Is Rand Paul a racist? And what about Rand’s father, former presidential candidate Ron Paul? Does civil rights resentment run in the family?
Rand Paul attracted media attention when he told Rachel Maddow that he rejected key provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Maddow: “Do you think that a private business has the right to say we don’t serve black people?”
Rand Paul: “Yes:
Rand Paul, the Tea Party victor of Tuesday’s Republican primary in Kentucky, is beginning to backtrack.
After listening to Rand Paul for thirty seconds you realize that the son got all of his father’s ideas, but only a modicum of the old man’s intelligence.
I doubt either man is a racist in the sense of hating individual black people for the color of their skin. But Ron Paul grew up in a world saturated with neo-Confederate clap-trap and deep racial resentment.
Two years ago, James Kirchick with the New Republic wrote an article called, “Angry White Man: The Bigoted Past of Ron Paul.” The article created a brief Tea Pot Tempest before passing into oblivion. Kirchick tracked down some of Mr. Paul’s old newsletters dating back to the mid-1970s and was shocked by the content. Paul (or his surrogates) regularly made crudely disparaging remarks about Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, homosexuals, Jews, Israel and AIDS victims while describing low-income African Americans as lazy, welfare dependent criminals. Moreover, Paul appeared to embrace a full range of One World conspiracy theories.
Asked to explain the newsletters on Wolf Blitzer’s CNN program, candidate Paul expressed shock and bewilderment. He hadn’t written the offensive newsletters, he said, and didn’t know who did. He was doing a lot of traveling and public speaking at the time, Paul explained, and had a medical practice to look after. As a result, he farmed the newsletter out the underlings and didn’t give it a lot of attention.
That was enough to satisfy Mr. Blitzer.
More troubling, however, is the comments section. Ron Paul devotees defended their leader against Kirchick’s “smear campaign” but seemed untroubled by the content of the old newsletters. This is typical:
While many of the statements are politically incorrect. Are they exactly errant? To me it seems like messages of frustration for a government that literally has kept blacks down by welfare and other means to get their votes. As for Israel, I know RP says he would also not give money to their enemy. Does it make sense to fund Israel and then fund their enemies even more? As for Alex jones and the central bankers, bilderburg, etc. If people don’t see that has been happening since about 1913 then they are the loons! This is not conspiracy but fact. As for racism! I don’t think there is a race that doesn’t have bad people, lazy people, corrupt people, etc. which I believe was also in one of those newletters but wasn’t mentioned here! Can’t wait to see what you write when the One World System is in place…and it will be! We are so far along in globalization it would make your head spin and somehow you spent too much time writing this article instead of researching the latter.
The most common reaction boiled down to: “So, what’s the big deal? Every right-thinking American believes that stuff.”
I am profoundly unconvinced by Ron Paul’s exercise in spin control. Kirchick asked all the right questions at the conclusion of his article:
Paul’s campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naïve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically–or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point–over the course of decades–he would have done something about it.
Even if the real Ron Paul is a big fan of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, his association with groups like the John Birch Society and proponents of Christian Reconstructionism raise troubling questions. In a 2008 address at a John Birch Society convention, Paul praised the organization and thanked its supporters for working supporting him over the years.
The John Birch Society was, and remains, deeply opposed to the goals and successes of the civil rights movement.
Christian Reconstructionism is a philosophy rooted in the writings of Rousas John Rushdoony, a pseudo-scholar who denied the holocaust and saw slavery as fully legitimate. According to Rushdoony’s Wikipedia article: “Rushdoony believed that interracial marriage, which he referred to as ‘unequal yoking’, should be made illegal. He also opposed ‘enforced integration’, referred to Southern slavery as ‘benevolent’, and said that ‘some people are by nature slaves’.”
Gary North, Rushdoony’s son-in-law (and ardent Reconstuctionist), worked for Ron Paul when he first went to Washington in 1976. Ron Paul’s racial views may have evolved over the past few decades, but this stuff is in his DNA.
