Militarists, Drug Warriors, and Heresy-Hunters: The Anti-Ron Paul Axis of "Decency"

Toxic smugness: Google the term "Backpfeifengesicht."

Newt Gingrich, lapsed adulterer, impenitent warmonger, and self-appointed“teacher of civilization,” has excommunicated RonPaul and his supporters from the ranks of human decency. A similar anathema hasbeen pronounced by left-wingheresy hunter David Neiwert -- a former sidekick to the degenerate fraudnamed Morris Dees – and many other self-appointed political “watchdogs.” 

Those banishment decrees condemn Dr. Paul and his supporters forrejecting the fundamental tenet of statism – the belief that officiallysanctioned lethal coercion is the key to social progress. 

"I think Ron Paul's views are totally outside themainstream of virtually every decent American," insisted Gingrich in a CNNinterview. Although Gingrich alluded to the manufactured controversy overdecades-old newsletters published by Dr. Paul that contained supposedlyoffensive material dealing with matters of political correctness, Gingrich’schief complaint – which he has reiterated on many occasions – is that Dr.Paul seeks to end America’s interventionist foreign policy and the God-awful wars that policy entails. 

Gingrich has also dismissed Dr. Paul’s constituency as beinglimited to “peoplewho want to legalize drugs.” Unlike Gingrich – who used government-proscribed canabinoids as ayoung adult – Ron Paul has never used such illicit substances nor condoned their non-medical use, whileunderstanding that no government has the moral right to punish individuals who consume them as they see fit. In 1988 – at a time when, according to Gingrich andother detractors, Paul was peddling racist propaganda – Dr.Paul was denouncing the racist roots of the so-called War on Drugs. Gingrich,on the other hand, has endorsedthe execution of first-time drugoffenders who possess trivial amounts of narcotics. 

For Gingrich and the dominant militarist wing of the GOP, itis rank indecency to oppose the mass murder of foreigners through aggressivewar overseas, and to leave individuals free to choose what mood-altering substances they consume, if any. For “Progressives” of Neiwert’s ilk, it is similarly uncivilized totreat Americans as adults capable of managing their own affairs, and choosing theirown associations, free from the directives of bureaucrats and social engineerswhose mandates are backed by the threat of deadly force.

Neiwert volubly disapproved of foreign war when GeorgeW. Bush was in power, but found other things to complain about once Obamaascended to the Imperial Purple. A deeper problem than such facile and predictablehypocrisy is the insistence – which Neiwert shares with many other figures onthe academic Left -- that war and military occupation are morally superior topeaceful, market-centered action in dealing with institutionalized bigotry. 

“The hand-wringing about whether Paul is a racist or notreally is beside the point,” declaredNeiwert in a typically sanctimonious outpouring. “Labels really becomeinconsequential when the real issue is how their politics would play out on theground if they achieved power.” He denounces a supposed “monstrous bind spot inlibertarianism – namely, their apparent belief that the only element ofAmerican political life capable of depriving Americans of their rights is thegovernment….”

Actually, the core libertarian tenet is the non-aggressionaxiom (an application of the Golden Rule), which recognizes that it is anunalloyed wrong for anybody to commitaggressive violence against the person or property of another human being. Libertariansdo not exempt private actors from that principle. We refuse to exempt thegovernment from it, as well – and this is what is deemed unacceptable by collectivistsof Neiwert’s ilk, who believe that all good things in life begin withofficially sanctioned coercion. 

Consider, for example, Neiwert’s claim that it waslibertarian-leaning conservatives (or their philosophical ancestors) in theaftermath of the War Between the States, who “led the resistance toReconstruction that overturned the verdict of the war….” 

Neiwert’s use of the term “verdict” in this fashionresonates with the view expressed by Thrasymachus,the notorious sophist depicted in Plato’s Republic– namely, that “in all states there is the same principle ofjustice, which is the interest of the government; and as thegovernment must be supposed to have power, the only reasonableconclusion is, that everywhere there is one principle of justice,which is the interest of the stronger.”

In Neiwert’s moral universe, only incorrigibly hatefulpeople question “verdicts” imposed through mass slaughter and propertydestruction.

The “Reconstruction,” it must be remembered, was anundisguised military occupation of the conquered South, in which “wholesalecorruption, intimidation of new voters by the thousands and tens of thousands,political assassinations, riots, [and] revolutions … were the order of the day,”as Dr. Paul Leland Haworth wrote in his1912 study Reconstruction and Union,1865-1912. 

The objective that inspired Reconstructionwas not a vision of civicequality, but rather a desire to destroy the troublesome Southern aristocracy, whichwas seen as an impediment to the designs of the Northern corporatist elite. 

