Long-time Balloon Juice commenter (and friend of ABLC) TVHilton is guest blogging over at No More Mister Nice Blog, and he penned a post that is well worth reading:
Last week Glenn Greenwald won the Dumbest Tweet of the Week award with this beauty, about Ron Paul:
Of course, this is laughable to anyone familiar with Paul’s positions on, say, abortion, or the Civil Rights Act (Dave Neiwert has a great piece on this). It’s also ridiculous in the light of the vicious racism in Ron Paul’s newsletters. Greenwald’s response on the former was to point to his terribly-clever1 use of the weasel word “many”; the latter, he dismissed with an airy “they all have serious flaws”.
Greenwald has since doubled down on his tweet, describing Paul as “the only candidate in either party now touting” the “foreign policy and civil liberties values Democrats spent the Bush years claiming to defend”. All of which says much more about Greenwald’s extremly narrow (Libertarian-friendly) conception of “civil liberties” than about either the President or Ron Paul.
But even on its own terms–even excluding niggling little concerns like women’s autonomy or enforcing the equal protection clause or separation of church and state–Greenwald’s comment is fatally wrongheaded. Paul’s positions on issues like military intervention, surveillance, and the drug war may converge with the positions of civil libertarians, but they aren’t really based on civil liberties as we liberals understand the term.
A lot of prog love for Ron Paul is based on his national defense policies: “Avoid long and expensive land wars that bankrupt our country….eliminat[e] waste in a trillion-dollar military budget.” An anti-war stance, naturally enough, sounds pretty good to anti-war liberals. Paul opposed the Iraq War from the beginning (as, of course, did Obama); that buys him a lot of goodwill.
But the nature of his anti-war stance is fundamentally different from that of liberal opposition to any given war. The tipoff is in his opposition to foreign aid, and his anti-United Nations position: he’s anti-war because the rest of the world just isn’t worth it. His is not the pacifism of the anti-war movement but the nativist isolationism of the America-Firsters; Paul is “to the left of Obama” the way Lindbergh was to the left of Roosevelt. (That may be true in a fairly literal sense, although I wouldn’t trust anything from Big Government without further corroboration.)
Similarly, Paul’s positions on civil liberties issues aren’t actually about civil liberties as we understand them; they’re about his opposition to Federal authority. (An opposition that is somewhat conditional, it should be noted.) For example, in talking about the death penalty, he makes clear that he opposes it only at the Federal level. His opposition to the PATRIOT Act, the War on Drugs, and domestic surveillance come from the same root as his opposition to the Civil Rights Act. He has no real objection to states violating the rights of their citizens; it’s only a problem if the Feds do it.
The assumption underlying this is that people are freer when states (as opposed to the Federal government) have more power. Now, it may seem obvious to some of us that the distinction between one arbitrary administrative unit and another isn’t exactly a human rights issue, but let’s just consider for a moment: does state or local control actually translate to more liberty?
I understand that progressives praise Ron Paul’s foreign policy and Paul’s anti-war stance, but I don’t entirely understand why. What I find puzzling is the belief that these views make Ron Paul liberal or liberalish or lefty. They don’t. I don’t believe that Paul’s stance stems from some expression of humanity or concern about the victims of U.S. drone strikes. (Notably (or perhaps not), the CIA has suspended drone strikes in Pakistan). I agree with TVHilton that Paul is isolationist and anti-government, and I think Paul maintains those positions only when it suits him. That Paul recently signed the personhood pledge along with the other GOP nutbags flies in the face of the “I heart civil liberties and personal freedom” mantra which civil liberties/libertarian bloggers (like Conor Friedersdorf and Glenn Greenwald) often ascribe to Paul.
And while I agree that a national conversation about our foreign policy and global imperialism is desperately warranted, ultimately, I’m not willing to give up, for example, my reproductive freedom to have such a conversation, a conversation that will ultimately be futile because any president that would seek to impose isolationist policies, including withdrawing aid to Israel, would without a doubt be hamstrung by Congress. Of course, Paul’s views that the Civil Rights Act impinges personal freedom are of great concern to me, not because I fear that he would somehow undo or attempt to repeal the Civil Rights Act, but because I fear that a Department of Justice under Ron Paul would simply stop caring about upholding the various provisions of the Civil Rights Act and would stop caring about how the Civil Rights Acts affects minority rights in this country. Would a DOJ under President Paul shoot down the South Carolina voter ID laws? I doubt it.
