead.
But if you just change "White" to "Black" and "European" to "African" you'll have the exact words that appear at the top of the home page of the website of the Trinity United Church of Christ, the Chicago church that Barack Obama has been attending faithfully for the past 20 years. Yet, so far the media — with the exception of a few conservative columnists — have given Obama a pass on his connection with this church.
The terms "racism" and "racist" are thrown around so much these days that they have effectively lost all meaning. Well, not all meaning. In fact it's very simple if you just remember that racism is what lies at the root of one's opponents' thoughts and actions, while one's own thoughts and actions arise from only the purest of motives.
The charge of "racism" is most often made by the Left against the Right. However, increasingly — and distressingly — conservatives are hurling the "racist" epithet at their opponents on the Left. There are so many examples of this, it is not necessary to provide links to them. Just Google "Alberto Gonzales" and "racist" to find some examples. Or go look up what some neocons have said about Ron Paul.
When Wolf Blitzer was questioning him about his old newsletters on CNN last week, Dr. Paul said "Libertarians are incapable of being racists, because racism is a collectivist idea". I don't know that I agree with the first part of that statement, but Dr. Paul should be forgiven because he was being ambushed with a question and had only a few minutes to answer it. (A much better exposition of his views on racism can be found on his campaign website.)
I think a libertarian can be a racist because I think anybody can be a racist. I don't mean a hooded, cross-burning, night-riding racist; just someone for whom race is a factor, however minor, in his or her personal decision calculus. Most people naturally prefer the company of people who are like themselves in most ways. They might not require the exclusive company of others like themselves, but they also don't want to associate exclusively with people who are very different.
Thomas Schelling, a Nobel laureate in economics, once proposed a game. Get a roll of pennies, a roll of dimes and a large sheet of paper divided into one-inch squares. Distribute the coins one per square on the sheet of paper, leaving about a third of the spaces empty. Adopt a rule: assume each coin wants at least some proportion — say, a third — of its neighbors to be of the same kind. Now find a coin for which the rule is not satisfied — i.e. less than a third of its neighbors are of the same kind — and move it to a square where it is. Repeat this step until all coins are on squares that satisfy the rule. When you get to this point, you'll find that the pennies have tended to cluster with other pennies, while the dimes are clustered with other dimes.
Under the rule adopted, these coins are very open minded — each is willing to live where up to two-thirds of its neighbors are of another "race". Nevertheless, the end result of this "invisible hand" process is that most end up living where all of their neighbors are the same.
The point of the game is to demonstrate how a pattern of racial segregation can result from the individual decisions of people whom hardly anyone would accuse of being racist. Which is one of the reasons the charge of "racism" is one that is almost impossible to defend against.
A person accused of being a racist can usually clear his or her name with the accuser only by agreeing with the accuser. Last week on The Huffington Post Earl Ofari Hutchinson demanded that Ron Paul issue "a clear and direct public statement...that says I fully support all civil rights laws, will work hard against racial and gender profiling, and will push government economic support initiatives to boost minorities and the poor" as the price for being absolved of the charge of racism.
In other words, the only way the libertarian Dr. Paul can prove he's not a racist is to abandon libertarianism and adopt Hutchinson's statist policy prescriptions. That's like telling a Christian televangelist whose assistant had swindled viewers that repentance and restitution are not enough — he has to renounce Christianity if he wants to be forgiven.
The significant point about libertarians and racism is not that a libertarian can't be a racist; it's that, in a true libertarian society, racism is irrelevant. A libertarian government would not have the authority to enact legislation that favors one racial or ethnic group at the expense of another because it would not have the authority to enact legislation that favors anybody at the expense of another.
Nor would the government have the authority to enact legislation to correct the results of "invisible hand" processes like Schelling's game. In fact, the mere attempt to do so would be not only racist, but futile as well.
An example of the futility and racism inherent in using the police power of the state to correct racial discrimination — intended or otherwise — resulting from individual decisions are laws prohibiting racial discrimination in employment. Since the hiring decision is multidimensional, a racist manager could claim any number of reasons for rejecting an applicant of the "wrong" race. Hence the need for affirmative action if the law is to achieve its desired effect. But, since affirmative action requires basing the hiring decision on race, it is itself racist (and most probably in violation of the law it is meant to enforce).
One of the silliest things a politician or pundit can say is that she/he opposes affirmative action, but supports laws prohibiting racial discrimination in employment. You can't have one without the other. If you don't believe it, consider this: age discrimination is against the law, too, yet it's rampant in the workforce. Just ask any computer programmer over 40. The difference is, there's no affirmative action based on age. Ron Paul is probably the only Presidential candidate in either party who understands this.
There are, of course, people whose attitudes about race go far beyond just feeling more comfortable around people who are like themselves. But is that necessarily something to get alarmed about? As long as they're not harming or threatening anyone else, why should we care? If they choose to act out their hatred by harming people of another race, then the government can act. Otherwise the government is trying to read minds.
Racism and racist are words that, through overuse, have lost their sting. They are what you say when you have nothing else to say. Probably the best thing for all of us would be to banish them from the language. Certainly, they add nothing constructive to political discourse.
Joe Allen | January 17, 2008, 3:22am | #
How does the Ron Paul candidacy threaten the journalists, think tankers, and academics who live and work along the Orange Line in Washington, D.C.? The answer is straightforward analysis of economic incentives, with some common cultural patterns thrown in.
