Monday, October 8, 2007

A Troubling Encounter With Ron Paul Supporters

Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) is a candidate for the Republican nomination for President right now. He spoke at the Gun Rights Policy Conference Saturday night. No surprise: he's the most outspoken pro-gun candidate, and this isn't the first time that he has spoken there.


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There was a police officer and, I suspect, a Secret Service agent with him, based on these two vehicles outside:


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I can't blame him for the security--Presidential candidates attract nuts.

I voted for him when he was the Libertarian Party nominee for President in 1988--not because I thought he had a chance, or would make a good President, but because he was the standard bearer for the Libertarian Party, and the goal was to get people thinking about libertarian ideas.

I am no longer a libertarian. In the 1990s, my libertarian beliefs started to morph into conservative ones for several reasons:

1. A core libertarian idea is that the only actions that should be punished by government are those involving force, the threat of force, or fraud. The theory is that it doesn't much matter what others are doing--as long as their beliefs and actions don't cross the "force or fraud" line, it really doesn't make life all that difficult.

This is a beautiful theory. Raising kids in the San Francisco Bay Area really caused me to reconsider whether this beautiful theory had any applicability to the real world. I concluded that it did not.

Peer pressure didn't much influence me as a kid. I defended communism in 6th grade--when my peers were parroting the liberalism of their parents. (This was Santa Monica.) By junior high, I didn't mind being the only Republican and only supporter of free market capitalism in most of my classes. But I have since seen that this is a tremendously difficult position for most kids to take. The herd instinct is overpowering, and in a place like the Bay Area, it is quite destructive.

There comes a certain point where enormous damage gets done by subscribing to this doctrine that only "force or fraud" should be subject to governmental discouragement. For example, we have laws that prohibit public nudity or defecating in the middle of the street. A strict libertarian would say, "Why? As long as you clean up the mess afterwards, no one is hurt by it. And no one is really hurt by public nudity." You can go too far, obviously, in promoting virtue and discouraging vice, but there are actions that need to be discouraged to create a civil society.

2. Libertarian activists like to portray themselves as the descendants of the Founding Fathers, and the Constitution as a libertarian document. Studying American history carefully demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that the Constitution was not a libertarian document, and you have to pick and choose your Founding Father quotes with considerable care to portray them as libertarian.

The Constitution certainly sought to limit federal government power (and failed), which is a libertarian idea, but it left the states free to exercise power in all sorts of arbitrary and often antilibertarian ideas--for example, the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which actually authorized the legislature to not only use tax dollars to support churches--but also to pass mandatory church attendance laws:
As the happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality; and as these cannot be generally diffused through a community, but by the institution of the public worship of God, and of public instructions in piety, religion and morality: Therefore, to promote their happiness and to secure the good order and preservation of their government, the people of this commonwealth have a right to invest their legislature with power to authorize and require, and the legislature shall, from time to time, authorize and require, the several towns, parishes, precincts, and other bodies politic, or religious societies, to make suitable provision, at their own expense, for the institution of the public worship of God, and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality, in all cases where such provision shall not be made voluntarily.

And the people of this commonwealth have also a right to, and do, invest their legislature with authority to enjoin upon all the subjects an attendance upon the instructions of the public teachers aforesaid, at stated times and seasons, if there be any on whose instructions they can conscientiously and conveniently attend.
3. Libertarianism suffers from the same reductionistic tendencies as many other political theories. This isn't because libertarianism is especially defective as a philosophy. Indeed, I think it has considerable merit as a direction (at least in much of America), but not as a goal. The problem is that strongly principled ideologies tend to attract people who are looking for single, simple answers to what are often complex problems. Is there poverty? Quick: it's all about (depending on what philosophy you have oversimplified) one of the following:
  • insufficient funding for public schools
  • racism
  • an overregulated economy
  • greed
  • drug abuse
  • alcoholism
  • the need for Christian education in public schools
If you think I am exaggerating, I have met people who have insisted that each of these choices is the entire, or at least primary cause of poverty. The idea that there are many causes of poverty, and that there is no single bullet--and maybe there are as almost as many causes as there are people--is anethama to the reductionists. Even people who say that they know that the problem is multifactorial sometimes behave or lobby for solutions as though they believe that a single fix will solve everything.