“I was satisfied, and have beenall the time, that the problem of war consists in the awful fact that thepresent class of men who rule the South must be killed outright rather than inthe conquest of territory,” wrote General Sherman to his wife (in a letterquoted in VictorDavis Hanson’s book The Soul of Battle). In what Hanson approvinglycalled Sherman’s war of “terror” against the South, the General warned thatthose who refused to display a properly submissive posture would be “crushedlike flies on a wheel.” 

"Good Indians," by Sherman's definition, at Wounded Knee.

Sherman, and his fellow stateterrorist Philip Sheridan, would follow the same approach in dealing with thePlains Indians, who also had the temerity to claim a measure of independence fromthe supposed authority of the Central Government. Neiwert, interestingly,addresses that horrifying historican episode in his recent book TheEliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right.

In a chapter dealing with "Eliminationism in America,”Neiwert describes some of the atrocities committed against the Plains Indiansby U.S. military forces commanded by  Sheridan and Sherman. He then devotesthe rest of the book to ritual execration of "neo-Confederates." That category must include anybody who understands that war to reclaim and “reconstruct”the South was a bloody prelude to the slaughter of the Plains Indians, theimperial war of conquest in the Philippines, and contemporary campaigns ofhumanitarian bloodshed that have blessed the lives of “people of color” in suchplaces as Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Neiwert, who is consistently oblivious to the implicationsof his own research, also points out that the Ku Klux Klan’s early-20^thCentury revival began when it was embraced by local governments (including somein the Midwest) as "an auxiliary police outfit" to enforce lawsagainst bootlegging. The Klan, of course, is the marquee hate group that hasserved as such a profitable foil for Neiwert’s mentor, Morris Dees – and it’squite possible that group would have disappeared permanently had it not becomea government sub-contractor in the first War on Drugs. 

This brings up a very important point: If Morris Dees andhis comrades at the SPLC are genuinely agitated over institutionalizeddiscrimination, why have they never publicly uttered a syllable of condemnationfor the patently racist “War on Drugs”? 

One possibility is suggested by the fact that thecontemporary SPLC, like the Ku Klux Klan of roughly a century ago, is aquasi-private adjunct to lawenforcement agencies that profit extravagantly from Prohibition. Dees istoo canny and cynical to disturb that lucrative arrangement by protesting aboutthe costs inflicted by Prohibition in terms of the lives and liberties of blackand Hispanic Americans. After all, complaints of that kind are the sort ofthing one hears from indecent, irresponsible extremists like Ron Paul. 

David Neiwert and other self-anointed custodians of socialjustice insist that Ron Paul and his supporters have somehow inherited the sins of bigoted people whodied long before they were born, and prospectively share the guilt of those whomight do horrible things if federal power were curtailed. Meanwhile, thepresident supported by Neiwert and his ideological kin is massacring innocent “people of color” in at leastthree countries, and escalating a domestic Drug War that is rife with racialprofiling and racial disparities in sentencing guidelines.  

 The mass slaughter of brown people abroad, and massincarceration of brown people at home, are a price Neiwert and his ilk arewilling to pay to preserve a system that can regiment societal arrangements totheir liking. In that system, as Neiwert candidly admits, social “verdicts” areimposed and upheld through state-licensed murder, rather than achieved through peacefulcooperation. 

Professor George P. Fletcher of Columbia Law School provides an incisive description of the ideological foundation of that system in his valuable book The Secret Constitution. 

Fletcher, anunabashed Marxist, is difficult to dismiss as a “neo-Confederate,” yet heagrees with the revisionist view that the war waged by the North was not aneffort to "preserve the Union," to emancipate the slaves, or (asLincoln absurdly claimed) a crusade to restore the pre-war constitutionalorder. Instead, that war was intended to consolidate a confederation of statesinto a unitary regime governed by what Fletcher calls a "New ConstitutionalOrder." The founding premise of that New Order is that "the federalgovernment, victorious in warfare, must continue its aggressive interventionin the lives of its citizens." (Emphasis added.) That "aggressive intervention" inescapably involves the threat -- and, increasingly, the exercise -- of deadly force.

Newt Gingrich and David Neiwert -- and the ideological cliques they represent -- disagree about a great deal,but they agree that “decency” in political affairs is measured by one’s willingnessto support State-sanctioned murder as the central organizing principle ofsociety.

 Once again, thank you!

My family and I wish to express our continued gratitude for the generous support so many of you have offered to Pro Libertate. This means more to us that we can adequately express. God bless you all. 

On another matter: I have been curating the news blog for Republic magazine; please pay that site a visit, and -- if it meets with your approval -- spread the word. 

Be sure to check out Republic magazine! 

Dum spiro, pugno!