I confess: I have felt uncomfortably conflicted about Ron Paul. There are things to like and things to loathe about the man and his politics, but I couldn’t quite articulate the intersection of those feelings.

Today, Ta-Nehisi Coates does the job over at the Atlantic by making a surprising comparison—what Paul means to (some) Americans now and what Farrakhan meant to (some) Americans during the height of the 1980s crack epidemic:

As surely as Ron Paul speaks to a real issue—the state’s broad use of violence and surveillance—which the America’s political leadership has failed to address, Farrakhan spoke to something real, something unsullied, which black America’s political leadership failed to address, Both Paul and Farrakhan, in their glamour, inspired the young, the disaffected, the disillusioned.

To those who dimly perceived something wrong, something that could not be put on a placard, or could not move the party machine, men such as this become something more than political operators, they become symbols. Substantive charges against them, no matter the reasons, are dismissed. The movement they represent means more. But as sure as the followers of Farrakhan deserved more than UFOs, anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories, those of us who oppose the drug-war, who oppose the Patriot Act deserve better than Ron Paul.

Read the whole thing.

To be perfectly clear: I cannot imagine myself ever voting for him, any more than I’d vote for Farrakhan—his history on race issues alone disqualifies him, not to mention his other bad ideas. But I also can’t whole-heartedly write him off as a total crackpot. He’s a problematic representative of a problematic constituency.

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

21 replies on “Ron Paul, Louis Farrakhan, and Ta-Nehisi Coates”

  3. “But as sure as the followers of Farrakhan deserved more than UFOs, anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories, those of us who oppose the drug-war, who oppose the Patriot Act deserve better than Ron Paul.”

    Luckily, we’ve got Gary Johnson, who has the added bonus of being unequivocally supportive of LGBT rights.

  4. Nice one Cato. Some of the things RP say sound good at first, but when you actually look at the reasoning behind those things, he is an ultra-religious conservative bigoted homophobic isolationist crackpot. Not to mention his love of the gold standard and desire to dismantle the govt…

  5. At least Farrakahn wasn’t running for office!
    Further proof that when putting leaders on too high of a pedastle, they will always find a way to dissapoint you.

  6. Just because he may support a few ideas that liberals support, does not mean he is a liberal, nor that he comes to them in a similar manner. He comes to those ideas by being a crack-pot libertarian. His goals are not the same as liberal/progressive goals. As said above: “How can you be conflicted?”

  7. He’s not against State use of all these things. He’s for States’ Rights to oppress and victimize, to the point where he would support the re-implementation of Segregation and Sundown Towns.

    His “principles” are rotten, and I don’t know why anyone’s pretending that States’ Rights have anything to do with Civil Liberties.

  8. Plus, as has been said a zillion times already, he picks and chooses when he’s for the Federal Government to oppress people in the name of his fundamentalist Christian beliefs.

  9. Just to elaborate, it is not unhealthy to feel conflicted about liking something that Ron Paul has said.

    It is, however, ESSENTIAL to realize where that cognitive dissonance originates and follow it to better understand why what he’s advocating is horrible and does not even necessarily solve the problems he claims to solve through the Truly Free Market and a fully corporate-owned (it is MUCH easier to buy out local elections than national) neofeudalist society.

  10. Why not rally around Bernie Sanders? He has the good parts of Ron Paul with none of the crankpottery. He likes gays, single payer health care, and the environment and doesn’t want wars or torture or detentions. He’s a much better person too.

    If I were conspiracy minded I would think the media pushes Ron Paul to fool the left in supporting extreme capitalism.

  11. @10: “Why not rally around Bernie Sanders?”

    I agree, but the media doesn’t give two shits about him, because he’s a progressive.

    Paul gets all the attention because he’s been saying the same GOP States Rights rot that the media’s fine with, to the point where they’ll actively gloss over the racist, homophobic, misogynistic stuff we have video of him agreeing with.

  12. Now that I think about it, I can’t think of a single liberal I know who likes Ron Paul. I and a few others have been intrigued by him until we read the fine print. If there are any liberal/progressives who like him, I think it is because in most liberals (at least the ones who aren’t part of or unwitting advocates for the corporate machine themselves) have a libertarian streak. I think libertarian ideals are best applied to the rabble in everyday life. Which is why his position on the drug war are what attracted most of us.

  13. @ 1 and @ 6.

    Again, someone else has articulated it better than I could—Ross Douthat in the NYT a few days ago:

    There are two commonplace interpretations of Paul’s unusual trajectory. To his many sympathizers — libertarians, dissident conservatives and some left-wingers as well — the extremism in his past has nothing to do with the issues that he’s campaigning on today. The case for Paul, as The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf put it, is that “he alone, among viable candidates, favors reforming certain atrocious policies” — scaling back America’s overseas commitments, ending a failed war on drugs, curbing a runaway public sector and reducing the powers of an imperial presidency. The newsletters may reflect badly on his past, but in the current political landscape he’s a voice of reason rather than of madness.

    To his many critics, on the other hand, Paul’s present-day positions are connected to his past derangements, because they share the same essentially conspiratorial root. Then as now, Paul blames shadowy elites for the country’s ills; then as now, he flirts with narratives that are straight out of the fever swamp. For all its superficial idealism, the critics insist, his campaign is a conduit through which fundamentally poisonous ideas are entering the mainstream body politic, and thus he needs to be not only defeated but repudiated.

    But consider a third possibility. There’s often a fine line between a madman and a prophet. Perhaps Paul has emerged as a teller of some important truths precisely because in many ways he’s still as far out there as ever.

    The United States is living through an era of unprecedented elite failure, in which America’s public institutions are understandably distrusted and our leadership class is justifiably despised. Yet politicians of both parties are required, by the demands of partisanship, to embrace the convenient lie that our problem can be pinned exclusively on the other side’s elites — as though both liberals and conservatives hadn’t participated in the decisions that dug our current hole.

    In this climate, it sometimes takes a fearless crank to expose realities that neither Republicans nor Democrats are particularly eager to acknowledge… Neither prophets nor madmen should be elected to the presidency. But neither can they safely be ignored.

  16. “But I also can’t whole-heartedly write him off as a total crackpot.”

    To be sure he is less of a crackpot than a dangerous demagogue who continuously wraps himself in the mantle of liberty to better impose robber baron capitalism.

  18. Ta-Nehisi Coates is the best blogger in America. You should link to him more. He’s a friend of Sullivan’s, but without Sullivan’s spectacular and total blind spot on the subject of race.

  19. Fnarf,

    NPR’s On the Media did a segment on him on this weeks show in which he discusses the moderation of the comments on his blog. Really good piece worthy of your time if you missed it.

  20. @16: Right, it’s a false dichotomy, why can’t he be BOTH a total crackpot and problematic representative of a problematic constituency? Because the media takes him seriously? They take EVERY person seriously that shows GOP cred, and states’ rights Republicans are nothing new.

Comments are closed.