Matt Stoller
Matt Stoller, now at the Roosevelt Institute, a former aide to former Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida, poses the question, “Why Ron Paul Challenges Liberals,” at naked capitalism. The piece is getting a ton of attention. Thinking about this piece this morning, I reflected: Ron Paul supporters came to Occupy Wall Street. They wanted a part of that radical movement. Is there nothing the left can learn from them? Stoller has jumped to that challenge. Sizeable excerpt. There is more theorizing about libertarianism’s history in the full piece.
as I’ve drilled into Paul’s ideas, his ideas forced me to acknowledge some deep contradictions in American liberalism (pointed out years ago by Christopher Lasch) and what is a long-standing, disturbing, and unacknowledged affinity liberals have with centralized war financing. So while I have my views of Ron Paul, I believe that the anger he inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.
My perspective of Paul comes from working with his staff in 2009-2010 on issues of war and the Federal Reserve. Paul was one of my then-boss Alan Grayson’s key allies in Congress on these issues, though on most issues of course he and Paul were diametrically opposed. How Paul operated his office was different than most Republicans, and Democrats. An old Congressional hand once told me, and then drilled into my head, that every Congressional office is motivated by three overlapping forces – policy, politics, and procedure. And this is true as far as it goes….
Paul’s office was dedicated, first and foremost, to his political principles, and his work with his grassroots base reflects that. Politics and procedure simply didn’t matter to him. My main contact in Paul’s office even had his voicemail set up with special instructions for those calling about HR 1207, which was the number of the House bill to audit the Federal Reserve. But it wasn’t just the Fed audit – any competent liberal Democratic staffer in Congress can tell you that Paul will work with anyone who seeks his ends of rolling back American Empire and its reach into foreign countries, auditing the Federal Reserve, and stopping the drug war.
Paul is deeply conservative, of course, and there are reasons he believes in those end goals that have nothing to do with creating a more socially just and equitable society. But then, when considering questions about Ron Paul, you have to ask yourself whether you prefer a libertarian who will tell you upfront about his opposition to civil rights statutes, or authoritarian Democratic leaders who will expand healthcare to children and then aggressively enforce a racist war on drugs and shield multi-trillion dollar transactions from public scrutiny. I can see merits in both approaches, and of course, neither is ideal. Perhaps it’s worthy to argue that lives saved by presumed expanded health care coverage in 2013 are worth the lives lost in the drug war. It is potentially a tough calculation (depending on whether you think coverage will in fact expand in 2013). When I worked with Paul’s staff, they pursued our joint end goals with vigor and principle, and because of their work, we got to force central banking practices into a more public and democratic light.
But this obscures the real question, of why Paul disdains the Fed (and implicitly, why liberals do not), and the relationship between the Federal Reserve and American empire. If you go back and look at some of libertarian allies, like Fox News’s Judge Napolitano, they will answer that question for you. Napolitano hates, absolutely hates, Abraham Lincoln. He sometimes slyly refers to Lincoln as America’s first dictator. Libertarians also detest Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
What connects all three of these Presidents is one thing – big ass wars, and specifically, war financing. If you think today’s deficits are bad, well, Abraham Lincoln financed the Civil War pretty much entirely by money printing and debt creation, taking America off the gold standard….
Modern liberalism is a mixture of two elements. One is a support of Federal power – what came out of the late 1930s, World War II, and the civil rights era where a social safety net and warfare were financed by Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the RFC, and human rights were enforced by a Federal government, unions, and a cadre of corporate, journalistic and technocratic experts (and cheap oil made the whole system run.) America mobilized militarily for national priorities, be they war-like or social in nature. And two, it originates from the anti-war sentiment of the Vietnam era, with its distrust of centralized authority mobilizing national resources for what were perceived to be immoral priorities. When you throw in the recent financial crisis, the corruption of big finance, the increasing militarization of society, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the collapse of the moral authority of the technocrats, you have a big problem. Liberalism doesn’t really exist much within the Democratic Party so much anymore, but it also has a profound challenge insofar as the rudiments of liberalism going back to the 1930s don’t work.
This is why Ron Paul can critique the Federal Reserve and American empire, and why liberals have essentially no answer to his ideas, arguing instead over Paul having character defects. Ron Paul’s stance should be seen as a challenge to better create a coherent structural critique of the American political order. It’s quite obvious that there isn’t one coming from the left, otherwise the figure challenging the war on drugs and American empire wouldn’t be in the Republican primary as the libertarian candidate. To get there, liberals must grapple with big finance and war, two topics that are difficult to handle in any but a glib manner that separates us from our actual traditional and problematic affinity for both. War financing has a specific tradition in American culture, but there is no guarantee war financing must continue the way it has. And there’s no reason to assume that centralized power will act in a more just manner these days, that we will see continuity with the historical experience of the New Deal and Civil Rights Era. The liberal alliance with the mechanics of mass mobilizing warfare, which should be pretty obvious when seen in this light, is deep-rooted.
