Greenwald on Ron Paul

Verbatim Glenn Greenwald:

I'm really uncomfortable with judging someone by the support they attract.

Wow. Really? That's a pretty major philosophical difference between him and me. In the very least it's a overly general principle that doesn't hold up well in practice.

Greenwald is responding to flak he's taking for a couple posts he has written about Ron Paul. His stance seems to be that he respects for Paul for being a principled conservative.

For a long time now, I've heard a lot of people ask: "where are the principled conservatives?" -- meaning those on the Right who are willing to oppose the constitutional transgressions and abuses of the Bush administration without regard to party loyalty. A "principled conservative" isn't someone who agrees with liberals on most issues; that would make them a "principled liberal." A "principled conservative" is someone who aggressively objects to the radicalism of the neocons and the Bush/Cheney assault on our constitution and embraces a conservative political ideology. That's what Ron Paul is, and it's hardly a surprise that he holds many views anathema to most liberals.

Greenwald makes a good case that Paul believes in his principles. For what it's worth, I think Greenwald is right and Paul probably does really believe in the principles he espouses. But c'mon, just how much credit am I supposed to give a guy for doing what he believes is right? Shouldn't that be the baseline expectation? This strikes me as the same thing as congratulating a guy on helping his wife out with the housework. Perhaps most men don't, but we really shouldn't flip our lids when we find a guy who who takes out the trash every once in awhile. Really, that should be the baseline expectation. Glenn Greenwald is falling all over himself to point out how principled Ron Paul is without really considering for a moment just what Paul intends to accomplish with those principles.

Actually, that seems to be another problem that Greenwald has. He doesn't actually believe that Ron Paul is really as extreme as all that:

Part of the dynamic of an unconventional candidacy is that it can become a repository for a whole array of disparate, unrelated groups. The lack of ideological familiarity enables many people with unconventional (even extremist or bizarre) political views to read into those candidacies whatever they want to see -- even if it isn't really there -- and to use the candidate as a proxy for their otherwise ignored and stigmatized causes. That was true to some degree for Dean, and is probably true to a much larger extent with Paul.

As someone who grew up chest-deep in far right wing conspiracy theories, I'm pretty damn good at decoding their language. It frankly scares me Greenwald, as obviously smart and well read as he is, can't see it, but perhaps my experiences give me an edge. I actually met the Montana freemen and spent a few days with them. I shook hands with Bo Gritz. I knew Ron Greisacker. Though I've been thankfully far away from that scene for many years now, I know it when I see it, and what Dave at Orcinus reports is exactly in line with how it operates.

But if you run through the broad array of kooky theories about the federal government promoted on the far right, you can find any number of Ron Paul's positions -- particularly regarding the gold standard, the Federal Reserve, the IRS, and the United Nations -- floating about there. Notably, Paul also played a significant role in Congress' ongoing failure to confront the growing problem of conspiracy-driven tax protests by diverting the blame to the IRS itself.

But that's who Ron Paul is -- a "constitutionalist" who deals in conspiracy theories and extremist anti-government beliefs. It's who he always has been, and who he is now. It isn't just an accident that Paul very recently spoke to a group with troubling racial ties, or that he attended a Patriot Network banquet in his honor in 2004, or that he gave an interview to a conspiracist magazine the same year. Hell, he's been operating within those same circles since 1985.

Absent in those quotes, but mentioned elsewhere in Dave's post, are references to the New World Order, the Trilateral Commission, and the European Currency Unit. To anyone who has spent some time in the company of conspiracy theorists, the language is unmistakable.

And yet perhaps it shouldn't surprise me that a lot of people don't see it. That's the thing about these conspiracy theorists. They don't come right out and say "I hate black people and Mexicans." At least, most of them don't. They tend to be really nice people. My grandpa was one, and if you'd read his letters to the editors ranting angrily about the Jewish Conspiracy, well, you'd be shocked at how many people loved the man for his deeply caring and generous nature. But just because he didn't call himself a bigot doesn't mean he wasn't one. The same goes for Ron Paul. Just because he's a True Believer doesn't make his policies somehow more admirable.

I suspect that Glenn Greenwald has trouble with the conspiracy theorists because the things they say can almost make sense when taken individually. Smaller federal sphere of influence in favor of states' rights? It sounds like something that reasonable people might disagree about. Ending gun control? Merely an extreme version of a popular idea. Shuttering the U.N.? People have been talking about this for years. Compounding the problem is that the worldview of a conspiracy theorist is quite a bit different than ours. Though we on the left often say they talk in code, the reality is they've been using these phrases so long that they have actually come to believe their own rationalizations. States' rights as an end is what many of these people actually believe in. They don't think of it as a means. If you ask them which rights they think the states would better represent, you'll get a litany of grievances committed by the federal government, and most of it vague. What you won't hear is anything about white power.

Given the language they use and the fact that they believe their own bullshit, I can see why someone who hasn't been around it a lot might have trouble with it. But that doesn't change the fact that the origin of these ideas came from racist and sexist ideas, and that those ideas are still at the core of the movement.

The real problem comes when putting all the conspiracy theorist ideas together in a big picture. These are people who really, truly believe that things were Better Back Then, that there was a time when the country was on the right track, but now it isn't and everything has been ruined. They want to dial back the clock and recapture the good ol' days. They don't use the words "racist" or "sexist" or "homophobic," at least not unless they are making fun of people who are being too "P.C." No, they just think of these as the natural order of things. And restoring that natural order is exactly what their platform is intended to do.