I like Ron Paul. On a few subjects (the drug war, the Iraq war) I find his arguments compelling. I met him when I was giving a talk at a libertarian convention in College Station, Texas a few years ago and he seemed like a genuine guy. But he isn’t the kind of secular libertarian you will find at Reason Magazine or the Cato Institute.
I predict that neither Rand Paul nor his illustrious father will be damaged by charges of closet bigotry. This supposedly negative press will help both men more than it will hurt them. It is virtually impossible for an outspoken supporter of civil rights to succeed in conservative politics. The bigots may be in the minority, but they comprise a powerful constituency that no savvy Republican can ignore.
How widespread is civil rights resentment in white America? Here’s one way to find out: ask a representative sample of Americans if they share Rand Paul’s concerns about the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
I predict that a majority of white respondents would answer in the affirmative. I pray I’m wrong about that.
Friends of Justice 
The United States of America is a kleptarchy. One of the most foresighted moves by the ancestors of the currant kleptarchs was to introduce slavery and to enslave only members of a race distinct from their own. Slavery is the main reason that American politics is so skewed towards the right.
The introduction of slavery meant that white people had a well founded fear of a slave revolt. This fear did not disappear with slavery’s abolition but simply became fear of the freed slaves. since all slaves were Negro all Negroes came to be feared by whites. This fear has been passed down from generation to generation and white Americans today are still afraid of a revolt by Negroes who will take revenge for all the harm done tp them over 500 years. Because there is a minority of 13% or so of the population who are easy to identify as those to be feared, politics among white voters has been dominated by the fear of the advancement of coloured people giving them more power and making their coming revolt more threatening. For this reason white working class people have adopted and internalized an ideology that advantages the rich and opposes any attempt to benefit poor people because it would benefit blacks. The fact that many whites are poor and would benefit from policies that help poor people is lost on them because even the poorest of white trash thinks himself more akin to the billionaire that to the Negro.
White resentment of civil rights is simply a manifestation of this ideology.
Racists do not know that they are racist.
The human mind works by making associations between memories that represent concepts. Examples of some concepts that exist inside human minds are crime, white, Negro, lazy, stupid and smart. For any individual mind their will be a certain strength of association between any two concepts, Negro and crime for example. I am pretty sure that if we dissected the brain of a white American such as either R Paul down to the level of neurons we would find that the association between the concepts of Negro and Crime is much stronger than that between the concepts of White and Crime. The same would be true for the strength of association between concept of Negro and any concept representing a character defect as compared with the strength of association between the concept “White” and the same character defect.
Anti-Negro racism is simply the sum total of these differentials in the strength of association of the concept “Negro” with negative concepts as compare with the corresponding associations between the concept “white” and these same negative concepts.
We really need some objective way of measuring the strength of these negative stereotypes. Asking people won’t work because people who knew would lie, but in any case these associations are not necessarily accessible to consciousness. They have real life consequences though as when a white Policeman sees a crime and a black man with a gun and shoots the black man dead because he assumes the black man is a criminal rather than another policeman responding to the same crime. There are multiple examples of such cases of white police killing black police because the strength of their association of the ideas Negro and Crime is so much stronger than that between their concepts of Negro and Police.
A good fictional portrayal of this effect is in the HBO series “The Wire”. It is a late episode of the third season Detective Presbylewski shoots an undercover Black officer dead.
Despite their racism, the Pauls, Ron and Rand may be better representatives for black Americans than allegedly nonracist Democrats beause of their opposition to things such as The Wars on Drugs, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This article by Alexander Cockburn in Aa href=”http://www.counterpunch.org/”>CounterPunch makes the point that Rachael Maddow was distracted from more important things when her interview of Rand Paul dwelt on his opposition to civil rights.
Curses, my hyperlink was misspelled.
The second sentence in my previous post should have read This article by Alexander Cockburn in CounterPunch makes the point that Rachael Maddow was distracted from more important things when her interview of Rand Paul dwelt on his opposition to civil rights.