Familiarize yourself with the main economic plank of Paul’s platform: eliminating the income tax with no replacement. If it succeeded, most of the friends, fellow partiers, sources, and sex partners of the Orange Line journalists and think tankers would be out of work. Even partial success (for example influencing other candidates into advocating deeper tax cuts to win Paul supporters, or motivating more Congressional candidates to run on an anti-tax and anti-war platform and thus creating a libertarian base in Congress) would harm economic interests in their social circles. Furthermore, there would be far fewer spoils for the lobbyists to lobby over, and fewer important articles for the journalists to write about D.C. politics, so they’d suffer personally as well as socially.
There are also “economic preferences” in politics not reflected in money — desires for power, desires to “change the world”, etc. (These two motivations are easily interchangeable near the Orange Line). D.C. attracts people from all over the country with strong preferences along these lines. These, too, would be hurt by a growing success of anti-tax libertarianism. To the extent Ron Paul succeeded, they would be less able to shut down the madrassas and save Muslim women from the dastardly Muslim male. They’d have less control over oil. They couldn’t provide all Americans with health insurance. And (keeping in mind this is only one of many motivations) they couldn’t provide as much protection for Israel. Generally speaking, practically everybody who came D.C. did so to get the federal government to solve various problems they are passionate about. They feel very strongly about these: much more strongly on average than people who do not live near the Orange Line. Success by Ron Paul or his acolytes would start stripping away from them the power they believe they need to solve these problems.
Remember, Paul ranks right up there with McCain, Huckabee and Romney for the 18-29 year old vote. Paul has come very close to winning a plurality of that vote in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Michigan, ranking far ahead of Thompson and Giuliani for the young vote in all three. Paul ranks ahead of _all_ the other Republican candidates in Internet searches and search results. Contrary to myth this represents not “spam” but just the high concentration of Paul supporters on the Internet, comparable to the high concentration of Democrats in the mainstream media (MSM). Both the Internet and MSM are unrepresentative slices of American political opinion.
But the Internet is growing at the expense of the MSM and Paul represents a large chunk of the future of Republican politics. The MSM, including its political bureaus along the Orange Line, finds the Internet threatening. Orange Line bureaucrats think of “radical” libertarians (i.e. those who would eliminate the income tax with no replacement) as maniacs out to destroy their jobs. Ron Paul brings these two fears together.
Moving beyond economic incentives and to human cultural patterns, the Orange Line crowd are a tribe, a monoculture defending itself from an alien tribe that is hostile to them, namely libertarians who don’t like how the federal tribe makes it’s living (via skimming off their paychecks). It’s tribal warfare.
All in all, it would be extremely surprising if the Orange Line did _not_ try to attack Paul. The only surprising thing for me has been to observe how much Orange Line “libertarians” are culturally aligned with the Orange Line rather than with anti-government libertarians.
This analysis has been a straightforward matter of economic incentives with some common human cultural patterns thrown into the mix. This economic analysis gets obscured because, on the one hand, those not privy to the workings of D.C. can only describe it metaphorically in terms of conspiracy theories. The Orange Liners laugh them off the stage. But the economic analyses in their rough form sound a bit like the conspiracy theories, so they too are shouted down by the bullhorns of the Oranger Liners and those who parrot their authoritative opinions. They are laughed off as “conspiracy theory” before the analysis can even start to begin. Most of the MSM when it comes to political issues, and even much of the “alternative media” like Reason Magazine and the Orange Line bloggers, are part of the Orange Line culture. Using these Orange Line bullhorns to make fun of or smear independent thought and independent sources of political power is one of the main levers of federal power.
Joe Allen | January 17, 2008, 3:25am | #
Political correctness is a very strong signal of statism. In the mind of a statist, something is either required or banned. Either homosexual behavior is banned or it is required that everybody respect homosexual behavior. Either races are discriminated against by law or it is required that everybody treat races as equal in their own decisions. Statism, exemplified by its ideology of political correctness, recognizes no middle ground where all preferences and tastes can be respected by law. In the world of the statist, racial equality under law cannot occur without expunging private racial discrimination by screaming taboo and force of law, nor can homosexuals “be equal” unless everybody is forced to recognize homosexual marriages.
In a world of liberty homosexual freedom and “homophobia” would coexist. Racial equality under law and racial discrimination in personal decisions by those who prefer such discrimination would coexist. Neither side would need to feel politically threatened by the other. All persons could satisfy their preferences, whether “vices” or “bigotry” or otherwise, as long as they are not initiating force. But this is not the wolrd the “cosmopolitan libertarians” want. They demand not just eradicating legal restrictions on their own vices — an opinion on which all libertarian agree — they demand that we in the suburbs and the rural areas and anybody else who does not share their tastes recognize what many of us choose to believe are vices, for example homosexual “marriages”, adultery, and use of addictive drugs, as virtues. If we do not, they will lash out at us with the most viscious kind of hate as if we were trying to ban their vices. This is “very small tent” libertarianism since, as Ron Paul is demonstrating, the vast majority of libertarians are of the rural and suburban type, not of the urban “cosmopolitan” type.
By eagerly participating in the politically correct smear campaign against Ron Paul on the very day of the traditionally most crucial primary, New Hampshire, many in the beltway “libertarian” / “cosmopolitan libertarian” crowd have revealed their true anti-libertarian, pro-government colors. Some of these are just what Tom Paine called “sunshine patriots and summer soldiers”, Benedict Arnolds who switch sides at the first signs of trouble. But most have just lived around D.C. so long that they have become statists in their hearts. By getting so worked up about about somebody else’s personal preferences and opinions about race and homosexuality — which they choose to view as vices, as is their right — during the middle of the election campaign, they have demonstrated a preposterously strong streak of political correctness and thereby revealed a strong statist instinct.
