'Ron Paul's Roots'

[|BlackJesus|]

[color="#FF0000"][b]interesting article from The Nation[/b][/color]




[quote][size=4][u][b]Ron Paul's Roots [/b]
Christopher Hayes
The Nation
December 24, 2007 issue[/u][/size]



Although not a single vote has been cast, it's [b]safe to say that Ron Paul has run the most successful libertarian presidential campaign in American history[/b]. Sure, the Libertarian Party nominates a candidate every term, but said candidate struggles to garner money and media attention. [b]Paul, however, has become a legitimate phenomenon, if not a particularly likely GOP nominee.[/b] With [b]his full-throated rejection of the imperial project in Iraq[/b] and a [b]radical vision of a stripped-down state[/b] (though, oddly, one that still forces pregnancy), he's attracting large crowds at campaign events and [b]polling at a healthy 8 percent in New Hampshire.[/b] In November he broke the single-day fundraising record with a $4.2 million haul.

So [b]you would think that the circle of DC-based libertarians centered around the Cato Institute would be ecstatic. Not quite.[/b] "He doesn't strike me as the kind of person that's tapping into those elements of American public opinion that might lead towards a sustainable move in the libertarian direction," says Cato vice president for research Brink Lindsey.

[b]Self-identified libertarians[/b] may be a tiny portion of the electorate, but [b]small numbers have never stood in the way of bitter intramural sectarian disputes.[/b] When Lindsey says that [b]Paul "comes from a different part of the libertarian universe than I do,"[/b] he's referring to the [size=3][b]libertarian version of the Trotsky/Lenin split,[/b][/size] which opened up in the early 1980s and continues to echo through libertarianism today.

In 1981 [b]American libertarianism's founding father, Murray Rothbard, had a falling out with Cato leaders over their weak-kneed conception of libertarianism as "low tax liberalism."[/b] After being kicked off the board of the organization he had helped found, [b]Rothbard[/b], a Jewish, Bronx-born economist who'd studied with Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, helped [b]found the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama[/b]. The institute became the intellectual center for what Rothbard protégé [b]Lew Rockwell termed "paleolibertarianism,"[/b] a worldview [b]rooted squarely in the populist Old Right tradition[/b]. [size=3][b]Paleolibertarians tend to be culturally conservative (attracting, on the edges, a fair share of Confederacy nostalgists and white supremacists), zealously against imperial foreign policy and the Federal Reserve.[/b][/size] "Ron Paul has shown that the core of the state is the Pentagon and the Federal Reserve," says Rockwell, who was Paul's Congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982.

[size=3][b]The division between paleolibertarians, centered around the Mises Institute, and cosmopolitan libertarians, centered around Cato, is also a case of "culture clash,"[/b][/size] according to Justin Raimondo, editorial director of Antiwar.com and prominent member of the Mises set. [b]"There's the populist wing of the libertarian movement, and then there's the Washington crowd that's still trying to sell libertarianism,[/b] or their version of it, to elites. These people want to go along and get along. [b]As long as they can abort their babies and sodomize each other and take as many drugs as they want to, they are happy.[/b] They don't care who is being killed in Iraq and how many Iraqis are dying. That's their hierarchy of values."

[b]As you can tell, there's no love lost between the two camps.[/b] One DC-based libertarian--who asked not to be named because he "would like to avoid getting endless [b]2 am calls from nuts yelling at me for not agreeing with the gold standard"[/b]--told me he [b]thinks Rockwell is "one of the most loathsome people ever to set foot on this continent." [/b]

But nothing breeds harmony like success, and the Paul bandwagon is now getting big enough for both the Hatfields and the McCoys to get on board. "Our readership is very enthusiastic," says Nick Gillespie, editor of the DC-based magazine Reason. A few months ago Reason published an article titled "Is He Good for the Libertarians?" That no longer seems an open question. "On basic fundamental issues he speaks strongly for libertarians, regardless of the flavoring," says Gillespie, who recently co-wrote a pro-Paul op-ed in the Washington Post.

This gets to the paradox at the [b]heart of the Paul campaign:[/b] he's the candidate least likely to hedge or obfuscate, the most apt to spell out in sharp detail his underlying principles--and yet [b]he's also something of an ideological cipher,[/b] [size=3][b]attracting the support of everyone from hipstertarian kids on Northeast college campuses to John Birchers in Texas.[/b][/size] [b]"You have this weird group of people," says Lindsey. "You've got libertarians, you've got antiwar types and you've got nationalists and xenophobes.[/b] I'm not sure that is leading anywhere. [size=3][b]I think he's a sui generis type of guy who's cobbling together some irreconcilable constituencies[/b][/size], [b]many of which are backward-looking rather than forward-looking." [/b]

But even if the Paul campaign doesn't point the way toward some lasting, powerful, paleo-cosmo libertarian coalition (and, really, let's hope it doesn't), he is at least providing libertarians with a long-awaited Kumbaya moment. [b]"There are personal animosities that will probably never heal," says Raimondo. "But, you know, maybe Ron Paul can unite us all." [/b][/quote]


