Syndicate and Hague

Ron Paul supporters frighten me.

I keep reading things about his candidacy and his supporters and I just don’t understand how people can throw their support behind the man.

From the Seeing the Forest blog:

Ron Paul is this year’s Howard Dean. You can’t go to a farmer’s market around here without encountering a Ron Paul volunteer. In their enthusiasm to help fix the country many new voters are being drawn into the Ron Paul sphere.

Bringing in new voters is always a good thing. And opposing illegal aggressive war. torture, and demanding that the Constitution and laws be followed are to be praised no matter who is doing it. Heck, listening to Paul talk about these things almost makes me want to support him!

But then these recruits are then subjected to the other side of the far-right libertarian agenda. First there is the lunatic “Secret NAFTA Superhighway” conspiracy stuff. It’s a catchy phrase that seems to affect people’s brains, but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just nut stuff. People’s understandable concerns about trade deals that practically require the destruction of jobs and the environment are used by Paul as a way to mainstream far-right “black helicopter” thinking.

Then comes a dose of really bad economics. There’s the “get rid of the IRS” and gold-standard nonsense. And the talk that the Federal Reserve is some kind of secret internationalist cabal has a hint of the old-time antisemitism of those who say that Jews have a secret conspiracy to control all the money.

And I don’t fault a candidate based on who supports him or her, but Ron Paul sure does have a lot of militia, white supremacist, etc. groups endorsing him. So I do have get a bit suspicious about where he is coming from.

Unfortunately he is also a possible Ralph Nader whose independent run could siphon off enough votes that would otherwise have gone to Democrats to throw the election to the right. Anti-war, pro-Constitution support draws votes away from the Democrats, not Republicans. That guarantees the war continues and the shredding of the Constitution is completed.

Now, I’d like to note that the only similarity between Ron Paul and Ralph Nader is the same thing that makes him similar to Ross Perot or John B. Anderson in that he could be a spoiler.

I actually don’t think this will be the case. If Ron Paul became a truly viable candidate, not just the object of obsession amongst a primarily male, internet-lovin group of anti-war libertarian isolationists with dreams of not paying taxes, the exposure his crazy ideas would have would destroy his candidacy.

So I’m not worried about him. But I just would like to understand his support. Especially in light of things like this (from Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s column on HuffPo):

Then there’s Paul’s now infamous slavery quip that he made on Meet the Press. Paul claimed the Civil War was an unnecessary bloodbath that could and should have been avoided. All Lincoln had to do was buy the slaves. Other slave promoting countries, asserts Paul, didn’t fight wars and they ended slavery peacefully. Paul’s historical dumbness would have been laughable except for four things. One, he was dead wrong. Lincoln twice made offers to the slave owners to buy the slaves. They turned him down flat. The countries that freed the slaves without war, presumably France and England, unlike the U.S., did not practice slavery in their countries. And France did fight a war– Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Haiti to put down the slave revolt there.

He goes on:

In fact he even highlights this as “Issue: Racism” on the site. “Government as an institution is particularly ill-suited to combat bigotry.” In other words, the 1954 landmark Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of education school desegregation decision, the 1964 and 1968 Civil Rights Acts, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and legions of court decisions and state laws that bar discrimination are worthless.

I think it’s necessary to interject here that this is an argument I have heard in more subtle variations from a lot of white people - predominantly, though not exclusively, Republicans. Personally, I think it shows a fear of a slowly (sloowwwwly) leveling playing field and ignores how entrenched racism is institutionally. I don’t want to digress too much from my focus on Ron Paul here, but I think it’s really time that we disregard the notion that ‘changing our hearts’ is the most effective way to end entrenched racism. Because if you’re privileged, you can feel that everyone is equal, but the world that has been set into motion from before you were born has already made that not so. I guess I can talk about this more later. Back to RP.

He’s trying to get Dems with targeted messages. From Bleeding Heartland:

On Sunday night or Monday night, I got a robocall supporting Paul. The script emphasized that Democrats in Congress have failed to end the war, and none of the Democratic candidates would be able to end the war. It urged me to caucus for Ron Paul because unlike the Democrats, he has always been against the war and would be able to end the war. It also mentioned a few of Paul’s other policy positions.

He also doesn’t accept the theory of evolution.

Pet peeve alert. In vernacular, theory and hypothesis are used more or less interchangeably. I’m guilty of this. Totally. HOWEVER! In science, a theory is a more or less verified or established explanation accounting for known facts or phenomena, like the theory of relativity. A hypothesis is a conjecture put forth as a possible explanation of phenomena or relations, which serves as a basis of argument or experimentation to reach the truth. (from Dictionary.com). Loony creationists are exploiting the broad usage of the word theory to minimize what a scientific theory is.

God, I could go on, but I just don’t get Ron Paul. Or his supporters. And I don’t think I will.