Carlyle:
I agree that Rand Paul would probably take more enlightened positions on the drug war, mass incarceration, wire tapping, etc. than most generic Democrats. That said, I don’t think Cockburn has paid sufficient attention to civil rights resentment in the South to realize that opposition to the civil rights act of 1964 is an issue of contemporary relevance. He can knock Morris Dees if he likes, but I’m glad somebody is monitoring the organizations that Ron Paul has been associated with over the years. Appearing on Alex Jones’ radio show signifies nothing–I have been a guest on Jones’ show and I disagree with most of his agenda. But Ron Paul has been a guest over 40 times and the newsletter written by his organization over the years reveal a fondness for Jonesian conspiracy theory. Ron and Rand are comfortable appearing on Maddow’s show because their agenda overlaps with hers in significant particulars. But when a guy says he would have stood with Southern shop owners who wanted to maintain a white-only clientele we ought to be concerned. This is what the sit-ins in Greensboro, Nashville, Jackson, etc. where all about.
I think Rand Paul gives the Democrats a real shot at picking up this Senate seat. Not a sure shot but more than a long shot. I agree with Mr. Moulton that Rand Paul might be more favorable to CJ concerns on some specific issues, but he would almost certainly vote with the GOP on trying to block any specific Obama issue, including possible center or left-center SC nominees. I’ll be pulling for his defeat w/o knowing anything about the Dem nominee.
Carlyle, you said: “I am pretty sure that if we dissected the brain of a white American such as either R Paul down to the level of neurons we would find that the association between the concepts of Negro and Crime is much stronger than that between the concepts of White and Crime.”
There is nothing more painful to me … than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved. — the Reverend Jesse Jackson, as quoted in US News, 3/10/96
Carlyle, sound to me like the Rev Jackson has made the same association.
Charles.
You don’t have to worry about Rand Paul blocking left or centre left SC nominees. I have seen enough of Obama by now to knw that he is never going to appoint anyone other than extreme rightists too the US Supreme Court.
You Americans were tricked when you voted for Obama and the Democrats and thought you were voting against unnecessary wars and transfers of wealth to the upper classes. Obama is as much an enemy of ordinary that is non-elite Americans and Black people as was George W Bush.
It may be that Democratic policy is slightly to the left of Republican policy, but that does not make the Democrats a better choice for the 99% of you that are not rich.
Carlyle, that is unadulterated BS. Obama has made two SC appointments now, one confirmed. Neither of them could be described as anything other than center-left.
Charles.
You Americans have strange definitions of the political left and right. Only in America could Elena Kagan be considered centre left.
The fact is the corporate kleptarchy owns both parties and has managed to drag not just the Overton window limiting the range of political discourse far to the right but also the definitions of the political left and right.
We Americans have the definitions of left and right that fit our social reality. The right is calling Obama a socialist. The left is questioning his progressive credentials. In reality, he is a pragmatic centrist and would be unelectable if he were anything else.
Your seem to use the term “kleptarchy” as a synonym for “plutocracy”. At least the two concepts overlap considerably. America is a plutocracy, but not all plutocrats operate out of the same philosophy. The Tea Party movement is best understood as an anti-plutocrat phenomenon. They oppose the Ivy League plutocrats who control the Democratic Party just a little bit more than they oppose the neo-con elitists who have held sway on the Republican side.
Both plutocrat camps spend lots of tax payer money, but on somewhat different things. I doubt the Tea Party people would like the consequences of electing a whole swath of Rand Paul clones. To cut government spending in a big way you must either eliminate Social Security and Medicare or you must scale back the size of the military and, by extension, the scope of American military hegemony. I doubt rank and file Tea Pary folks would be willing to move in either direction. But as long as the recession rages and unemployment lines are long all the fire and spirit in American politics will be with the Tea Pary crowd. That’s the reality Obama must deal with.
Alan.
Only in America would the Democratic Party be considered left wing and would anyone think Obama is a socialist. When Americans and non-Americans talk politics they really need to be explicit about which country’s definitions are being used for words like “”centre”, “left”, “right” and “socialist” otherwise there will be misunderstanding.