[b]I subscribe [/b]

[LudwigVan Kubrick]

Ron Paul: CNN Cafferty File - $6M pull and poll response

[url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtmnLKkcEto"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtmnLKkcEto[/url]

[Nati Ice]

i agree with the sentiment of the article but have never had the proper knowledge or wordage to explain concisely why i have never declared myself to be a modern libertarian. the problem arises from this split, with most of those who declare themselves libertarian to be modern neocons who increasingly enjoy pot and corporate tax write offs and thus still suckle at the teet of dick cheney. pauls supporters on the other hand consist of the alienated, mostly those from the middle to left of the political spectrum, and in spite of some of pauls views on evolution and governmental oversight find the upside of his campaign to be far greater than even the most liberal of green party candidates. i enjoy listen to mr paul because of the simple explanations he gives to highly complex issues, and while i may not always agree with him about all of his small government cutbacks i also realize that if elected a lot of the issues i disagree with him on will be nearly impossible to enact. i do not claim to be 100% for ron paul but i do appreciate the splintering of the modern political platforms to be a small step in the right direction in what may become a complete overhaul of the 2 party system.

i sincerely doubt ron wins the nomination but the ideas are more important than the man himself and thus showing the rest of america that there are more options than simply left or right has become the main issue for why i am so enthralled with the man. dont get me wrong, i will not waste my vote on him after the primaries should he fail to get the nomination when i consider getting the neocons out office to be of the up most importance. i will instead vote for whomever the democrats nominate so long as it is not hillary, but until the gop decides to squash the ron paul revolution i will continue to support the man for what i believe is for the greater good.


...if any of that makes any sense

[CincyInDC]

[quote name='Nati Ice' post='610937' date='Dec 17 2007, 09:48 PM']i agree with the sentiment of the article but have never had the proper knowledge or wordage to explain concisely why i have never declared myself to be a modern libertarian. the problem arises from this split, with most of those who declare themselves libertarian to be modern neocons who increasingly enjoy pot and corporate tax write offs and thus still suckle at the teet of dick cheney. pauls supporters on the other hand consist of the alienated, mostly those from the middle to left of the political spectrum, and in spite of some of pauls views on evolution and governmental oversight find the upside of his campaign to be far greater than even the most liberal of green party candidates. i enjoy listen to mr paul because of the simple explanations he gives to highly complex issues, and while i may not always agree with him about all of his small government cutbacks i also realize that if elected a lot of the issues i disagree with him on will be nearly impossible to enact. i do not claim to be 100% for ron paul but i do appreciate the splintering of the modern political platforms to be a small step in the right direction in what may become a complete overhaul of the 2 party system.

i sincerely doubt ron wins the nomination but the ideas are more important than the man himself and thus showing the rest of america that there are more options than [size=5]simply left or right [/size]has become the main issue for why i am so enthralled with the man. dont get me wrong, i will not waste my vote on him after the primaries should he fail to get the nomination when i consider getting the neocons out office to be of the up most importance. i will instead vote for whomever the democrats nominate so long as it is not hillary, but until the gop decides to squash the ron paul revolution i will continue to support the man for what i believe is for the greater good.


...if any of that makes any sense[/quote]

If only those were our choices. How about center-right and waaaay right? Assuming Kucinich doesn't get the nod.

[LudwigVan Kubrick]

I keep looking for that candidate that I will vote for if Ron doesn't win the primaries.

I just don't see him/her.

[|BlackJesus|]

[color="#FF0000"][b]The term "Libertarian" is a very fluid and inexact term with it's origins in communism. [/b][/color]


[quote][b]- The first person to describe himself as a libertarian was Joseph Déjacque, an early French anarchist communist. [/b]The word stems from the French word libertaire, and was used in order to evade the French ban on anarchist publications.

- In the context of the European socialist movement, libertarian has conventionally been used to describe those who opposed state socialism, such as Mikhail Bakunin. In the United States, the movement most commonly called libertarianism follows a capitalist philosophy; the term libertarian socialism therefore strikes many Americans as inconsistent.

- However, the association of socialism to libertarianism actually predates that of capitalism, and many anti-authoritarians still decry what they see as a mistaken association of capitalism to libertarianism in the United States.

[b]- As Noam Chomsky put it,[/b] [i]“a consistent libertarian must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer”.[/i][/quote]




[center][color="#FF0000"]--->[/color] [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism"]Libertarian Socialism[/url]

[color="#FF0000"]--->[/color] [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Marxism"]Libertarian Marxism[/url][/center]



[color="#FF0000"][b]Hence in Europe the "Libertarians" are Socialists and Marxists ... and thus Ron Paul is often confused by them as a "leftist" candidate. That is also why I would consider myself a "Libertarian Marxist" ... and like many of Ron Pauls ideas on civil liberties, but not his economic ones. [/b][/color]