Samples from the Ron Paul newsletter

A website called Spirit/Water/Blood has substantive quotations that have been scanned from Ron Paul’s old newsletter from the ’80s and ’90s. The style and worldview revealed in these passages does not sound like the Paul I’ve heard as a presidential candidate, and I assume the story is correct that the real author of these items was Llewelyn Rockwell.

Back in the ’80s and ’90s Rockwell was a paleo-libertarian, meaning that he combined paleoconservative with libertarian beliefs. Meaning, he combined adherence and loyalty to a particular culture and people with an opposition to big government. Another expression of paleo-libertarianism was the Rockwell-Rothbard Report which was published in the same period and to which I subscribed for a while. Since then, at his website lewrockwell.com, Rockwell has dropped the paleo part and become something for which there is no ready label, but could be described as a radical anti-American libertarian ideologue. The essence of this ideology is that big government is the root of all evil, and therefore any people who have a big government deserve to be destroyed. Rockwell is the libertarian equivalent of the anti-homosexual pastor Fred Phelps. At the prospect of the ruin and death of America, her culture, and her people, Rockwell and his adherents stand there with signs gleefully declaring, “God hates big government.”

In any case, as I said recently, regardless of what we think of the various controversial statements published in the Ron Paul newsletter, either Paul, as he has now avowed, paid zero attention to and had zero knowledge of what was published under his name, which means that he is a nothing; or else he is a bigger liar than Obama denying he had any knowledge of the anti-America, anti-white preachings of Rev. Wright. Either way Paul’s reputation as a man of integrity is kaput.

- end of initial entry -

February 6

Timothy A. writes:

Ron Paul’s volte-face isn’t surprising when you look at the history of his mentor Murray Rothbard. In 1948, Rothbard was, in his own words, the only New York Jew who supported Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat campaign for President. By the mid 1960s he was seeking to collaborate with New Leftist groups like the SDS. In the early 1990s he was favoring cooperation with right-wing populists like Pat Buchanan and David Duke.

LA replies:

You describe two Rothbard volte faces, one to the left, the next to the right. What is the analogy to Paul?

Timothy replies:

At the time of the “racist” newsletters, Paul was building bridges to the David Duke crowd. Now he is appealing to a left-wing, OWS, anti-Iraq War crowd, so he is pro-immigrant, anti-anti-Muslim, anti-DADT, etc. It’s all about building electoral coalitions, Rothbard-style, with whichever disaffected group seems the strongest at the time. The fact that it is never effective, as well as being intellectually dishonest, doesn’t seem to matter.

LA replies:

Very interesting. It reminds me of how The American Conservative attempted to “build bridges” to various anti-American leftists, publishing their disgusting articles, because they and TAC shared an opposition to the Iraq war. TAC even had a complimentary cover article on that deputy prince of darkness, Norman Mailer.

As you rightly point out, such “coalition building” not only fails, it leaves the hopeful coalition builders without any principles or integrity. And as I have said so many times, if, like the anti-war right, you are primarily driven by what you oppose or hate, instead of by what you believe in and affirm, you inevitably end up siding with anyone who shares your hate. You end up treating the enemies of your enemy as your friends, even if the enemies of your enemy are the worst people on earth.

February 7

Alan Levine writes:

I fully agree with your remarks on the Ron Paul / Murray Rothbard-type obsessions and these men’s fixation on alliances with “the enemies of the enemy.” It seems to me that this is a basic characteristic of the libertarians. To them, all government is nominally “the enemy,” but in fact the real enemy, or rather the only enemy they can get worked up about, is the United States along with other Western democracies (or what used to be such). They are entirely consistent in this, so they always wind up apologizing for Nazis, Communists, etc., in preference to conservatives, democratic socialists, and the rest of the political spectrum. I have observed that when libertarians deal with history (from which they are basically alienated), they get far more emotional about the American Revolution and the evils of George III than about any modern tyranny. They only sound “patriotic” about that; the rest of American history is meaningless to them.

LA replies:

It makes entire sense that the libertarians would be so unprincipled and destructive, given that, far from being opposed to liberalism, they are super-liberals, and thus super-relativists. What is liberalism? As Jim Kalb puts it, liberalism is the belief that the ultimate aim of society is freedom—equal freedom for all. This is contrasted, Kalb continues, with traditionalism, which says that the ultimate aim of society is the good. Both liberals and libertarians reject the idea of an objective moral good. But because libertarians are more consistent and far-reaching than liberals in their embrace of freedom as the ultimate aim of society, they are also more consistent and far reaching in their rejection of the good. Because they reject the good so thoroughly, they end up being guided primarily by their reactive opposition to the things they dislike, rather than by any principle. And this leads them in turn to the relativistic (though it is actually nihilistic) stance, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” no matter how vile or tyrannical the enemy of their enemy may be.

Jim Kalb writes:

Libertarians do seem amazingly indifferent to good and evil. That’s their single-mindedness.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 05, 2012 07:37 PM | Send