The right wing parties in Australia are The Liberal Party and The National Party and they work together as a coalition when they can form Government. In Australia’s terms our previous Prime Minister John Winston Howard was the most right wing one that we have had and he introduced certain techniques of electioneering called wedge politics by scapegoating racial minorities and appealing to white resentment. These were obviously copied from the US GOP. However even this man would be seen as a raving loony leftist in the US. The right wing parties in Australia are considerably to the left of the Democrats.
It seems to me that US politics has shifted rightward since the sixties and many Americans are not aware of how much it has done so. I consider Barak Obama to be to the right of Richard Nixon. What Americans see as the centre I see as far to the political right.
Not all plutocrats are kleptarchs, Bill Gates for example made his wealth honestly although his business practices were pretty ruthless. However the plutocracy is now dominated by kleptarchs, whose main technique for advancing their interests is tilting the intra society terms of trade between the very rich and the not very rich in their favour of the rich using the power of government. I consider that this tilting has gone so far as to constitute government enabled theft. I like the terms kleparch and kleptocrat and do what I can to spread their use. Sometimes pejorative terms are necessary to help people recognize enemies as such. The problem in the US is that even poor white trash see their interests as being the same as the kleptarchs, with Joe the Plumber types believing that one day they will become rich businessmen, join the elite and benefit from low taxes. The main reason for this is that slavery has left a significant minority 11-13% of the population, slave descendants whose race is recognizably different and whom all whites fear and whom whites see as an alien presence threatening to steal things that rightfully belong to decent white people via government action. White Americans strongly associate the term “poor” with the concept “being of Negro race” and poor white trash oppose any policies that help the poor because they fear that an undeserving black person might get some of their tax money. Of course there are many poor white people but the successful use by the right of blacks as scape goats has distracted poor whites from pursuing their own interests effectively.
George.
Yes, Negroes have the same strong associations between the concepts “of Negro race” and the concepts of negative character attributes that whites have, though not as strong obviously. So Jesse Jackson was speaking not just for himself.
Blacks read and watch the same media discourse that whites do and get the same implied messages from it. The media discourse is strongly slanted towards depicting blacks as being much worse than they in fact are and whites as much better than they in fact are. There are plenty of white criminals, but society does not see the actions of one of them discrediting the whole white race whereas society considers all blacks to bear responsibility for the crimes of any one of them. The dominant section of society has a privilege that all minorities lack, the privilege of not being blamed for the bad actions of others of their race. Whites are not aware of how much this privilege protects them, the lack of this privilege is catastrophic for blacks.
Some time in the nineteen seventies Gore Vidal said:- l”There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party…and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently… and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”
Since then both right wings have moved further right.
Alan.
The terms “centre left” and “centre right” I find confusing. Does “centre left” mean slightly to the left of the centre or does it mean in the centre of that part of the political spectrum that most people term “the left”?
One commentator who says much that I find sensible about American Politics is Glen Greewald. I strongly recommend his blog at salon.com. I suspect you would like him too.
Unfortunately, a lot of people think this same way. I know that most of the people in small town America would probably agree with the statement that Paul originally met, and he won his victory in KY, which is about as small town American as you can get. As much as I hate to say it, electing a black man has brought out some really strong views from people who would not have necessarily said the same things two years ago. I am all for Obama, but people who are against him, are really against him. There are hardly any middle of the road people anymore, and those who are on the same side as the Tea Party tend to lash out and say whatever comes to their mind without thinking about it first.
George and Carlyle:
I suspect Jesse Jackson made that comment at the height of the creack epidemic when homicide rates were at record rates, especially among young black males. Even now, the homicide rate among African Americans is six times the rate among whites, a statistic white liberals generally ignore. But African Americans from the civil rights generation are well aware of the statistics if only because most of the victims are also young black males. This helps explain why it is so difficult to light a fire under black civil rights activists regarding the Curtis Flowers case. They don’t want to be associated with a guy who is accused of murder–innocent or guilty. These issues are complicated. I agree with much of your analysis, Carlyle, but your geographical distance from the American reality has been showing in recent posts. Our desire at Friends of Justice isn’t to bolster an ideological position; we are trying to get at the truth. Sometimes that means admitting hard truths from both sides of the political spectrum.
