Ron Paul and Obama Derangement Syndrome

       That there is a faction of liberals who somehow believe that Ron Paul in any meaningful way is part of the solution is nothing new. Basically he claims to oppose war, the Federal Reserve and the War on Drugs. However there's a lot of other baggage he brings as well. Mat Stoller wrote one article claiming he shows that liberalism faces a kind of crisis. I think this crisis is overdone and mostly a reach.

      After his first article in Naked Capitalism he wrote a second piece as he got a lot of response from the first.

      Listening how he answered the first shows the wrongheadedness of his approach: "A post I wrote two weeks ago, How Ron Paul Challenges Liberals, created something of a stir.  It was the most commented article on Naked Capitalism, ever.  And it kicked up a series of arguments among Democrats and civil libertarians.  Glenn Greenwald, who has been talking about these problems in prominent forums, followed up with this remarkable post (and then this one), and has taken many insults as a result.  This in and of itself is worth noting – the slurring of those who critique the structure of modern liberalism is an essential tool in the preservation of the status quo.  I’m going to highlight a few of the reactions here without much of a rebuttal, because I think the reactions themselves illustrate the struggle that boxes in traditional partisan Democrats."

      http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/01/naked-capitalism-a-home-for-all-sorts-of-bircher-nonsense.html

     A few observations. How is it that anyone who questions this ideology that Paul somehow calls into question the entire modern liberal legacy itself is a slur. I know that Stoller thinks Ron Paul poses this huge problem of liberalism, I don't happen to agree, Where's the slur? Is this how the Paul partisans expect to shutdown anyone who applies a reality check to the Paul illusion?

     Listening to Stoller is there not something wrongheaded in his whole thrust?

      "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."

      http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/matt-stoller-why-ron-paul-challenges-liberals.html

    Who says that as a liberal you have to support the drug war? And no one is arguing about Paul's defects unless you want to trivialize talk of a coming race war and other racist bon motifs as a character defect. This is actually a signature piece of the Right-to minimize racism by saying well it's a character defect, we all have character defects, but what matters is cutting the size of government.

    I would say that none of the liberal opposition is about his character. His ideas are mostly about taking government back to the 19th century. Listening to Stoller I wonder if he has drunk too much of the Ron Paul Koolaid:

   "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. He oversaw the founding of the nation’s first national financial regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which chartered national banks and forced them to hold government debt to back currency they issued. The dollar then became the national currency, and Lincoln didn’t even back those dollars by gold (and gold is written into the Constitution). This financing of the Civil War was upheld in a series of cases over the Legal Tender Act of 1862. Prior to Lincoln, it was these United States. Afterwards, it was the United States. Lincoln fought the Civil War and centralized authority in the Federal government to do it, freeing slaves and transforming America into one nation."

    My problem here is that Stoller is giving us the opinions of extreme Right wing libertarians without questioning whether we should by into them. A lot of this I think is about wanting to defeat Obama at any price. That is one thing. Liberals who claim that he is not liberal enough is a value judgement. I have not been happy with everything he's done all the time but I still believe he's the best we have and he's pretty good.

    But whatever, this argument has been going for awhile. I think the Obama haters will lose but there you go. Stoller is doing more than claim that Obama is not liberal enough. He is claiming that liberalism may have serious defects that Ron Paul leads us to divine. Here he truly jumps the shark. How much so? Just listen to his false choice he offers for liberals in 2012:

   "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 health care 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."

   To say that there is some choice to make between lives lost in the drug war and from Obama's health care bill gives about as good an example as a false choice as you can imagine. To even speculate as such a counter factual shows it's a false choice. Is he arguing a vote for Obama means saving some lives through expanded health care but losing lives through the drug war, whereas voting for Paul means saving lives in the drug war while losing them from the health care law? Note too that he questions whether coverage will expand at all in 2013 whereas he already presumes that if elected Paul would single handedly-never mind a Congress that is not on the same page-immediately end the war on drugs all by himself? Of course we're also assuming that Paul really is a viable candidate.

    In any case it's false to make the War on Drugs Obama's war-in truth it is the product of long standing US policies. I don't see in what way they are liberal policies however. I think they are conservative Republican policies-Paul is idiosyncratic among the Right libertarians in actually applying libertarianism to things like the drug war instead of simply things like the right of hospital emergency rooms and health insurance companies to not serve people who can't afford emergency room care. Historically as Stoller has reviewed the administrations of Lincoln, Wilson and FDR, let's point out that it was under the FDR Administration with an overwhelming liberal Democrat Congress that overturned Prohibition, so I don't see why the Drug War means we have to question liberalism and eviscerate Lincoln and FDR and wonder if getting of the gold standard was unconstitutional. This is what I mean by Stoller drinking the Koolaid. To want to beat Obama at all costs is a coherent if misguided strategy. But to get so caught up in the Ron Paul Mythology that you now are questioning liberalism itself is a particularly acute from of Obama Derangement Syndrome (OBDS).