Beware of Old School Libertarians
Jan 23rd, 2008 by Donagh
Thanks to Splintered Sunrise I discovered, to my dismay, that there are those on the American left who think that left wing anti-war campaigners should join forces with supporters of anti-abortion obstetrician and Republican Senator Ron Paul in the upcoming US Elections. As Sherry Wolf tells us in a December Counter Punch article - linked to by Splintered - it is apparently Paul’s unwillingness to support the Iraq war, his consistent voting against a war budget and his avoidance of Congressional privileges that has a minority of vocal anti-war activists muting such an alliance.
“At the October 27, 2007, antiwar protests in dozens of cities noticeable contingents of supporters carried his campaign placards and circulated sign-up sheets. The Web site antiwar.com features a weekly Ron Paul column. Some even dream of a Left-Right gadfly alliance for the 2008 ticket. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, liberal maverick and Democratic presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich told supporters in late November he was thinking of making Ron Paul his running mate if he were to get the nomination.”
Let’s hope that the Cleveland Plain Dealer is talking shite.
Anyway, at the moment, the only connection between the names of Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul seems to be the opinion that neither have the slightest hope of getting elected.
Also, as Wolf so thoroughly explains there is nothing in Ron Paul’s politics that can offer any point of connection with people who consider themselves to be left-wing. Why, one need look no further than his website:
“Ron Paul’s own campaign Web site reads like the objectivist rantings of Ayn Rand, one of his theoretical mentors. As with the Atlas Shrugged author’s other acolytes, neocon guru Milton Friedman and former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, Paul argues, “Liberty means free-market capitalism.” He opposes “big government” and in the isolationist fashion of the nation’s Pat Buchanans, he decries intervention in foreign nation’s affairs and believes membership in the United Nations undermines U.S. sovereignty.”
Wolf’s purpose, of course, is to make sure that there is no casual acceptance of Ron Paul’s Libertarianism by those on the left, in some misguided effort to try and resuscitate the flagging fortunes of the anti-war campaign.
As Wolf concludes:
“Discontent with the status quo and the drumbeat of electoralism is driving many activists and progressives to seek out political alternatives. But libertarianism is no radical political solution to inequality, violence, and misery. When the likes of Paul shout: “We need freedom to choose!” we need to ask, “Yes, but freedom for whom?” Because the freedom to starve to death is the most dubious freedom of all.
And there is every reason to be wary of the casual imposition of Libertarianism as a mainstream political philosophy. Why, even while watching a children’s animated cartoon one must be aware of the attempted imposition of this pernicious mind-bomb.
While I know a little about Ayn Rand, her right-wing low-brow version of Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Ubermensch, and that she is the author of the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, it was only while reading Tobias Wolff’s Old School that I started to get a full picture. In the novel, the narrator is a pupil in a prestigious though not necessarily posh US boarding school. One of the pluses of attending the school is to that pupils have the opportunity to meet a famous author each term. One these is the author Ayn Rand.
I’ll let bookslut take up the rest of the story:
“The narrator had never read Rand’s work before the announcement that she would be visiting, but on a break from school he purchases The Fountainhead and reads it on the train to visit his grandfather and his new wife at their embarrassingly humble and boring home. He becomes obsessed with the book, with Howard and Dominique, and with Rand herself. He reads the book over and over, eventually fancying himself to be like Howard — destined for greatness, refusing to compromise — and delays his entry for the competition until the last minute, supposing that the greatest piece of work ever to emerge from him with spontaneously create itself. He imagines that his selection as the winner and his meeting with Rand are inevitable. Unfortunately, he falls severely ill (the haze was not one of creativity, but one of illness) and is unable to submit an entry or attend Rand’s reading. He does, however, escape the infirmary in time to attend the coffee clutch which follows the reading, during which Rand and her black-clad posse are predictably (although not to the narrator) haughty, disdainful, and generally obnoxious. He is devastated, his opinions of Howard and Rand deflated and his hopes for a future of creative integrity dashed, and he returns to his previous worship of greats such as Hemingway.”
Old School is a great novel; very compelling and like McGahern’s books you know it’s well written because it’s so easy to read. However, it’s the physical description of Rand that I wanted to emphasize. In the novel Rand is indeed ‘haughty, disdainful, and generally obnoxious’ but she is also surprisingly (to the narrator) short in stature, dressed in black and has a short bob-cut hair style.