Only a statist believes that the middle of an election campaign, much less the very day of the traditionally most important primary, is the best time to publically air the possible personal vices of libertarian candidates, in order to distract attention away from that candidate’s political views and smear him. Indeed, this has always been the statist’s favorite tactic for smearing anti-government types in older organizations like the John Birch Society. Now everybody with no personal memory of the matter accepts the “bigotry” of the JBS as historical gospel — the legacy of liberal and National Review-type MSM statists who then controlled the memetic agenda. The beltway “libertarian” smear campaign against Ron Paul is repeating almost exactly the tactics that statists like Bill Buckley pulled against the small-government JBS and the anti-interventionist Taft wing of the Republican party a generation ago.
In the statist world of the “cosmopolitan libertarians,” only cosmopolitans get to satisfy their preferences and tastes (or as some others choose and should be free to choose to view them, vices) in the marketplace. Statists in their guts, the “cosmopolitan libertarians” view any differences in values as political threats. Suburban and rural preferences and tastes, whether vices (like racism and homophobia) or otherwise must therefore be shouted down and banned, and even the most ardent libertarian like Ron Paul for whom it is suggested might hold any such values they view as a political threat. That is why so much effort has been put in by, not just the straightforward enemies of liberty in the pro-war crowd, but even by some anti-war DC “cosmopolitan libertarians”, to sabotage Ron Paul’s campaign.
Joe Allen | January 17, 2008, 3:36am | #
Ron Paul: Now for the piling on
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Beltway libertarians use Congressman's old newsletters as excuse for dumping on him. Some perspective.
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by Phil Manger
(Libertarian)
I guess we should have expected it.
The Beltway libertarians, those polished public intellectuals at Cato and Reason, have been falling all over themselves the past few days in an effort to distance themselves from Ron Paul following the "outing" of his old newsletters last week by The New Republic. Not that they were ever that close to begin with. The Cato gang never liked Dr. Paul, and the folks at Reason only warmed up to him after his campaign began to catch fire on the internet. Now, their blogs are full of I-told-you-sos, denunciations, and warnings of dire consequences for libertarianism.
Typical of these was David Boaz, Cato's executive vice-president, who told the world that "...over the past few months a lot of people have been asking why writers at the Cato Institute seemed to display a lack of interest in or enthusiasm for the Paul campaign. Well, now you know." Even Radley Balko, a Reason editor and former Cato policy analyst whose research on police misconduct made him one of the few shining lights among the Beltway libertarians in recent years, has joined the lynch mob. You can find links to dozens of other similar comments here.
Interestingly, all of them say they don't believe Dr. Paul is really a racist, and most of them say they believe him when he says he didn't write the articles in question. In fact, their real target seems to be something they call paleolibertarianism, a branch of libertarianism that has its center of gravity at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. And the man they really seem to loathe is the institute's president, Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. Ron Paul is merely collateral damage.
I should point out at this point that I really have no firsthand knowledge of any of the details of the mutual animosity that exists between the Beltway libertarians and the paleos. I only know that it exists and that it runs deep. I was a libertarian activist from the mid-'60s until the early '80s. I then decided to get a life and, except for an occasional blog post or attendance at a meeting, I was pretty much out of it for the next quarter century. It was my son who urged me to support Ron Paul in his run for President. (I didn't deliberately raise him to be a libertarian. Do you suppose it's genetic?) I did a lot of Googling of Ron Paul's name, and...well, here I am.
So, what about those newsletters? According to The New Republic article, the newsletters reveal "decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays". Actually, that's a gross overstatement. It's more like a careless phrase or choice of words here and there — sometimes very careless, and sometimes even mean.
What the newsletters remind me of is the "gold bug" marketing in the early '70s. The "gold bugs" — those who believed that the dollar was destined to continue to lose value — were a mixed bag: conspiracists, libertarians, John Birchers, survivalists (of both the Left and the Right), racialists, and some who just wanted to turn a quick profit. Following the dollar's devaluation in 1971 a number of businesses and newsletters appeared on the market to capitalize on the uncertainty of the times. They sold their wares, whether precious metals or newsletter subscriptions, by instilling fear and serving up red meat to the gold bugs. I remember attending one precious metals "seminar" in 1974. A black couple was sitting near me. When the speaker got to the part about riots in the cities and a breakdown of civil authority, I could see that the couple were extremely uncomfortable. They left before the end of the presentation.
For whatever reason, Ron Paul has a very bankable name in that market. The International Harry Schultz Letter, the granddaddy of all the gold bug newsletters, prominently features a plug from Dr. Paul on its webpage. So it would make sense that a newsletter bearing Paul's name, aimed at gold bugs or their like, would be profitable.
So, did Ron Paul write that awful stuff posted on TNR's website? I’m a former writer and editor and also a former college professor who got to be pretty good at sniffing out plagiarism in student papers, and I have to say I very much doubt it. It isn’t at all like Ron Paul’s style of writing (you can go to the Mises Institute website, where there is an extensive archive of Dr. Paul’s writings, if you don’t believe me), and there’s nothing in his voting record over 10 terms in Congress to suggest those are his views. I don't find it at all implausible that someone would use his name to sell subscriptions to a newsletter written and edited by others.