This post is not primarily about Ron Paul. It is really about some of his supporters that I spoke to--and what I heard rather concerned me. You see, after the 1988 campaign, Ron Paul sent those of us who had contributed to his campaign a newsletter that concerned me enough that I decided not to contribute to further Ron Paul campaigns or projects. I see from this discussion at Flopping Aces that Ron Paul only contributed his name to that newsletter--he claims that he didn't write or even read some of this material that went into the newsletter. But shortly, you will see why I am concerned, nonetheless.

I have never been an unquestioning supporter of Israel. There are Christians who conflate respect for Judaism with respect for the nation of Israel--a country originally established by Jews who were not particularly religious--and who were held in considerable contempt by Orthodox Jews because of their secularism.

Nonetheless, while I have often been critical of how Israel does things, I generally give Israel the benefit of the doubt. A bad human rights day for the Israeli government is far above the best days that just about every Arab nation achieves.

I understand the non-interventionist foreign policy position that some libertarians espouse. I agree that the U.S. has far too often stuck its nose into the affairs of other nations, with often destructive results for both human rights and our pragmatic national interests. But the 9/11 attackers weren't Nicaraguans, or Costa Ricans, or Mexicans, or Haitians, or Iranians--countries in whose internal affairs the U.S. has intervened, and would at least have a plausible complaint. If anything, the U.S. has gone out of its way to be hands-off to the governments of Arab countries.

Whatever argument you want to make for non-interventionism, it doesn't fly to explain 9/11. Even U.S. support for Israel is a pretty inadequate explanation. We've poured absurd amounts of money into Israel--but also into Egypt. We've supplied the Israelis with weapons--but we have also pushed them very hard at times to play nice, and negotiate with the Palestinians and Israel's neighbors. And the results of forcing Israel to deal have more often than not been more bloodshed by what increasingly seems like a deranged bunch of monsters.

One of the Ron Paul newsletters that turned me off so much talked about how he would look up into the galleries of the House and see Israeli agents giving directions to members of the House as to how they were supposed to vote--and I begin to sense something about two steps back from "Jews are running the world." Nothing quite so direct and paranoid--but it gave me some real discomfort.

At the GRPC, I spoke to several Ron Paul supporters (who seemed to be a large fraction of the attendees, based on the buttons and such), and I found myself increasingly reminded of that newsletter. While we were standing in line for the buffet, I joined a conversation about the mistakes that Bush has made with respect to the Iraq war. He's made several very severe ones--even if you agree that the war needed to be fought. I pointed out that the several reasons for the war that enjoyed general support in the U.S. at the time, even among Democrats, and this one Ron Paul supporter suddenly said, "The Iraq War was about one thing: protecting Israel. Full stop."

The idea that the Iraq War is all about doing Israel's bidding--because those "Jewish neocons" ran the Bush Administration--is very popular in leftist anti-Semitic circles at the moment. For purposes of argument, let's accept that there was concern in the Bush Administration that Iraq, once in possession of a nuclear weapon, might use it against Israel. This does not preclude the other possible risks of a nuclear-armed Iraq such as a threat to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the dangers of escalation with Iran, or of Iraq supplying such weapons to terrorist groups. This complete oversimplification of the question to doing Israel's bidding, in conjunction with that creepy newsletter some years ago, really makes me wonder what kind of a crowd Ron Paul is attracting.

Another aspect that disturbed me was the crowd of Ron Paul supporters who suddenly showed up for his speech (but who had not been at the GRPC). There were signs that declared, "Ron Paul Will Save America." When Ron Paul arrived, there was a frightening intensity to the chanting, "Ron Paul! Ron Paul!"

I've volunteered for Presidential campaigns before. In 1980, I put a lot of effort into coordinating volunteers for the Ed Clark campaign. But I do not recall ever seeing this level of leader worship--what at least from the outside looked like fanaticism.

I don't mean that every Ron Paul supporter is a closet Nazi. But there was something just a little peculiar about what I saw and heard--and I found it a bit disturbing.

UPDATE: I'm told that another gun rights activist is also seeing similarly disturbing signs of a messianic following for Ron Paul--probably because so much of our political class has shown so little reason to be leading us. This is a very dangerous sign--when people start seeing politicians in that light. We all want someone decent (or at least smart) to follow, but we should never lose sight of the fact that politicians put their pants on one leg at a time--except when in public restroom stalls.

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