Wolff describes her accent perfectly. Originally from Russia she has lived in the US for many years, so her accent is a kind of hybrid. Strong traces of the Russian accent remain but because it has become diluted over time it just sounds vaguely European. She speaks quietly, but is prone to sudden intolerant outbursts.
Oh, and if I recall correctly, she uses the word ‘Darling’ a lot. While reading it I was immediately reminded of Edna, the fashioner designer who makes the superhero’s costumes in The Incredibles.
Could it be that Edna was based on Ayn Rand? While researching this curious possibility I discovered something rather strange. Someone has already made the connection between Ayn Rand and the Incredibles.
This is from one of the first reviews of the film, written by New York Times film critic A.O. Scott:
“THEY keep finding new ways to celebrate mediocrity,” grumbles Bob Parr, once known as Mr. Incredible, the patriarch of a superhero family languishing in middle-class suburban exile. He is referring to a pointless ceremony at his son’s school, but his complaint is much more general, and it is one that animates “The Incredibles,” giving it an edge of intellectual indignation unusual in a family-friendly cartoon blockbuster.
By “they” Bob means the various do-gooders, meddlers and bureaucrats - schoolteachers, lawyers, politicians, insurance executives - who have driven the world’s once-admired superheroes underground, into lives of bland split-level normalcy. “The Incredibles” […] is not subtle in announcing its central theme. Some people have powers that others do not, and to deny them the right to exercise those powers, or the privileges that accompany them, is misguided, cruel and socially destructive.
[…]
The intensity with which “The Incredibles” advances its central idea - it suggests a thorough, feverish immersion in both the history of American comic books and the philosophy of Ayn Rand - is startling.”
Bloody ‘ell. You see, you have to watch out and read things carefully, because if you don’t next you know you’ll be seeing American left-wing anti-war protesters queuing up to get into the back of Ron Paul’s limo.
Although, to be fair now, there does seem enough room for all of them.
I’ve long been of the opinion that if you scratch a professional libertarian, you’ll find a fascist not far beneath, and I’m not convinced by anything Paul says, his principled stand on Iraq notwithstanding. The New Republic has been running a series of articles recently on Paul’s past newsletters, which embrace such unsavoury stances as anti-semitism, xenophobia, racism and homophobia. More of the same from the Republicans, I would think.
The dude is an obstetrician - it’s not surprising that he is not pro-abortion. But that’s your yardstick, is it? Shallow, very shallow.
Actually, Paddy, Ron Paul is in a professional minority on this issue. Both the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists support legalised abortion. And that’s not really surprising - obstetricians know better than anyone the consequences of women being forced to obtain illegal backstreet abortions.
Ron Paul also doesn’t believe in evolution, which is fairly remarkable for someone who presumably had to learn biology in the course of his education. I can’t for the life of me fathom his appeal to the left, whatever his views on the war.
BTW Donagh I know I owe you an email - will try to get to it later today or tomorrow.
Thanks for the link Seanachie, although it seems that this particular quasi-fascist hasn’t a hope of getting the nomination.
Paddy, I was suggesting that he is anti-abortion for political reasons and not because of his experience as a medical practitioner. All of his policies come from a very narrow minded Libertarian conservatism that plays to a significant section of the American right – even his position on evolution is contrary, as Wednesday pointed out, to one of the fundamentals upon which is own education is based.
I think you stopped reading at the word Obstetrician and didn’t follow the link to Wolf’s article.
Thanks Wednesday, whenever you have a chance.
Hey, I wrote an article explaining my views on Paul’s relationship with Ayn Rand. I hope you find it sufficiently humble and polite! Best wishes - Graham.
Thanks for the link between Edna and Ayn Rand - I _thought_ she seemed oddly familiar. Much like Anton Ego, I won’t be able to get the Edna voice out of my head anytime I hear one of her real-life counterparts from now on. Incidentally, those libertarians with a sense of humour (they do exist, you know - just like left-wing protestors with jobs) refer to them as “Randroids”. (Edna may also be based at least partially on a famous japanese clothes designer in the US, who only creates according to her own whim and you have to be invited to purchase her clothes, or some such thing.)
