This is 2008, however, and the horizon lying before libertarians, paleoconservatives, classical liberals, and other politically homeless citizens is significantly different than it was just a short time ago. Maybe drastically different. They have Ron Paul to thank for that.
Moreover, Sabrin suddenly has a new identity that will undoubtedly attract fresh attention and create excitement that wasn”t there the last time he ran for office. That identity appears on his campaign website, printed on a picture of a gold bar”Sabrin is a Ron Paul Republican, representing the gold standard of political honesty and integrity.
What a luxury this new label is for right-wingers of all varieties! “Libertarians” are kooky and overeducated. “Constitutionalists” are probably racist theocrats. “Conservatives” are rednecks and hawkish super-patriots. No one has ever heard of a “paleoconservative,” much less a “Tory anarchist.” But call yourself Ron Paul Republican and you might get a friendly greeting from people who would hate you in any other of your political postures. You put yourself at risk to be considered hip, even. And you definitely make it clear that you have out-radicaled all those canned radicals who enthuse over dismal candidates like Barack Obama.
It also is worth noting that people around Sabrin’s campaign are making noises that will please those cranky paleos who have had a quibble or two with Ron Paul’s campaign. Sabrin is by habit more aggressive toward his Republicratic counterparts than gentle Dr. Paul. And he is running to win, surrounding himself with experienced apparatchiks without compromising his Pauline gospel. His campaign is being managed by Max Consulting, Inc. and Patrick Donohue. Donohue, young Max Raskin tells us, “ran Pataki’s fundraising operations since 1994 and has raised over $400 million for Republican candidates and causes over the past 13 years.”
When Ron Paul supporters get taunted it’s often because their candidate has no chance of winning. That may be the case. But Ron Paul’s supporters aren”t the ones who should be blushing. The fact that Ron Paul is drawing such insults at all is a mark of progress that even tin-foil-hat libertarians couldn”t have dreamed of a year ago. He has assembled a serious opposition that threatens our odious two-party establishment on its right side. And that opposition will still be responding to Ron Paul Republicans years from now, annoying whatever miserable Republicrats are running for office. Readers of this website will have no trouble adjusting to this new situation.
]]>In the minds of Democrats, the federal government is one big therapist that applauds homosexual lifestyle preferences the same way young parents solicit the progress of offspring during toilet training. For them Huckabee’s intimation of a marriage amendment is truly traumatizing. But clearly, Huckabee is not vocalizing serious opposition to the American social democracy and the programs its left-wing administrators cherish. In conversation with Sean Hannity on FOXNews, the Baptist minister praised the Republicans to the high heavens for their superior record on “truly trying to bring civil rights” reform to the American regime. Huckabee took turns with his counterpart in reminding viewers that Ike had integrated Central High School in Little Rock and that Lyndon Johnson had depended on Republicans to get key civil rights and voting rights bills passed. Later in the broadcast the presidential hopeful affirmed his allegiance to a tradition of changes to the Constitution that merely freed slaves, gave women and blacks the vote, and secured important freedoms in the first and tenth amendments. Huckabee did not need to suppress knowledge that the civil rights movement had ever involved anything so untoward as social engineering since this is knowledge he does not possess.
There is nothing in Huckabee’s intellectual makeup that should bring my left-brained colleagues nightmares. Neither is there any historical evidence that evangelicals represent a serious challenge to the Left. Eager Christians like the ones Huckabee is now courting have been organizing and noisemaking for thirty years without significantly altering the political landscape or undoing left-wing programs. Although Christian groups influence elections and enjoy access to the news media, they do so while remaining obediently within conventional leftist boundaries. More significant than their approval of a marriage amendment is their willingness to keep Christianity updated and in line with changes in our democratic faith, the terms of which are set by the Left in the form of the neoconservatives. Those who know the difference between these evangelicals and the Biblical fundamentalists with whom they are often confused are not surprised when the former deemphasize “family values” in favor of a non-controversial “global rights” agenda. There is nothing traditional or right-wing about evangelical adulation of America and its military as a revolutionary force with a planetary reach.
