While many folks on the blogs delighted to the video of angry Ron Paul supporters chasing Sean Hannity to his hotel yelling "Fox News sucks!" because their man was excluded from Fox the night before, something disturbed me. I thought of brownshirts. There's just a disturbing mob feel to these kids. So I considered the source.
Ron Paul took a beating a month or so back for some hair-raising stuff in his newsletters of the past. And even if I bend over backwards and grant Ron Paul leeway for intemperate newsletter items others wrote in his name, there is something even more slickly bigoted about the man that makes me suspect his minions.
Consider this, from his own campaign website:
Government as an institution is particularly ill-suited to combat bigotry. Bigotry at its essence is a problem of the heart, and we cannot change people's hearts by passing more laws and regulations...
Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than as individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike: as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called "diversity" actually perpetuate racism.
The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims. Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence - not skin color, gender, or ethnicity.
So what's so racist about this? Everything.
The first paragraph is transparently misleading. Government as an institution is constituted to regulate behavior, regardless of hearts. Because bigotry manifests in behavior such as the Jim Crow laws and lynchings that color the history of Paul's neck of the woods, to deny that government should have a role in combatting bigotry is to passively endorse the worst aspects of it.
The second paragraph generalizes a subset of "collectivism" into "collectivism" generally. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the first sentence is true, it does not follow that "viewing humans as members of groups" (the word "strictly" is gratuitous, as we'll see) is the root cause of racism. Yet that is what Paul argues in the very next sentence, accusing those who think in terms of groups at all as perpetuating racism. He glosses over the key distinction that racists think malevolently about groups and advocates of diversity do not. By ignoring the core distinction and emphasizing the surface commonality, he attempts to brand anti-racism as racism. By his logic, the Anti-Defamation League is anti-semitic.
The denouement to Paul's argument proposes an unnattainable outcome as antidote. This is especially pernicous when the outcome -- limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims -- is attainable to the extent that the group claims of the most vulnerable are more easily disposed of than those of the most powerful. It is easier, for example, to abolish the Voting Rights Act (which almost happened!) than to abolish trade associations. For Ron Paul to raise this vision in the context of racism is to tip his hand: if he comes into power, the claims of the oppressed are to be ignored. The claims of the powerful, well -- that will take longer -- like, forever.
Thus Ron Paul is a racist, by his own words. There was a turnaround to a well-known losing presidential slogan from 1964: "In your guts, you know he's nuts." In our guts, we know where Ron Paul is coming from. It's hard to believe his followers don't. That's why the New Hampshire Hannity-chase scene reminded me of brownshirts.