Reason Magazine, Populism and Ron Paul: An essay on the idiocy of the "libertines"

By Dylan Hales

The latest Reason magazine has a typically idiotic piece by another cosmo-libertarian, and the new Editor of the magazine, Matt Welch. In the piece Welch argues that the paleolibertarian movement that Ron Paul represents is filled with those willing to stoke the fears of racist whites for political gain. Furthermore according to both Welch and David Weigel (who contributes another anti-Paul piece in the magazine this month) Paul failed to focus enough on the uniting themes of "liberty" and "freedom", in lieu of pandering to immigration hawks, who are of course nothing but bigots in the eyes of the Reason crowd.

All of this is insane and the arguments provided by both are particularly ridiculous. Weigel argues primarily through the anecdote of the despair he encountered in New Hampshire, when a Paulite cringed his way through an anti-amnesty radio ad the campaign had chosen to run. Welch bases most of his argument off of fifteen year old quotes from Lew Rockwell and a hilarious misreading of a Murray Rothbard piece on David Duke and right wing populism.

What this whole smear campaign really shows is how out of the loop Reason magazine and the other urbanite "libertarian" elites are with the grassroots of the movement they claim is their own. Late last year The Nation ran a piece by Christopher Hayes on the Paul campaign, that carried this quote from long time Paul supporter, and paleolibertarian Justin Raimondo:

"There's the populist wing of the libertarian movement, and then there's the Washington crowd that's still trying to sell libertarianism, or their version of it, to elites. These people want to go along and get along. As long as they can abort their babies and sodomize each other and take as many drugs as they want to, they are happy. They don't care who is being killed in Iraq and how many Iraqis are dying. That's their hierarchy of values."

Raimondo, is absolutely right. In fact if Matt Welch had actually read the full text of the Murray Rothbard article he points to as a sign of right wing extremism and racism he would have stumbled upon this point himself. You see the piece cited by Welch is called "Right Wing Populism: A Strategy For The Paleo Movement". If the title is not a clear enough indicator of Rothbard's intentions, the writing is. In the piece Rothbard makes the point that libertarians and other decentralists would be wise to appeal to the very real anti-statist trends of grassroots middle americans pissed off about the welfare state and the power of publicly subsidized corporate empires. On the specific issue of the David Duke campaign, the issue that set off Welch's PC alarm, this is what Rothbard had to say:

"It is fascinating that there was nothing in Duke's current program or campaign that could not also be embraced by paleoconservatives or paleolibertarians; lower taxes, dismantling the bureaucracy, slashing the welfare system, attacking affirmative action and racial set-asides, calling for equal rights for all Americans, including whites, what's wrong with any of that?".

So here we have a libertarian, writing what he describes as a "strategy" memo on the crossover appeal of libertarianism to disaffected conservative white southern voters, and the response from the Manhattan-martini-"libertarians" is to claim that Rothbard and paleolibertarianism in general is a race obsessed ideology, that fatally wounded Ron Paul's presidential hopes. The fact that libertarians, conservatives, liberals, et. write memos and strategy papers far more controversial than this is apparently lost on the Reason crowd, because the paleos cultural conservatism (or willingness to form a detente with cultural conservatives to push more important libertarian concepts) is unacceptable to their worldview. As Rothbard points out in the same essay:

"They said in the 60's when they gently chided the violent left: "stop using violence, work within the system." And sure enough it worked, as the former New Left now leads the respectable intellectual classes. So why wasn't the Establishment willing to forgive and forget when a right-wing radical like David Duke stopped advocating violence, took off the Klan robes, and started working within the system? If it was OK to be a Commie, or a Weatherman, or whatever in your wild youth, why isn't it OK to have been Klansmen? Or to put it more precisely, if it was OK for the revered Justice Hugo Black, or for the lion of the Senate, Robert Byrd, to have been a Klansman, why not David Duke? The answer is obvious: Black and Byrd became members of the liberal elite, of the Establishment, whereas Duke continued to be a right-wing populist, and therefore anti-Establishment, this time even more dangerous because "within the system""

This dichotomy is in fact more important than it seems because in my view it was the silent influence of the Reason-set that hurt the Paul campaign in many of its attempts to reach out to the broader conservative base. Ironically the issue of immigration raised by Weigel, as evidence of Paul's poor prioritizing, was in actuality a problem for Paul for precisely the opposite reason than Weigel claims. Paul wasn't hurt because he ran an aggressive anti-amnesty campaign. Paul was hurt because he didn't run an aggressive anti-amnesty campaign. In a year where immigration consistently pops up as a top three issue, particularly in traditionally Republican states, it is truly pathetic that an anti-birth right citizenship, anti-NAFTA, anti-amnesty, pro-border control candidate could have done so little with the issue. While I don't know this to be true, I suspect that a large reason for the relative silence on this issue from the Congressman's campaign, had much to do with not wanting to alienate liberal and libertarian allies drawn to Paul because of his record on war and empire. That this would have expanded Paul's base was less important to some, then keeping "Dr. No" within the "mainstream" of the Wall Street crowd.