What we’re seeing on the left is this conflict played out, whether it is big slow centralized unions supporting problematic policies, protest movements that cannot be institutionalized in any useful structure, or a completely hollow liberal intellectual apparatus arguing for increasing the power of corporations through the Federal government to enact their agenda. Now of course, Ron Paul pandered to racists, and there is no doubt that this is a legitimate political issue in the Presidential race. But the intellectual challenge that Ron Paul presents ultimately has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with contradictions within modern liberalism.
Glenn Greenwald has posted a powerful, no holds barred column today which directly addresses the hypocrisy of progressives who, while ready point out the reactionary defects of Ron Paul, are willing to overlook the Obama’s gutting of the Constitution, promotion of endless war, and carte blanche support of Israel. “Progressives and the Ron Paul Fallacies” is at:
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/31/progressives_and_the_ron_paul_fallacies/singleton/
“Ron Paul’s stance should be seen as a challenge to better create a coherent structural critique of the American political order. ”
Where are my royalties, Stoller? :)
Paul invalidates the liberal class. With him, the fight is between labor and capital. The bourgeois don’t factor in.
Good point Tom.
Many left wing people in america are soft on Obama because he belongs to a minority that has been discriminated against in America, he appeared less bureacuratic and more progressive than Clinton, he is a democratic who used antiwar language etc.
With Ron Paul on the other hand, left wing people probably feel mixed like his program. But the democratic party machinery will for obvious reasons avoid promoting him, and he will not be a cause celebre for strong left wingers, even if they like him, because of his negative parts that are opposite their main points.
Regardng liberal wars, I don’t think the writer has done a good enough job explaining this. I think this is partly true, with Human Rights being used to justify very deadly invasions of Serbia and Libya by many liberals in the US.
It’s true that Serbia had ethnic massacres, but so did the Bosnian/Kosovo side. And Gaddafi was a dictator, but the other side in the civil war killed tons of Gaddafi’s side too. The constant in both wars was the expansion of NATO’s power. With Serbia, the EU expanded, and with Libya, corporations will profit, presumably.
This is very similar actually to the war on Iraq- Sadaam was a bad guy, so when WMDs were ruled out as a justification, the claim became democracy.
The real drive in my mind was profit and conquest, but many “moderate” liberals were persuaded based on Human Rights concerns.
‘Ron Paul supporters came to Occupy Wall Street. They wanted a part of that radical movement. Is there nothing the left can learn from them?’
Phil, I feel this is legacy thinking, framing thru political boxes. Using those boxes for a moment in order to explain, the ‘left’ could learn to forget about being ‘left’. The Paulites don’t want ‘a part’ of that movement, they recognise themselves as belonging to it. They don’t see themselves as ‘right’ – certainly not the more recent converts. The whole thrust of OWS is non-partisan, because those that get it understand that there is no hope in the US any more of actual political representation for either of the old school poles, or for the great centre either for that matter. They know the Democrats are at least as likely to send them into an impoverished, police state 1984-style future as the GOP, perhaps more so, now that money corruption has turned them into simply the other wing of the ruling elites’ political duopoly. Both OWS and the Paul resurgence are evidence that citizenry of the US, facing tsunamis of depression and war enabled by elite capture of government and media, is finally waking up and clearing their collective throat. It is not a left or a right thing any more.
They will return of course, and an increasingly desperate elite will, through the media and political machiney they have a lock on, try to make sure the great centre cannot hold (or even form) – this is nakedly obvious in the treatment meted out to both Paul and OWS. But for now a truce on all the relatively minor issues that divide them should be called so that this existential battle, the incipient loss of freedom (let alone prosperity) for the great majority can be fought, and won.
The siamese-twin headed US political system looks more an more like Robert Mugabe, once effective and even respected but now sclerotic, self-dealing, self-absorbed and self-destructive – heading for the dustbin and the opprobrium of history. To continue in the left/right, Dem/GOP paradigm is to provide support, however unwitting, to this claque which is both unwiling and unable to effect any change worth pursuing. Only a new Centre can manage this, and if Ron Paul and his followers can share the open mic, there is at least hope, if not expectation.