So, am I monster for caring more about my uterus and the rights of minorities and the underclass than I am about the victims of drone strikes in a foreign land? Maybe. But I’m ok with it.
[cross-posted at Balloon Juice]
Good post. And TVHilton did a great job, in my opinion, of exposing why Greenwald’s ridiculous dreams of a progressive-libertarian alliance are worthy of progressives’ deep suspicion.
By the way, if Greenwald believes Paul’s nativist, isolationist positions deserve to be lauded as being as virtuous as anti-war, pro-civil-liberties, humanity-loving pacifism, he should have no problem praising Pat Buchanan’s foreign relations positions as well. How well would emoprogs react to Buchananlove?
Greenwald is huckster who spews anti-establishment BS to make a buck. He’s still fuming that an old pro like Lawrence O’Donell dressed him down after the 2010 election on his flawed political math. And his backing of a bigot like Ron Paul shows he’s jumped the shark for readership. But, he’s also the Pied Piper for so-called activist types who think Alex Jones is liberal, so its really a surprise.
Ron Paul is no liberal, he’s a walking socket puppet for the John Birch Society. The man came out against pasteurizing milk, for God’s Sake. The GOP would love to support the Gilded Age economic policies of Ron Paul, if this nut case didn’t also call for the complete dismantling of our banking and international trade systems as well (that and the whole legalize everything but abortion stance).
Greenwald is huckster who spews anti-establishment BS to make a buck. He’s still fuming that an old pro like Lawrence O’Donell dressed him down after the 2010 election on his flawed political math. And his backing of a bigot like Ron Paul shows he’s jumped the shark for readership. But, he’s also the Pied Piper for so-called activist types who think a lunatic like Alex Jones is liberal, so its really no surprise.
There are people out there who think Alex Jones is liberal?
Yes, I’ve had many a Lefty at political rallies and in the blog world quote Alex Jones as Gospel truth. Personally, The Enquirer shots of Bigfoot are more credible than Prison Planet or Info Wars. But they’re mostly “9/11 Truth” Conspiracy nuts who are still looking for blasting caps and missile fragments 10 years later at Ground Zero. Or they’re the weird ‘indie media journalist’ who a degree in have Anthropology and quotes Chomsky like Scripture at a Pentecostal revival but somehow can only work as barista at Starbucks near the local state college.
Personally, nuts like that are one of the reasons I left the Green Party and gave up on political activism in general.
And by the way, Ron Paul is no liberal. He’s a walking socket puppet for the John Birch Society. The man came out against pasteurizing milk, for God’s Sake.
Newt Gingrich of all people said it best that even the most hard right Republican voter would find most of Ron Paul’s core beliefs kooky, if not downright scary. The GOP would love to support the Gilded Age economic policies of Ron Paul, if this nut case didn’t also call for the complete dismantling of our banking and international trade systems as well (that and the whole legalize everything but abortion stance).
BTW, Ron Paul is no liberal, he’s a walking socket puppet for the John Birch Society. The man came out against pasteurizing milk, for God’s Sake. He’s an Alex Jones’ Info Wars blog posting with legs.
Even the Republicans thinks this guy’s a whack job. The GOP would love to support the Gilded Age economic regulations and social policies of Ron Paul, if this nut case didn’t also call for the complete dismantling of our banking and international trade systems as well (that and the whole legalize everything but abortion stance).
This post totally nails it when it states Paul’s so-called defense of civil liberties is really opposition to federal government authority.
Besides, from what I’m hearing, there’s not much liberal or progressive love for Ron’s son, Rand (even from emoprogs and the PL). Yet, Ron said that he and his son are not that philosophically different. The only difference is that Rand doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. If you really want to know what Ron Paul stands for, just look at his blabber-mouth son.
The Paultroons make the same mistake the EmoProggers make – assuming that it’s all about electing the guy at the top. If they really do want to stop the war on drugs, then they should be working to recruit and elect people across the board who share that value. And fwiw, Obama got rid of the unfair sentencing from the Clinton years that required harsher penalties for crack than for powder cocaine. I’m sure Greenwald, et al, sang his praises for that step in the right direction on civil liberties and justice, right?
Well, they said a silent cheer.
I tried to follow this on BJ, but it got bogged down my trolls determined to rag on you and not discuss the issue. Odd, that. The other front pagers get one or two dedicated trolls. You have five or six. I wonder what’s different about you…?
(Sorry, it’s just that every once in awhile I see your arguments about racism proven in action, and it just hits me between the eyes.)