But I agree with Alex Wallenwein and Bill Westmiller that we need to know who did write that objectionable material so that we can move on. Otherwise, this stuff will come up again and again.
However, I am not so naive as to think that this will mollify the Beltway libertarians. In their writings on this controversy, I've detected a barely suppressed undercurrent of glee, as if they're trying to keep from shouting "Aha! Gotcha now!" They say they are concerned about what all this is doing to the reputation of libertarianism — although, it seems to me they're more concerned about what it's doing to their own standing in Georgetown — but I think they doth protest too much.
If the Beltway libertarians are really concerned about the reputation of libertarianism, let them take a look at what they're saying about Ron Paul over on the Left. Although they like his antiwar, pro-freedom message, a lot of the bloggers over there don't care for the fact that he's a libertarian. You see, they equate libertarianism with the Cato Institute. And to them, Cato is just another D. C. think tank laboring in the service of the corporate elites.
Joe Allen | January 17, 2008, 3:40am | #
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act." -George Orwell
The highest circulation libertarian periodical in America has joined the racist smear dog-pile on Ron Paul, or maybe they started it. It seems pretty damn suspicious Kirchick went out of his way to absolve The "libertines" at Reason and the "urbane libertarians" at Cato from any connection to Dr. No in his original TNR hitpiece. CATO is a beltway think tank. Both Cato and Reason have said from the beginning that Dr. Paul "can't win," so now they have a huge incentive to try to make their predictions come true. Funny also how the newsletters were unearthed from the Univesity of Kansas library, the university where Charles Koch, CATO funder, is a major patron.
They also guarantee themselves facetime on every cable news program in the country where they can spin their cowardly abandonment of the most pro-freedom candidate in decades as independence. They are so pure, that for them any libertarian candidate pragmatic enough to get elected is not idealistic enough to be worthy of office. The are shocked, SHOCKED to discover that the dumb things printed in old Ron Paul newsletters--things they have been aware of for months if not years-- were actually not ALL of the dumb things.
What's different about the new revelations? The context! Candidate Paul is gaining traction, so now his decades-old, well aired editorial lapse of judgement is evidence that he is dangerous, not quaint. But wait, if he can't win, why is he so dangerous?
Letting a bunch of xenophobic rot appear in his old newsletters actually does reveal something about Ron Paul. It reveals that he faults on the side of trusting people too much, rather than not enough. As a publisher, he foolishly trusted his editor to actually edit. Letting this go on for years is evidence that he is too tolerant of people and ideas he does not agree with. He has insufficient support for the thought police that keep this country on the track it is on. He naively believes that exposing people to unpopular ideas is beneficial, not harmful and that people can detect faulty resoning for themselves.
It's a good thing he can't win.
Joe Allen | January 17, 2008, 3:42am | #
I traded a few emails with Reason Magazine's Matt Welch recently.
Unlike almost everybody, I actually read reason magazine, at least I did until now. I have a copy next to the computer here as I type. I check the Reason website about a dozen times a day.
When the old newsletter non-story broke on the day of the New Hampshire primary, Reason very abruptly quit singing his praises and joined the MSM howls of condemnation.
It was BECAUSE of their coverage on Dr. Paul that I suspect an attempted swiftboating.
Reason has covered Dr. Paul often and fairly until the TNR story broke the day of the NH primary. The mainstream pack dogs smelled blood and Reason, far from fending them off, was ringing the dinner bell. Cursory critism was directed at Kirchick for opportunism, and then the wholesale abondonment of presumption of innocense.
It was shocking to me that Reason was taking the same angle as everyone else instead of seriously questioning the relevance of the story and the direction of the spin. I read the newsletters. They were not good, but not terribly damning either and wouldn't have been news at all if they carried the name of a less reputable person. Dr. Paul's sterling reputation is what makes this bemish stand out. McCain actually says stuff on camera worse than some of the material found in the Ron Paul reports, but Reason treats the "revelation" as if it had the same magnitude of finding a corpse in Dr. Paul's trunk!
Reason's justification for hanging Paul out to dry seems to be this: They are trying to protect the reputation of libertarianism by crucifying the most poular and influential libertarian in our lifetimes! You see, he lent his name (for profit) to a publication that didn't print church hymns and therefore he must be burnt at the steak. Trading on one's own name would seem to be a libertarian idea, but the Reason gang is throwing fuel on the pyre and basking in the glow.
Why? Why would Matt, Nick and Radley join the ugly chant that "someone's gotta pay?" These guys are smart enought to know that witchhunts don't stop when a witch is found.
A journalist has two main responsibilities: to report the facts, and to determine which facts to report. The facts should be timely, relevant and newsworthy. At best the old newsletters only met one of the three criteria.
Reason readers count on a pro-liberty perspective, but Reason showed none in this case. If I was on staff, I would have written something like this: "Attempted Smear Greeted by Yawns" or "Skelletons in Congressman's closet finally found."
The media has enormous power to frame the debate. Putting facts into context is as important as accuracy. Reason failed it's readers, the public and libertarianism spectacularly, by joining in the feeding frenzy and even leading the charge.
Reason's rationale of joining the bloodsport to "protect libertarianism" falls so flat they can't even look us in the eyes while they mutter it. Assuming the absolute worst that Dr. Paul wrote every ugly word in those newsletters himself and believed them in his heart of hearts, he would still be by far the most libertarian candiate in this election and every previous one since 1988 when he ran the first time.
