Whatever else one wants to say, it is indisputably true that Ron Paul is the only political figure with any sort of a national platform certainly the only major presidential candidate in either party who advocates policy views on issues that
liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial. The converse is equally true: the candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote Barack Obama advocates views on these issues (indeed, has taken action on these issues) that liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil.
As Matt Stoller argued in a
genuinely brilliant essay on the history of progressivism and the Democratic Party which I cannot recommend highly enough:
the anger [Paul] inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview. Ron Pauls candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of Americas Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, its one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception.
The thing I loathe most about election season is reflected in the central fallacy that drives progressive discussion the minute Ron Paul is mentioned. As soon as his candidacy is discussed, progressives will reflexively point to a slew of positions he holds that are anathema to liberalism and odious in their own right and then say:
how can you support someone who holds this awful, destructive position? The premise here the game thats being played is that if you can identify some heinous views that a certain candidate holds, then it means they are beyond the pale, that no Decent Person should even consider praising any part of their candidacy.
The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by progressives President Obama himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians Muslim
children by the dozens not once or twice, but continuously in
numerous nations with
drones,
cluster bombs and other
forms of attack. He has
sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents in secret and with no checks to target American citizens for
assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has
waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a
Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become
darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to
amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.
He has
entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the
state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has
vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely
racist War on Drugs,
including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy,
efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an
endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. Hes
brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the
brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as
subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab worlds
most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.
Most of all, Americas National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before. The nation suffers from what
National Journals Michael Hirsh
just christened Obamas Romance with the CIA. He has created what
The Washington Post just dubbed
a vast drone/killing operation, all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obamas steadfast devotion to what Dana Priest and William Arkin called Top Secret America has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the austerity measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on Americas middle and lower classes.
The simple fact is that progressives are supporting a candidate for President who has done all of that things liberalism has long held to be pernicious. I know its annoying and miserable to hear. Progressives like to think of themselves as the faction that stands for peace, opposes wars, believes in due process and civil liberties, distrusts the military-industrial complex, supports candidates who are devoted to individual rights, transparency and economic equality. All of these facts like the history laid out by Stoller in that essay negate that desired self-perception. These facts demonstrate that the leader progressives have empowered and will empower again has worked in direct opposition to those values and engaged in conduct that is nothing short of horrific. So there is an eagerness to avoid hearing about them, to pretend they dont exist. And theres a corresponding hostility toward those who point them out, who insist that they not be ignored.
The parallel reality the undeniable fact is that all of these listed heinous views and actions from Barack Obama have been vehemently opposed and condemned by Ron Paul: and among the major GOP candidates, only by Ron Paul. For that reason, Pauls candidacy forces progressives to face the hideous positions and actions of their candidate, of the person they want to empower for another four years. If Paul were not in the race or were not receiving attention, none of these issues would receive any attention because all the other major GOP candidates either agree with Obama on these matters or hold even worse views.
Progressives would feel much better about themselves, their Party and their candidate if they only had to oppose, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann. Thats because the standard GOP candidate agrees with Obama on many of these issues and is even worse on these others, so progressives can feel good about themselves for supporting Obama:
his right-wing opponent is a warmonger, a servant to Wall Street, a neocon, a devotee of harsh and racist criminal justice policies, etc. etc. Paul scrambles the comfortable ideological and partisan categories and forces progressives to confront and account for the policies they are working to protect. His nomination would mean that it is the
Republican candidate not the Democrat who would be the anti-war, pro-due-process, pro-transparency, anti-Fed, anti-Wall-Street-bailout, anti-Drug-War advocate (which is why some neocons are
expressly arguing theyd vote for Obama over Paul). Is it really hard to see why Democrats hate his candidacy and anyone who touts its benefits?