And there is at least a strong element of parody in Edna’s character - and, in fairness, institutionalised mediocrity does deserve a good pummeling nowadays, especially in the US (the awful truth is that the Incredibles is so funny and terrible precisely because it is so close to reality of corporate drones - just look at the mediocrity in the Oval Office… Syndrome, is that you?)
I’m going to have to take grave exception to pretty much everything negative you all said about Ron Paul - and I almost genetically a Democrat.
A perennial problem with Europeans (and many Democrats in the US) is their snobbish distain for much of the culture, history and population in the US, despite many of the targets being pretty much blue collar / working class.
Not many left-wingers would publicly heap abuse on the values of the Yanomamo tribe in the Amazon, or the Beber nomads in the Sahel, simply because they are different; but it’s open season on rednecks and small-town America all year round.
I could bang on about this, but let me illustrate with this example: the “Scopes Monkey Trial” is held up constantly as a club with which to beat all the ignoramuses (ignorami?) who live in “the flyover states” (that vale of benightedness between LA and NYC). In the TV version, a brave young lawyer defends an enlightened schoolteacher for teaching evolution in a Tenessee classroom; the rednecks are trying to keep the children trapped in the dark ages. The reality is a bit more complex: the prosecuting lawyer was a sincere Christian who believed that if human beings were reduced to mere animals, they would be treated as the same; as he saw it, he was defending the poor against the likes of the defense lawyer, himself a “progressive” defender of, amongst other things… eugenics.
It may be true that there aren’t many Congressmen with children in Iraq; most of the volunteer white fellows there are poor church-going types (you know, rednecks) from the flyover states, and what is possibly more aggravating than those rich hypocrites in the Republican Party talking about God and Country - and their blood-sucking harpies in the media, is the ultra-liberals who will whore for the Democrats’ utter mediocrity (there’s that word again) because at least, like, they’re not, gawd, rednecks or anything.
Ron Paul probably won’t be President. He is a conservative. No. Shit. He is also one of the most sincere and possibly personally decent men in the entire Congress, and one of the most genuine, if not the only _actual_ conservative, in that he actually wants to conserve the actual American Constitution as written, not shred it and the Bill of Rights. He has consistently voted against every unconstitutional Civil Liberties infringement, and against the unconstitutional prosecution of an immoral war without fixed objectives, and so without end. Another old right-winger once said “War is the Health of the State”. Which is why maybe the Democrats aren’t so vociferous in their opposition; why spoil their chance to wield the reigns?
In Ireland, nowadays, there isn’t much respect for our Constitution, which apparently was just put there by killjoys to ruin our fun, so that we have to have a referendum every two years (annually, if we give the wrong answer) to change it, rather than actually enforce the damn laws already there effectively (thanks to the Lisbon Treaty, hopefully we will be saved from ever having to bother our heads about this difficult governing stuff ever again).
In the US, however, people are oddly sentimental about their own. Everyone from the International Workers of the World, to Civil Rights activists, right through to to Republican Congressmen who become spokesmen for the ACLU, and Hollywood liberals who become NRA spokesmen… they all seem to really really like it, and even risk their careers (sometimes their lives) defending it. But it isn’t a big magic ATM that just dispenses what ever you ask from it. When I say Ron Paul defends it, he defends hallowed political, philosophical, and cultural aspects of the US that are some of the most sacred of core American values which transcend ideology and the political spectrum. No, I don’t agree with all of his policies, maybe not even most of them - but that’s not the same as respecting him for his able defence of the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights.
And even if he isn’t going to win, then what the hell’s the harm in voting for him, most especially if he can draw from both the Right and the Left? The Neo-Cons (who were mostly disappointed uber-leftists to begin with, FYI) and war-mongers in the Republican Party hate him, by the way.
Votes are messages; if either party sees a chunk of the electorate abandoning both ships, they will get the message and motivation to change course; remember, not even a majority of the electorate necessarily votes - so a winning majority is maybe 25%. With those kinds of percentages, yes, even a minority candiate could swing an election in favour of particular policy.
And by the way, even Doctor Ruth Westheimer - the sexologist - is appalled when people opt for abortion because they couldn’t be bothered preventing it some other way. So don’t piss all over people (especially when many of them would be blue-collar working class) because they have serious moral issues with it, or with euthanasia, or even with eugenics (a low blow, I know; but you are all getting pretty high-horsey in your sweetness-and-light progressiveness, aren’t you?)