Your Email:

Subject:

Message:
Entry: The Revolution and the Right Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_revolution_and_the_right#17361 Post contents: Since Prof. Gottfried has claimed to be a “Zionist,” it shouldn’t surprise anyone that he endorses the “menace” of Islamic jihad as well as Israeli “targeted assassinations.” As a matter of fact however, Ron Paul repeatedly spoke about “radical Islam” as a problem that we exacerbate through the foreign policy and in one instance noted by Justin Raimondo even attempted to demagogue the issue in association with border security in a TV ad. For the most part however Paul conducted himself in debates as in the campaign with impeccable rationality and courage. Prof. Gottfried seems to imply that he lost out to Giuliani in their confrontation over “Why they hate us.” In fact that was Paul’s greatest teaching moment in the entire campaign. His insistence on rationality and cause and effect relationships penetrated for a moment the suffocating stew of paranoia, scape-goating, and fear-mongering that has been the daily diet meted out by the media and politicians. Since some degree of apprehension about “Islamo-satanic” bogeymen seems to be the price of admission to public discourse, we may ask ourselves why this is so. It goes back beyond neocons and media agendas to two major defects de Toqueville saw in American democracy: inattention and impenetrable consensus marked by a lack of freedom of thought. America is like a church, as Chesterton observed and “an army on the march” as a Frenchman is cited in Albert Jay Nock’s, Our Enemy, the State. To some extent this is the same problem Aristotle observes when he makes a distinction between the roles of rhetoric and dialectic in public discourse but the American consensus seems especially impenetrable to rationality, especially with regard to American exceptionalism and theological politics. That said, I think our good doctor provided those Americans with a sufficient attention span and ears to hear with the basis of a new politics based on truth, reason and ideas rather than lies, irrationality and fantasy. Time and pain will demonstrate the truth of the reason and reality he conveyed. Sent at: 2008 05 16