For Reason's rationale to have any merit at all, they would have us believe that any candidate pragmatic enough to get elected was insufficiently idealistic enough to be worthy of office. It can reasonably be asked if Reason serves the establishment more than libertarianism by giving us false representation in the fourth estate and drowning out smaller, more legitimate voices for freedom.
Simply put: I don't like them or trust them anymore. I don't believe you should either.Reason has every right to take what they consider the high road, but to me it is a stupid self-righteousness.
According to Reason, Ron Paul is aligned with Lew Rockwell who is aligned with Pat Bucchanon who is aligned with somebody somewhere who is a racist.
How many Kevin Bacon degrees of separation are required before someone is "pure" enough to be a legitimate spokesman for libertarianism??
Again I think their strategy and/or their morals are slef-defeating. It's like Groucho Marx's line that "I would never wan't to belong to a club that would have me as a member."
The holy reasonoids are claiming that the politically successful strategy persued by Paul is too pragmatic for them to support. As an alternative they offer...nothing.
Billy Joe Allen
Truckernomics
Nolanchart.com
ithaqua | January 17, 2008, 7:53am | #
"It may be that the more famous saying indeed embodies the spirit of a lovable, valuable, rich world of discourse; and that the second one perhaps embodies a less open, free, and dynamic, and thus less valuable and interesting, world of discourse."
It may be. But, you know, it's actually not. There's no actual contradiction between the two quotes you offer; I can firmly believe that white supremists, for example, should be ostracised from polite society, and that the people who urge me to seriously consider that blacks are inherently less intelligent, more violent, more criminal, etc., than whites are either evil or stupid, AND YET still defend, absolutely, their right to express such beliefs. I am not infringing on anyone's free speech by shunning them based on the content of said speech, nor am I doing so by encouraging others to likewise shunning them. The right to free expression does not include either the right to an audience or freedom from the consequences of the ideas expressed; moreover, one does not create a more "lovable, valuable and rich" discourse by refusing to condemn utter gibbering crap when it is promulgated.
You could argue, fairly, that the policies which Paul supports are beneficial enough that his other flaws should be overlooked. Fine. But please don't try to pretend that those of us who see something revolting, disappointing and dangerous in Paul's willingness to pander to white supremists are somehow anti-freedom or anti-free speech by, you know, judging Paul based on the ideas to which he lent his name.
Also, what Sheldon said. Libertarians do, indeed, live sociably and peacefully among people who advocate policies and beliefs the libertarian finds abhorrent. On the other hand, libertarians do not generally support advocates of said abhorrent beliefs for public office. It's kind of like, oh, supporting Giuliani over Paul due to the belief that a hard line on "Islamofascism" benefits libertarianism more than his other unlibertarian beliefs and policies harm it.
now what | January 17, 2008, 9:09am | #
Interesting new twist: an article about the RON PAUL NEWSLETTERS that contains none of those words...
Anyway, Reason dudes/dudetttes: I like you guys. I really do. I've been reading you for five-ish years. So help me out here.
After all, you sort of got me into this Ron Paul mess in the first place. It was in part your favorable coverage of his candidacy (cover story, videos, talking him up on O'Reilly Factor, etc.) that contributed to my hopping on the rEVOLution's wacky bandwagon despite my discomfort with some of Paul's stances on issues about which honest men (including many of the Reason writers) may disagree (immigration, abortion, gold standard, black helicopters).
So now we've got Newslettergate, and Reason is distancing itself from Ron Paul -- and as much as I want to buy the campaign's "old news, let's move forward" response, it's still harder to justify keeping that RP bumber sticker on my car, maintaining Ron Paul links all over my blogs, and contemplating how much money I've sent to the guy on those once exhilarating "money bomb" days.
Assuming that many Reason folk previously considered more-or-less endorsing a vote for Ron Paul in the primaries, and assuming that Newslettergate has revealed too much unsavory stuff to continue supporting his campaign ... now what?
Is there a "second choice" you could get behind? Do you suggest sitting out the primaries (again) and waiting to see what the Libertarian Party comes up with for it's under 1% of the vote candidate this time around?
Seriously... help me out. Before Feb. 5, please.
Steve Horwitz | January 17, 2008, 9:23am | #
Dondero doesn't help himself by questioning Sheldon Richman's libertarian credentials. Get real.
The point Sheldon makes is the one I'd make too. It's one thing, as a libertarian, to defend the right of racists to say racist things and even if we as individuals choose not to associate with them, we should still be vigilant in defending their right to free speech.
However, when people calling themselves libertarians are pandering to racists and either outright saying or strongly implying that such beliefs are part of what it means to be a libertarian, then it's a whole other issue. (And I use "racism" as a cover term for all kinds of odious stuff.) Then libertarians who find such views offensive have every right to engage in a more aggressive sort of shunning and one that suggests that presenting such arguments *as libertarian arguments* is not a position that can be tolerated.
To me, when self-proclaimed libertarians suggest that racist views are part of libertarianism, it feels just like someone is calling me a racist. Not only is it false, it does damage to my name and reputation, and I feel justified in saying "you're wrong and shut the hell up."
As one example, it troubles me no end that there seems to be a generation of young libertarians who believe that it is part of libertarianism to defend the South in the Civil War. (Obligatory caveat - this does not mean I think Lincoln was a saint, ok?) Such an argument need not be racist but it certainly can be, or can be easily misconstrued that way. In any case, libertarianism per se requires no such view of the Civil War.