The truth is Dr. Paul ran a campaign almost exclusively based around three issues, restoring civil liberties at home, ending the Federal Reserve system, and a non-interventionist foreign policy. Immigration, abortion and cultural conservatism were not big parts of his electoral push, despite the hysterical rantings of pro-amnesty and pro-choice libertarians and liberals distrustful of anyone with differing ideas on social issues. These supposedly "awful" traits of the Paul campaign were peripheral to his message at worst (or best depending on your perspective). The choice to downplay his views on those issues (which are very conservative) almost assuredly cost him votes in the GOP primary process, which left us with a coterie of war hawks and corporate statists, including the eventual nominee John McCain, who Matt Welch has just written a scathing biography of. Something tells me Welch is not happy with that result, but he is clueless about the possible role he and his friends played in it. By keeping pressure on the Congressman to stay quiet about his objections to certain liberal platitudes that are non-negotiable in the cosmo-libertarian universe, Welch hurt the movement for liberty and by proxy helped McCain.

As I have pointed out before, with the exception of the Counterpunch newsletter crowd, most of the American Left is notoriously awful when it comes to political priorities. To The Nations and Noam Chomskys of the world, the "right" to get an abortion or receive a welfare check is the ordained word of God. For this reason, these folks have been far less willing to criticize, and far more likely to praise, "moderate" Republicans. Meanwhile "extremists" like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul agree with them on war, empire, trade policy, civil liberties, and most of the other important issues, but are largely viewed as bigots or worse because of their heresies on the identity politics issues. This should not be surprising, coming from an ideological grouping immersed in multiculturalism and internationalism, but there is no excuse for rightist or libertarians...and yet they exhibit the same traits all the time.

The real lesson for libertarians is very similar to the real lesson for conservatives and populist leftists; stop trying to be a part of the establishment. It will change you or turn you away every time. The Reason magazine folks are cultural libertines, who believe in free market economics. Some of them are good on the warfare state. But in the traditional sense of libertarianism, anti-statism in all of its forms, they are sorely lacking for the same reason the modern Republican party is sorely lacking conservative bona fidas. Simply put both groups are more interested in power than principles.

When the Welch's and Weigel's of the world mock populist appeals as uncouth and even racist they do their own cause a great disservice and the historical record an even worse one. Around the same time that David Duke was first making noise as a serious candidate in Louisiana, there was another candidate seeking an even higher political office, running on a populist platform. He had a history of flirting with racial identity movements and advocating race based political strategies. His biggest success was in another state of the Deep South, South Carolina. The paleoconservative, libertarian sympathetic, scholar Clyde Wilson had this to say about the man in question in a 1992 essay:

"..if the Democrats had any spirit, any integrity, any faith in their own convictions, they would nominate for Bush's opponent the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who is far and away their most articulate, most charming, and most sincere leader. But this, of course, they will never do. Jackson at least has had the guts and the patriotism to complain about the loss of family farms and the shipment of American blue-collar jobs offshore-something no leading Republican has had the integrity to do, as far as I know."

"Watch Jackson when the cameras go in close. He is a real human being-one who has suffered and thought. (I write completely without irony.) Though he is sometimes half-baked in his solutions-what leading politician isn't?-he speaks from the heart about real problems, and once he has taken up an idea he does not retreat just because it's unpopular. That is, unlike Bush, he really represents his constituency. Allowing for differences of style, he is is no rationally describable sense any more of a demagogue than Bush-and a lot more sincere. Beside him Bush looks like a preppie, and the other Democratic presidential contenders like pyramid scheme salesmen."

Jesse Jackson is no Ron Paul, but Clyde Wilson was right. The Democrats were too cowardly to nominate the populist because he challenged accepted norms of the managerial-warfare state. This time around the Republicans were too cowardly for reasons all to similar. Libertarians like Matt Welch and David Weigel might think their ideological purity on the cultural issues gives them some sort of moral standing, but really it just shows how far out of the norm they are.