Why Don’t Libertarians Care About Ron Paul’s Bigoted Newsletters?
James Kirchick
December 22, 2011 | 12:00 am
Nearly four years ago, on the eve of the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary,
The New Republic published
my expose
of newsletters published by Texas Congressman Ron Paul. The contents of
these newsletters can best be described as appalling. Blacks were
referred to as “animals.” Gays were told to go “back” into the “closet.”
The “X-Rated Martin Luther King” was a bisexual pedophile who “seduced
underage girls and boys.” Three months before the Oklahoma City bombing,
Paul praised right-wing, anti-government militia movements as “one of
the most encouraging developments in America.” The voluminous record of
bigotry and conspiracy theories speaks for itself.
And yet, four years on, Ron Paul’s star is undimmed. Not only do the
latest polls place him as the frontrunner in the Iowa Caucuses, but he
still enjoys the support of a certain coterie of professional political
commentators who, like Paul himself, identify as libertarians. Most
prominent among them is
Daily Beast blogger Andrew Sullivan, who gave Paul his
endorsement in the GOP primary last week, as he did in 2008. But he is not alone: Tim Carney of
The Washington Examiner recently
bemoaned
the fact that “the principled, antiwar, Constitution-obeying,
Fed-hating, libertarian Republican from Texas stands firmly outside the
bounds of permissible dissent as drawn by either the Republican
establishment or the mainstream media,” while Conor Friedersdorf of
The Atlantic argues
that Paul’s ideas cannot be ignored, and that, for Tea Party
Republicans, “A vote against Paul requires either cognitive
dissonance—never in short supply in politics—or a fundamental rethinking
of the whole theory of politics that so recently drove the Tea Party
movement.”