The problem here is what I've called "libertarian contrarianism," by which I mean the belief that some libertarians seem to have that if you are libertarian, you must reject all "conventional wisdom." Hence, some libertarians attack those who attack racism, deny evolution or deny/minimize the Holocaust, defend the South/attack Lincoln in ways that can't be supported by historical scholarship, etc.
It's the mindset of a 16 year old who just assumes everything his/her parents say is full of shit. (Trust me, I have one of these creatures.) Pandering to racists etc has reduced pieces of the libertarian movement to intellectual adolescence. The newsletter fiasco might be our cue to be more consistently grown up.
Fluffy | January 17, 2008, 9:23am | #
Yesterday I talked about how deceitful douchebags are using the occasion of the newsletter scandal to try to "smuggle in" and accomplish other argumentitive goals, using the approach of talking about these goals in the same breath as the newsletters.
That douchebag Earl Hutchison mentioned above was one of the examples I had in mind.
Dondero is definitely one of the other examples. Because of his self-admitted desire to practice genocide against Muslims, he now hates Ron Paul, because Paul opposes his genocidal aims and threatens to alienate enough Republicans and libertarians from the party of torture's ultimate nominee to have an impact on the likelihood of Eric's murderous and sadistic desires being further fulfilled in the future. Eric is really happy about the newsletter scandal, because it allows him to attempt to accomplish a handful of other goals:
1. It allows him to argue that he was "right all along", even though the newsletter stuff was always a trivial part of what he posted here about Paul. We can go back and check the threads - Eric's primary and repeated concern was not that Paul would associate libertarianism with racism, but that he would associate it with pacifism and "anarchism". [Eric defines anarchism as anyone who doesn't want to submit to Giuliani-style fascism lite.] Over and over Eric bellowed that because he stood in the snow to collect petitions one day back in 19whenever, he wasn't going to let "his movement" be associated with not wanting to exterminate Muslims. Everyone here knows this is true.
2. It allows him to promote other names as "the face of the libertarian movement", despite the fact that just about all of those names are garden-variety Bush conservatives.
3. It allows him to try to promote additional smears about "financial irregularities", confident that no one will examine them too closely now that the first scandal has scored a "hit", and despite the fact that all reputable [i.e. not using Dondero as a source] information seems to indicate that Paul was the VICTIM of financial impropriety during the 1988 campaign.
And has anyone noticed the simple fact that all during the time period when Paul was supposedly this evil moustache-twirling racist, Eric happily continued to work for, to work with, and to associate with him just the same? If we were to take Eric's twisted and slanted version of events at face value, by Eric's own statement he was happy to be an associate of Paul's when Paul was fomenting race war, he was happy to be an associate of Paul's when Paul slept each night in a coffin lined with anti-Semitic agitprop, he was happy to be an associate of Paul's when Paul would "force" him to "dress up" and "pretend" to be a Jew, and he was happy to be an associate of Paul's when Paul was involved in "financial impropriety" - and only decided to not be associated with Paul when Paul's reaction to 9/11 was to - correctly - predict that 9/11 would lead to shocking abuse of human rights and civil liberties. All those other stories Eric makes up? Just fine and dandy by Eric. Correctly predicting the future on 9/12, instead of slobbering at the prospect of deliberately killing civilians for revenge, as Eric admits he did and still does? Not acceptable to Eric. Judge everything Dondero posts on that basis.
Lawrence | January 17, 2008, 11:37am | #
I'm curious if the fact that folks like the KKK were the among the first to attempt gun control, primarily so that "some" folks could not defend themselves on certain dark evenings?
There is a difference between not liking someone because of their genotype, and actively campaigning against their right to vote, hold property and own guns.
It can easily be argued that the folks and ideas that Mr. Paul "endorsed" under his name may actually have been the impetus for the collectivists to take action.
Would we have gotten LBJ and his policies if the folks Ron Paul associates with hadn't forced them by rejecting equality before the law?
Would liberals mock "states rights" (I don't personally believe in states rights, per the constitution, I believe in limited federal powers, limited state powers not beholden to fed action, and individual rights, exactly as the constitution spells out), if state rights were not also a historical call for depriving some humans from the right to call themselves human and own themselves?
Institutional racism, which Ron Paul seems to endorse in these letters, is COMPLETELY collectivist. That's my problem with his associations.
It doesn't matter if he decries that or not, to attempt to declare an entire section of humanity not deserving of basic property rights is exactly the historical arguments that gave birth to present climate.
I don't blame the collectivists for rebelling against the opposition of some to the refusal to allow that these genotypes were indeed human, with a right to vote and hold property, and not be held as cattle and property.
If you really don't like the collectivists and their attempt to force equal outcomes, then one has to ask...
WHY SIDE WITH THOSE WHO OPPOSE EQUALITY BEFORE THE LAW. Which would have been the perfect solution to head off LBJs "superstate", and the collectivist argument in favor of equal outcomes.
Always remember, it was folks like the "racists" who most successfully opposed basic property rights and voting rights (as well as gun rights) in American history, and showed the collectivists how to do it.
Sam Grove | January 17, 2008, 1:34pm | #
One reason I left the LP behind is perception that hierarchical organizations tend to attract political types who want a place at or near the top of the organization. They want to run the show.
As I am personally anti-authoritarian, I don't care to participate in the hierarchy.
Ron Paul has a peculiar trait: although he is uncomfortable in imposing himself or his preferences on others in a personal setting, when it comes to the constitution, he is like a rock.