Alan.
Every quote should be considered in the context in which it was first spoken or written. However I remember reading relatively recently about a psychological study that showed that blacks have the same negative stereotypes about blacks that whites have.
Members of an underclass are often angry and often have are extremely sensitive to perceived insults. Angry, hair trigger people who have access to guns are likely to use them in anger when something which objective observers view as trivial happens and this explains many of the murders. The remainder would disappear if drug prohibition did, they are the result of people fighting over the profitable black markets that prohibition creates.
Geographical distance gives a different perspective. No one can be sure which perspective gives the truest picture, but comparing different views is worthwhile. I believe your view of the extent of the left/right spectrum is taken from the political talk in the main stream media, if you viewed the left wing blogs you would find there attitudes that are very far to the left of this.
Before I became interested in American blogs I was a voracious reader of Australian newspapers and blogs and what I think I see is that compared with Australian politics US politics is skewed crazily to the right. The US main stream media are also biased to the right more than are those of Australia although I do notice a rightward creep in ours over the last few years.
American blogs seem to me to run the full range of the left, I have not sought out the right wing blogs but I do look at some libertarian ones.
I would give Glen Greenwald, Jane Hamsher and Digby of Hullabaloo as examples of Americans who are moderately left wing in a sense that an Australian would understand. I suspect that many Americans would consider them screaming left wing crazies.
I am fully familiar with leftist opinion. The other day I was giving a talk on the death penalty at a Texas university. One of my fellow presenters made comments about Obama very much along the line of yours. I work with anyone, right, left or center, if they are willing to hear me out. When you live in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex you don’t have the luxury of dismissing conservative opinion because it represents the prevailing consensus. In addition, I don’t always agree with folks on the left. The American culture war has created a toxic climate that frustrates honest debate. When folks on the left discount religion as a form of insanity and show utter disdain for the benighted rubes in “the flyover states” they feed the fire and strengthen the hand of their opponents.
Alan.
I bet the fellow presenter whom you mentioned is not someone who would be mentioned in the main stream media. My point is not that leftists don’t exist in the US, they do and are well represented in the blogosphere, but leftist opinion is not well represented by the main stream media, media pundits or the speech of elected politicians or those with a serious chance of becoming elected. Glen Greenwald says this much better than I can and I would give him credit for giving me the idea, his archives are well worth browsing.
Incidentally there is a very good article and comment thread on Alternet about how the relative wealth of Blacks is sliding relative to Whites due to the financial crisis.
I don’t believe that religious belief is a form of insanity. I believe that mental mechanisms to support spiritual or religious beliefs are hard-wired into the human brain, and evolution has caused this to happen because on the whole religious belief is advantageous for survival. This does not mean that religion sometimes leads to very bad outcomes, but sometimes it leads to good outcomes as well. Trying to work out whether the net effect of religion is more good than bad or otherwise is a futile exercise. The reason that humans evolved religious beliefs is that in the long run they are pro-survival. Consider how much depression at an atheists knowledge of the finality of death impairs his functioning and is anti-survival, a belief system that removes this fear allows people to function better while alive and helps the survival of their genes.
I am an atheist myself, having had a everse Damascus conversion on the way home from school at the age of 13, but I can see many good reasons for believing in religion, none of them though have anything do do with religious ideas being true. I believe that those who can believe in something are lucky, the atheist view tends to the bleak and depressing. The problem is that 2000 years ago religious beliefs did not conflict with anything people then knew about the world, now when analysed in conjunction with what we know about science, especially biology the arguments in favor are being squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces.
Alan.
Does your site have a limit on the number of hyperlinks that can be included in a post, Johnathon Turley’s blog , also on WordPress has such a limit and one of my posts with two hyperlinks on your blog has gone into the moderation queue. I can’t see any obviously problematic words that would have triggered the moderation filter.
Got my multiple negatives in a tangle.
The third sentence in the previous post should read:-
“This does not mean that religion does not sometimes leads to very bad outcomes, but sometimes it leads to good outcomes as well.”.