Howard Fineman thinks the GOP can save themselves by channeling their inner Ron Paul. Never mind that Fineman thinks Rep. Paul is ‘out there,’ ‘angry, and ‘apocalyptic;’ the important thing is that he believes in something. Because he believes in something, it doesn’t matter that many of ‘his ideas are unworkable, some are dangerous.’
According to Fineman, ‘Paul is a bargain-basement Jefferson for our time.’ I’ll give you five bucks if you can tell me what the hell that means and why it’s a compliment. Here’s a quote from Jefferson. Maybe you can tell me how Ron Paul reflects a poorman’s latter day Jefferson.
“And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.”
-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
What? Does that not seem like something Ron Paul might write or that his supporters might understand? Well, how about this?
Priests…dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions of the duperies on which they live.
-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Correa de Serra, April 11, 1820
This is not even considering that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, served in the Confederation Congress, served as Minister to France, as Secretary of State, and Vice-President and President of the United States. He created the University of Virginia. He invented the freaking swivel chair. And that list only scratches the surface of his accomplishments. Who could possibly trace Fineman’s mind when he compares Ron Paul to Thomas Jefferson? He ought to be so embarrassed that he never writes again.
My best guess is that Fineman thinks of Jefferson mainly as a representative of agrarian interests. Show me the modern-day freethinking farmer-populist and I’ll show you a bargain-basement Jefferson. Ron Paul, my ass.
The teabagger and Ron Paul movements are anything but freethinking. Unless, you mean ‘free to think any nonsense that pops into their minds.’ The GOP might make electoral gains with this foolishness but, if Jefferson saw their arguments, he’d never stop throwing up.
Hamilton -> banks/industry -> Fed
So
Jefferson is to Ron Paul as Hamilton is to Greenspan.
..in other words, Jefferson didn’t like the idea of central banks. It was this sentiment in part, that helped cook up the weird quasi-private nature of the Fed, once it was decided for us that we needed something centralized after all.. I guess the whole jefferson-Paul thing falls apart kinda quickly in the details.
It’s like saying I am todays Napoleon because we both hate’ Russian foreign policy.
Coming from a slave owner that sounds really sincere.
The upshot of your comment is apparently that, if someone behaves in disreputable ways then virtually anything and everything that such a person might say (if not, indeed, also do ) is not only automatically suspect but can be immediately discounted, dismissed, as being, in the example here, not credible.
That you don’t state that argument explicitly but, instead, rely on insinuation and implication, is only more reason to criticize your comment.
Why not state things clearly: Jefferson, because he held slaves, should be suspected in all that he said (or in this case, that he wrote) as being insincere in making some moral point or argument.
I suggest another way of thinking about this:
Jefferson could have been both sincere in his comments as cited and, at the same time, a person with moral failings, as evidenced in his being a slave-holder. Besides, your dismissal of Jefferson, whatever its validity, remains beside the point as far as the worthiness of his point is concerned for us in our times.
Do you dispute the fundamental soundness and validity of what Jefferson’s hope as he stated it, leaving aside the question of his own sincerity?
If not, then what’s the point in impugning his viewpoint by associating it with other behavior which is rightly to be condemned?
I bet I get no straight answer to these questions.
link
Originally in the Declaration of Independence:
link
It was only his crushing debt (which informed his hatred of banks) that prevented him from setting free all his slaves.
Then, you’d have to say it was his poor land management, expensive architecture tastes and lack of interest in capitalizing on his fame that kept the slaves in-house. Morals is about priorities, not excuses.
More to the point, one also has to give him the fact that he wanted to include slaves in the rights given all citizens.
Imperfect, for sure, but leaning in all the right directions.. but as far as economic policy goes, he lived in a glass house more than a bit (literally, i am sure, had he thought of it).
Thank you. I get so tired of hearing people dismiss an entire person’s life based on a single flaw.
I think it’s more along the lines of:
Strict interpretor of Constitution to the point that state’s rights trump the people’s rights
and
Hatred of central banking.
The problem is that no one can know where Jefferson would stand in the contemporary world. I think it’s clear, though, that he would be nowhere near the Republican Party, even if Paul is a black sheep.
I’m not a Ron Paul fan, primarily because of his adulation of the “market” and deregulation. Neither of those items on his list promote social justice. But neither do the policies of either of the two major political parties.
But I would say that Paul’s ideas on US foreign policy–closing the 800 some odd worldwide US military bases, opposition to pre-emptive wars, and downsizing the military–are far closer to Jefferson’s than to Obama’s.
I only use Jefferson as a reference because of Fineman’s context. I dislike the use of the “founding fathers” as some sort of divine precedent.
I am glad Paul is in the political mix. At this point in time, I don’t consider him any worse than the majority of democrats.
I’d go even further in Ron Paul’s defense.
We lose whenever we turn the other side into cartoon characters. Like the Dems, each individual Republican has his good points and his awful points. Politically, I’m very much in line with the Democratic party. But Ron Paul is right about some things, and that’s why Fineman tipped his hat.
Defending Ron Paul is a giant mistake. Enormous.
I don’t care if he agrees with me on a few issues. I want nothing to do with him or his supporters.
