Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies

Glenn Greenwald explains why liberals hate Ron Paul so much:

It’s perfectly rational and reasonable for progressives to decide that the evils of their candidate are outweighed by the evils of the GOP candidate, whether Ron Paul or anyone else. An honest line of reasoning in this regard would go as follows:

"Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason, and the CIA able to run rampant with no checks or transparency, and privacy eroded further by the unchecked Surveillance State, and American citizens targeted by the President for assassination with no due process, and whistleblowers threatened with life imprisonment for “espionage,” and the Fed able to dole out trillions to bankers in secret, and a substantially higher risk of war with Iran (fought by the U.S. or by Israel with U.S. support) in exchange for less severe cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, the preservation of the Education and Energy Departments, more stringent environmental regulations, broader health care coverage, defense of reproductive rights for women, stronger enforcement of civil rights for America’s minorities, a President with no associations with racist views in a newsletter, and a more progressive Supreme Court."

Without my adopting it, that is at least an honest, candid, and rational way to defend one’s choice. It is the classic lesser-of-two-evils rationale, the key being that it explicitly recognizes that both sides are “evil”: meaning it is not a Good v. Evil contest but a More Evil v. Less Evil contest. But that is not the discussion that takes place because few progressives want to acknowledge that the candidate they are supporting — again — is someone who will continue to do these evil things with their blessing. Instead, we hear only a dishonest one-sided argument that emphasizes Paul’s evils while ignoring Obama’s (progressives frequently ask: how can any progressive consider an anti-choice candidate but don’t ask themselves: how can any progressive support a child-killing, secrecy-obsessed, whistleblower-persecuting Drug Warrior?).

Paul’s candidacy forces those truths about the Democratic Party to be confronted. More important — way more important — is that, as vanden Heuvel pointed out, he forces into the mainstream political discourse vital ideas that are otherwise completely excluded given that they are at odds with the bipartisan consensus.

More here.

Of course, I'm a liberal who doesn't like Ron Paul too terribly much.

On the other hand, I don't hate him, especially relative to most of the GOP. Indeed, as Greenwald has been observing for months now, Paul has been absolutely and consistently correct about our Middle Eastern wars of adventure, as well as the massive erosion of foundational civil rights over the many years of "The War on Terrorism." Paul also gets some extra points with me for opposing the fruitless and destructive and ongoing "War on Drugs."

Really, my big fear with Ron Paul are all the teenagers and twenty-somethings who hear about his pro-marijuana and anti-war positions and totally embrace him without stopping to consider how, exactly, he came to these views. Don't forget that Paul is primarily a Libertarian, which means he doesn't accept or see that private business can be, in its own way, every bit as oppressive and anti-freedom as government, so when he talks about "freedom," he's not simply talking about peace and pot; he's also talking about allowing corporations to run wild in ways that are far, far worse than what we see right now. Indeed, Paul is the ultimate Big Business candidate, a man who as president would remove virtually all regulations on business. His America looks much more like the sterile corporate future envisioned in the Alien movies than the apple pie and baseball images he likes to conjure with all his "freedom" rhetoric. The kids don't seem to see this, and it scares me.

But having said all that, he is pro-pot and anti-war. You gotta give him his props for that. So I don't hate him.

I haven't personally noticed in my reading around the 'net the kind of liberal vitriol against Paul that Greenwald mentions, or perhaps I have and just haven't characterized it that way because, you know, I'm a liberal. But Greenwald's observation fits a preexisting liberal pattern that's driven me nuts for years: trash conservatives and Republicans because of their politics, but do your damnedest to destroy utterly any and all liberal dissenters.

Of course, Paul's no liberal, but his Libertarianism has brought him to embrace some very key liberal positions, which are no longer embraced by the so-called "liberal" establishment. That is, Paul, a conservative, has establishment liberals totally beaten on their home turf. And it pisses them off in the same way Noam Chomsky pisses them off by relentlessly exposing liberal complicity in US imperialism and corporate enabling behavior, in the same way Ralph Nader pisses them off for doing essentially the same thing. It pisses them off in the same way when Chomsky and Nader supporters such as myself dare to repeat their arguments in liberal company.

So, while I haven't personally seen the anti-Paul liberal dynamic that Greenwald bashes here, I take him at his word that it's happening. It's totally par for the course. And it pisses me off because it shows that liberals are just as tribal, emotional, and stupid as their conservative counterparts.

Sometimes I'm amazed that the human race isn't still eating bananas up in the trees.

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