On to the subject at hand, which was drowned there. I agree that Paul isn’t ‘to the left’ of anyone. He’s batshit insane, and if you look very narrowly at some of his positions they look like liberal positions. Except you can’t look at them narrowly, because they’re not individual positions – they’re part of a whole philosophy, of dismantling every government service and every law that doesn’t support his wide-ranging bigotries. He doesn’t support dismantling the police state, he supports dismantling the police period, and anyone who can’t hire their own security force is out of luck. You can’t say ‘he opposes the patriot act’, because that opposition does not exist without the baggage of how much further he wants to take things. You might as well say that Mao was for equal education for all, since that WAS a loudly trumpeted side effect of his desire to destroy the academic intellectual system, leaving everyone equally ignorant.
And Greenwald is a ‘government is evil’ Libertarian. It’s not like he denies it. Of course he supports Paul’s supposedly ‘left’ policies. Greenwald is coming from exactly the same bizarre, juvenile ideology.
Got it in one
Perfectly summed up.
I think Frankensteinbeck gets the post of the day, ABL. It perfectly lays out the issue.
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” is legit. Once I read that Ron Paul did not believe that Israel should exist, I could not vote for him and have any self-respect.
That said, the kind of threats to civil liberties that arise from the GWOT, such as FISA/NSA issues, are not only the issue of drones. And they are beyond the power of any one state government to enact. If Ron Paul has enough votes to be a threat at the convention, maybe he can force the Republican Party to realize how much they have relied on simple brutality in the war on terror, and cheered more and more of it as good. Torture in particular is a crime against humanity and should concern anyone no matter where it is. (The issue with Obama admin seems to be lack of torture prosecutions rather than torture itself and I don’t know if we’ve heard anything out of Paul on prosecutions.)
You really can’t look at Paul’s stances on the issues you’ve mentioned without looking at his positions on Civil Rights.
Paul could care less about the violation of civil liabilities that torture and other military action causes. He only cares that this is being done at the federal (not state level). Paul (and his son Rand) merely reject federal authority. That’s it.
How else could you reconcile his supposed belief in civil liberties with his rejection of Civil Rights? In Paul’s mind, it’s perfectly okay for a business to discriminate against people of color, women, gays and lesbians, etc, but not okay for the federal government to torture people. Sorry, but this does not make any sense.
Fortunately, I don’t have to vote. To be at the Missouri caucus you have to say you’re a Republican.
(Torture prosecutions: It won’t matter, unless you can prove that someone died, because by the time an extremely hypothetical President Paul takes office the SOL will have run out on so many of the crimes and political opponents can say, “Durham looked, and found nothing.”)
Three makes a trend. This is the third example – Prison Isolation during the Bradley Manning episode, police brutality during the OWS crackdown/DHS conspiracy theory, and now “civil liberties” in a general sense – that Greenwald has demonstrated a striking ability to overlook a large manifestation of an issue he purports to care about, which has long been of greatest significance to minority communities, and see only its salience to/from a white, professional-class, leftist perspective.
Yeah, Ron Paul is great on civil liberties, as long as you don’t think the LAPD had any civil liberties issues in the 1980s.
So much wrong with this post. Where to begin
1) reproductive rights : if you want a federal government powerful enough to grant you reproductive rights, they would also be powerful enough to take it away. wouldn’t you want several state governments competing on that issue?
2) Israel. Why do we give a tiny country with an affluent GDP comparable to Spain 400 times more money than we give Somalia?
3) Civil Rights Act : If the federal government has the power to force racist whites to allow blacks in their restaurants, doesn’t it also have the power to force a black restaurant owner to serve KKK members? Do we really want the government forcing us to take customers, or do we want personal liberty in our businesses?
4) Paul is not isolationist. He is for trade with other countries, foreign exchange students, diplomacy, etc. He’s just against buying off other governments, and bombing innocent bystanders overseas.
5) Read his newsletters yourself. The “racist” comments were largely a cut-and-paste hack job by one person, and everyone else just copied that guy or read his piece instead of reading the original. His comments aren’t racist at all, they are in fact more race-sensitive than any other political candidate.
Uh, I know you don’t pay attention on account of having a penis and all, but they already do that, and it doesn’t particularly help anyone in those states restricting reproductive rights. Just saying.
Dominionists that are part and parcel to the party of which Paul has aligned himself. Next question.
Barring actual disruption of the activities in the restaurant, yes it does. Your point?
But then, “personal liberty” to the Paultards just means “personal liberty to be a flying asshole to everyone else”.