I'm not a constitutionalist except in the sense that if you're to have a government that bases its authority on the constitution, then by God, it had better conform to the constitution.
The biggest obstacle to the Ron Paul campaign, aside from those in power, is the perception of being unelectable. The same problem faced by the LP, BTW.
This is a confounding issue. If people actually thought Ron Paul had a chance of being elected, more people would support him, thus giving him that chance.
What is the tipping point for electability?
Does Ron Paul have a 1% chance? Is 1% worth anything?
What percentage is required before a candidate may be considered viable?
I hate this evaluation. People toss it off without a thought. When I campaigned for LP candidates in the past, I should've counted all the comments I heard in that vein, as it was a fairly frequently refrain, along with "I like your candidate", BUT...
Is this what we're stuck with?
Is Reason mag, CATO or the LP going to change the world?
Not a chance. They're just making a living off of people who have no hope of a libertarian political reformation.
Meanwhile, Ron Paul just beat two front runners in th MI primary.
Jim Henley | January 17, 2008, 1:54pm | #
Hey there, Fluff . . .
In all likelihood this is because sometimes when the Rockwell set uses the term "beltway libertarian" they mean a lifestyle libertarian, and sometimes they mean a pro-war, pro-Republican-party libertarian.
I agree completely. It gets to a couple of the things that make Brian's plea kind of silly, actually. Because, if you read Brian's piece and parse the assumptions of many of the anti-"Cosmo" posters in this thread, you'd think no libertarian had ever condemned another avowed libertarian before Hit & Run authors began linking to Jamie Kirchick.
In fact, "Paleo-libertarianism" as laid out in Rockwell's original essay began as A CONDEMNATION OF WHAT PASSED FOR "COSMOS" IN 1990. It was specifically a call to cast out "libertines" in favor of a new anti-state movement excluding them, explicitly hostile to them. You would think, from much that has been written here and elsewhere, that Lew Rockwell and Karen DeCoster and Myles Kantor and the like never uttered a cross word about anyone in the "pro-freedom" "movement" until one day out of the blue they found themselves being viciously assaulted by the likes of Kerry Howley.
Just ain't so.
Meanwhile, as you say, sometimes when the Rockwellians use a term it means one thing, and sometimes it means another thing. It always intends to delegitimize the object of their scorn for
who they are. What I realized in the late '90s and early '00s reading LRC - and there were a few years there where I read all the columnists, even the crazy ex-Rhodesian mercenary - was that everything they write is always political. That is, they're always
doing politics - attempting to advantage themselves in a power contest, whether with "beltway libertarians" or the staff of this or that magazine or competitors for leadership of the fringe right. This has everything to do with why I'm fast coming to distrust the Ron Paul personality cult as much as the Rockwell, Rothbard and Rand cults before it.
Me, I love lifestyle libertarians. If it weren't for the wife, kids and mortgage, I could have a ton of fun being one. For "pro-war, pro-GOP libertarians" I have no use. They're two different groups. My first-hand experience is that the overlap is not substantial.
To me a beltway libertarian is someone who, upon hearing Jonah Goldberg claim to be a libertarian, would immediately think, "Hmmmm...how can I get him to agree to support policy 'X'?" A Paul libertarian would immediately think, "If I spit in Jonah's face, can I get out of here fast enough to avoid the cops?"
Hey, that would make me a "Paul libertarian." Dude! Except, by your standard, a "Paul libertarian" hears that people like Jared Taylor and Willis Carto have a following and say, "Hmmmm...how can I get him to agree to support policy 'X'? I know: by flattering the prejudices of their followers!!!"
Now, I don't think that's really how you think, or how most Paulistas think. But the actual behavior of Paul's brain trust indicates that it's how THEY think, or at least thought.
LibertyVini | January 17, 2008, 11:01pm | #
The Ron Paul Bigotry Report...is less than it at first appears. I actually sat down and read all the newsletter quotes in the newsletters themselves (no, I don't own them, the article links to them). Kirchick correctly identifies quotes that many people would find offensive, which is completely what a journalist should do. But he quotes selectively and out of context to make the remarks seem as racist as possible, not the model of objectivity, I am afraid, from a publication and author who are rabidly pro-Jailiani, the candidate who stands the most to gain by dredging this stuff up right now.
Out of all of the newsletters he links to, I could only find one or two things that were patently offensive, and more to my point, almost nothing that was not pretty standard conservative cant at the time. It's widely known, for instance, that MLK plagiarized in his PhD. dissertation and cheated on his wife (the FBI had it on tape, moreover it was a big issue at the time because of Arizona's refusal to pass an MLK day holiday.) We are only a couple of political seasons removed from widespread public conservative criticism of "the Gay Agenda".
Limbaugh, Buchanan, Hannity, et al were saying arguably worse things back in the day, so much so that then-president Clinton tried to blame the "right-wing media" for the 1994 OKC Murrah building bombing.
The language used, to modern eyes, is as disturbing as it is because, I submit, of how far we have come as a people with regard to race, sexual orientation, etc. It is certainly worth pondering whether someone who authorized such speech in 1992 can legitimately claim to be neutral with regard to those characteristics, as Paul emphatically does. But what has been done here is a smear, a successful attempt at destroying the candidacy of a man who while imperfect, offered arguably the most antiracist platform in the Presidential race extant (ending the War on Drugs, ending the Iraq War and the Empire, ending the tyranny of Federal Reserve inflation, Social Security, and the IRS which all disproportionately harm the poor and the aspring black middle class).