A related factor is how Republicans who have gained office on the support of family-values Christians have had no trouble negotiating away their demands. Evangelicals tolerated
Reagan’s selection of the previously pro-choice George H.W. Bush as running mate as well as his appointment to the Supreme Court of Sandra Day O”Connor, anything but a stable right-wing judicial force. Cal Thomas has remarked that O”Connor “has been the swing vote that, in virtually every case, has beaten back any and all challenges to the “right” of a woman to abort her child at any stage of pregnancy.” Similarly, evangelicals, for all their efforts, have not wrought significant changes on the views among members of society. In thirty years the American mind has not changed on abortion or other social issues.
The cadence to Huckabee’s hosanna was a fascinating bit of counterfactual (and self-contradictory) history. Although the Republicans had provided LBJ the support needed to make real legislative gains, Dr. King remains the real hero in this narrative. Without King’s Protestant backing and “prophetic voice” the government would not have enacted needed social reforms. Bureaucrats had to be led “dragging and kicking and screaming” to accept their assignment to exorcise the demons of racism and insensitivity from American society. So far this leaves Hillary standing as the candidate with the best understanding of the history under review“excepting, of course, Dr. Paul.
]]>On the long drive home to Pennsylvania for my winter break, I decided to listen to some of the evil Nazi-Republican radio jockeys in order to hear some really treasonous stuff. Within five minutes of turning the dial to Rush Limbaugh’s flatulent program, the pill-popping oaf took a call from an honest-sounding gentleman who attempted to start a conversation about Barack Obama‘s fiercely ethnocentric church in Chicago and what political meaning this relationship might have. If I were a dumber college student and more prone to the cascades of unchallenged left-wing pap that circulate on my campus, I would have braced myself at that moment for the unbridled racism that such a call was sure to trigger in Limbaugh’s extremist brain.
Instead, I heard the response I expected from a sensitized slightly right-of-center social democrat. Limbaugh, striking some button or flipping some switch with one of his porky digits, ended the call and announced that his show was above the caller’s sordid question. He would not be discussing “such matters,” he said, and he did not much like the idea that people were discussing them at all, on his show or anywhere else. Clearly Limbaugh did not want to upset the established image as racists of those who would discuss Obama’s obvious and direct links to an aggressive black nationalism. Lucky are we to have a corps of Republican loudmouths like Rush who help us understand that discussion of racism and ethnocentrism on the Left is totally verboten.
Meanwhile the Left is at liberty to bring nukes to this knife fight, presenting as sterling journalism its imaginings about Ron Paul’s “Nazi troubles” and alleged racist ties (the “journalist” in question having to be bitch-slapped into place by attentive readers). In the latest instance, a New Republic author has asserted that judging from some nasty old newsletter, the avuncular liberty-loving Paul is a man “filled with hate.” Such slanders are examples of the “anti-fascist” fury that Paul Gottfried routinely illuminates on this website. This “anti-extremist” obsession has taken over servile minds like those belonging to poor Virginia Heffernan and James Kirchick. This obsession dictates that those who throw up serious opposition to globalist foreign policy or a multiculturalist culture are by definition pathological racists whose political views represent a backwards slide toward a horrifying Nazi past. That Heffernan and Kirchick are obviously stupid, mean-spirited swine is beside the point. More important is the unchallenged strength of left-minded intellectuals in our current political configuration. When any journalist speaks of the “racist ties” belonging to anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton (or any white person, for that matter), we are all expected know in our bones that such ties must exist. Yet no crime committed by any individual left-oriented, however hateful, will ever bring shame to the neocon/liberal establishment. And no amount of reaching out by Republican mouthpieces will ever earn them recognition for the enthusiastic pluralism they wear flamboyantly on their sleeves.
Rush is careful to avoid letting people know about Obama’s black nationalist congregation, which holds a “non-negotiable commitment to Africa“ and obsesses over something called “black liberation theology“”apparently Jesus is a highly motivated partisan of the black lobby and a committed anti-racist, especially when it comes to his own religion. There seems to be little real cost for a Democratic candidate whose church pledges allegiance to Africa and works to eradicate those signs of America’s bourgeois European basis. It is much harder for Huckabee and Romney to pretend to be serious Christians in an older, more traditionally American pattern. Both candidates are continually running through a series of PC hoops in an attempt to “reach out” and apologize for the racist sins of their religions” pasts. Were a talk show host to ask Obama a question that was half as aggressive and hostile as those faced by this pair of grinning Republicans, the VDARE.com blog would celebrate a major victory. Such dubious and occasional consolation prizes are pretty much all that is left for right-minded folks to enjoy.
]]>