Thoughts on Ron Paul’s Newsletters

A lot has been written about the Ron Paul newsletter kerfuffle. Here are my two cents, for those who aren’t yet sick of the issue.

I’m pretty sure Paul isn’t a racist. The newsletters have a spiteful, shrill prose style that is very unlike Paul’s. It does bear a stylistic resemblance to Lew Rockwell’s work. Reason’s Julian Sanchez and Dave Weigel have done some digging, and they believe Rockwell is the ghostwriter.

Read the piece – it’s really good. They say the racist content was part of a deliberate “grow-the-movement” strategy, probably Murray Rothbard’s idea. Julian and David don’t go into it, but Rothbard was fascinated by revolutionary thought, especially Lenin (who, after all, succeeded). Lenin’s strategy was to eschew majority support. Small and intensely devoted cadres were a better agent of revolt.

Racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism will never garner majority support. But people who hold such views tend to hold them very intensely, even at the price of social disapproval. Rothbard and Rockwell wanted to court these people and make them into their own cadres. Hence the offensive content in the Ron Paul newsletters.

Those illiberal views cannot be reconciled with libertarianism. Rothbard had probably read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, and didn’t think it mattered. Hoffer thought that some people are naturally prone to extremism, and can hold any ideology, so long as it’s radical. Thus the fringes the newsletters attracted could be turned into libertarians.

The cadre strategy didn’t work; Paul has had much more success this year by not pandering to racists. What worked in Russia in 1917 did not apply to America in the 1990s. Nor would it work today.

Rothbard and Rockwell’s idea has unintentionally done long-term damage to the movement to which both devoted their lives. An unwritten rule at organizations I’ve been associated with is “no kooks or crazies, please.”

Ron Paul, and Rothbard-Rockwell, have not followed that rule. They actively courted wild-eyed crazies. This is not the image libertarians should project if they want their ideas to be taken seriously.

So those are my thoughts. I have more to say about the old paleo-vs.-cosmopolitan libertarian schism that Newsletter-gate has reopened, but we’ll leave that for later.