When CATO, and Reason, and The New Republic, and the major Old Media outlets that had previously been friendly to Ron had the choice of believing in old words or current stated intended actions, they decided that the old words were more important.
Sure Ron's excuse was lame, and I'm not excusing the newsletters, just trying to put in perspective what has been presented a little bit. And the smug, self-satisfied losers who revel in Ron's troubles as though what he did makes him evil, while their own twisted pride is not are not the type of 'enlightened' people I envision as libertarians. And, by definition, anyone who supports a thug like Giuliani cannot be, by definition, a libertarian if they follow someone who said this much more recently;
"We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."
Nothing Ron ever said or implied in those newsletters, I submit, is as anti-libertarian, or anti-freedom, as that Giuliani statement. The very idea that anyone who could support such a megalomaniacal, authoritarian thug is enough to exorcise them from the libertarian movement, TOLERANCE BE DAMNED.
Stephan Kinsella | January 18, 2008, 6:03pm | #
Steve Horwitz: "However, when people calling themselves libertarians are pandering to racists and either outright saying or strongly implying that such beliefs are part of what it means to be a libertarian, then it's a whole other issue. ... To me, when self-proclaimed libertarians suggest that racist views are part of libertarianism, it feels just like someone is calling me a racist. ... As one example, it troubles me no end that there seems to be a generation of young libertarians who believe that it is part of libertarianism to defend the South in the Civil War. (Obligatory caveat - this does not mean I think Lincoln was a saint, ok?) Such an argument need not be racist but it certainly can be, or can be easily misconstrued that way.
"... The problem here is what I've called "libertarian contrarianism," by which I mean the belief that some libertarians seem to have that if you are libertarian, you must reject all "conventional wisdom." Hence, some libertarians attack those who attack racism, deny evolution or deny/minimize the Holocaust, defend the South/attack Lincoln in ways that can't be supported by historical scholarship, etc."
Steve, let me agree with much of this. Racism is immoral, and is certainly not part of libertarianism. Of course, this does not justify falsely accusing others of racism; that is itself immoral (and libelous). And this is what many of the cosmotards continue to do.
As for the War of Northern Aggression--the same cosmotard libertarian centralist compromisers continually refer to anyone who brings up secession and the unconstitutionality (and illegality) of the Civil War, or a critic of Lincoln, as a neo-confederate and a "defender" of the CSA South a neo-confederate and apologist for slavery. It mystifies me why any libertarian would ever have harsh words for libertarians critical of Lincoln! This is utter ignorance or madness. As for the Civil War, it is a perfectly legitimate view to believe that it was immoral, unnecessary, unconstitutional, and illegal, without favoring slavery (e.g. abolitionist Lysander Spooner's views). Or even without "defending" the South. For example I view with contempt the Rebel Flag waving neo-confederate hokum; I do not defend the South *or* the CSA (in fact they had no right to exist, or to keep slaves or to keep slavery legal; or to conscript soldiers to fight, etc.). Yet this does not mean there is anything wrong or unlibertarian with a sober analysis of the constitutional and moral flaws with Lincoln's actions too.
In addition, there has been a gradual (unconstitutional) federal centralization of power in this country, dating back since the Civil War (if not before), and it has increasingly ignored the constitutional fetters placed on it. This results in more death and destruction, more unleashed power of the state, so waht in the hell is wrong with naming some of the origins of these troubling trends? Has PC infected part of our movement so much we cower in fear to soberly and honestly diagnose historical origins of the evils of our current marauding central state? What is wrong with the PC crowd ...? they are so distracted by all the PC concerns that they overlook, or bash, legitimate libertarian inquiry and concerns.
So I agree that libertarians should not "defend the South" in the Civil War because slavery was evil and because states are evil, and war is evil. Of course, one not need "defend the South" to criticize Lincoln or his immoral war.
You say that the argument against Lincoln or his war "need not be racist but it certainly can be, or can be easily misconstrued that way."
I don't know of any libertarians who oppose Lincoln's war because it freed the slaves. Every libertarian I know, without exception, opposes slavery. So I have no idea how libertarian opposition to Lincoln or the war coudl even have a racist component. And yes, it obviously "can be easily misconstrued that way" since so many cosmotarians repeatedly do this--but I didn't know it was so easy to be so dishonest and vile.
"Hence, some libertarians attack those who attack racism,"
Yes, usually because "those who attack racism" do so either unfairly (by using such a broad brush the unfairly label non-racists as racist) or unjustly (by using the power of the state to outlaw racism). I would agree, however, that we ought as a general matter to be opposed to real racism; but this view, too, is not part of libertarianism, just what decent humans should do.
"deny evolution or deny/minimize the Holocaust,"
Well, I don't think we are obligated as libertarians to accept evolution (though I do); and I don't personally know any libertarians who deny the Holocaust. As for "minimizing" it, unless you are referring to recognizing *other* genocidal murders that are also to be condemned (China, USSR, etc.), I don't know any libertarian who minimizes it either; all libertarians I know of course oppose slavery and murder, including mass murder. So you must know a different young breed than I do.
"defend the South/attack Lincoln in ways that can't be supported by historical scholarship, etc."
I assume here you are talking about DiLorenzo, who has done heroic work attacking the terrible statist, racist, and UNlibertarian Abe Lincoln. Even if you don't like Tom's scholarship, this has nothing to do with racism, or libertarianism, or the ridiculous, self-embarrassing charges being made by the Palmers and Sandefurs of the world.
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