Lol, agreed, Booman. Come to think of it, aside from my activism in the streets and on the phone, the other part came from dealing with his supporters on the internet. It was an annoying and tedious process, and I’d really rather they just go away. However, boredom gets the best of me sometimes, and I engage in their inane and outright wrong ideas.
I also agree that I want nothing to do with Ron Paul. Even on foreign policy and the drug war, two issues where I somewhat agree with him, he’s dangerous. He wants to end the drug war, but put nothing into recovery and rehabilitation. That does nothing to decrease drug use or crime. On foreign policy, yeah he wants to end a lot of our hegemony, but then he wants to get out of NATO, the UN, end all foreign aid, end NAFTA; more or less be an isolationist other than trading without tariffs. The man’s a lunatic, even on the issues where he has some merit.
It’s not about defending Ron Paul on all counts! Sheesh. Read what it being said here.
It’s about not dismissing him entirely because he’s a racist. He’s right re the problems of the Federal Reserve. He’s completely right re that. I just think he’s wrong on the solution. The solution is not to do away with a Central Bank. The solution is to keep the senioriage profit for Americans, not private owners. It’s much more complicated.
The point is, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. No one is ALWAYS wrong on every point, and we have to be able to acknowledge that to gain credibility with those who might join us on some issues if they see we can at least acknowledge that truth.
Agree with you on “a few issues”??
As a former Democrat, it was hard to continue not to notice, that all the democratic candidates I had voted for were wrong on all these issues. It was clear from the beginning that Obama would be wrong on all these issues.
And he was. On Iraq, Afghanistan, Patriot Act, and the bailout of the big banks. He was wrong and will continue to be. Shouting “conspiracy nuts” and “New World Order at Ron Paul supporters will not change that.
I’m curious, Booman, how long before the rest of the Democratic base figures that out?
The Republicans chose to turn themselves into cartoon characters. Adulating Palin, getting on board the “birther” cult, fanning hysteria over “death panels” and the terrible threat of putting accused terrorists into max security US prisons only scratch the surface, as you know. When a whole party behaves like demented robots endlessly parroting a party line that wouldn’t fool a bright 5th grader they have no claim to respect as political leaders.
At some level I have to admire your forbearance, but challenge you to find good points in the likes of Inhofe, Palin, or Bachmann, for example. They may have personal virtues, but are pure poison at the political level. Is your starting point that there are no bad people? Again, there may be something to that in a person-to-person context, but not at a political one, to my mind.
It all depends on what “bargain basement” means doesn’t it.
Bargain basement can mean “cheap knockoff”, or “remaindered”, or “bad imitation of”.
A bargain basement Levi’s, a bargain basement fall fashion (in late fall), a bargain basement Brooks Brothers suit.
If it were anyone but Fineman, I’d go with “a bad imitation of”. As in has the label but not the goods.
Since it’s Fineman, I don’t have a clue what he means.
so far as Fineman’s observation goes about the GOP “channeling their inner Ron Paul”, he’s nuts. The GOP as it currently stands rejects Ron Paul on many levels.
But you quote some of jefferson’s deist/atheist/enlightenment beliefs and ask “Does that not seem like something Ron Paul might write or that his supporters might understand?”
I say yes and no. Ron Paul has a LOT of supporters, everyone from teabaggers to Glenn Greenwald, who has written positively about Ron Paul several times.
So while some of the teabaggers might not write or understand anything like that, many others undoubtedly would. Furthermore, those of us that are not teabaggers that support Paul’s ideas (like legal marijuana, ending the surveillance state, opposing stupid wars and the like) embrace jefferson’s statements on religion and science. In fact, most of the people I know who have supported Ron Paul in the past are atheists and empiricists.
I realize it’s easy to take cheap shots at that crazy ron paul guy and his supporters, but it’s also boring. you might as well write that Michael Moore is fat and Howard Dean yells “yeeaaaaagh!”
Is Paul that in bed with the teabaggers? I wasn’t aware that he supported the “birthers” or the “death panel” crap, etc. As I interpret the teabaggers, they “want their country back” because a black guy they think is a Muslim became president, not because of any coherent philosophical principles. It seems kind of unfair to put them and Paul in the same boat. Or maybe I just haven’t been paying enough attention.
I know quite a few of his libertarian supporters are tea baggers, but i don’t think that makes Ron Paul one of them, anymore than John Conyers is a member of Code Pink.
I agree with Booman that Howard Fineman is an idiot, but I refuse to conflate Ron Paul with the teabaggers.
He was a huge character, like many of the founders. There was nothing there, so anyone could become many things. Jefferson certainly used the lacunae of institutional structure to his advantage. He was an ambassadore, governor, president, architect, wine-promoter, Francophile, author, lawyer, slave-owner, slave-lover, and other things too.
He was big, in a time of other big men.
As such, almost anyone can find a piece of Jefferson which appeals to him, and which can be trimmed to fit a person today. Ron Paul, who would have been a tory in 1776, is a poor fit, but you can still try.
my favorite jeffersons:
I imagine Fineman refers to the revolutionary Jefferson, who deeply distrusted the power of entrenched and institutionalized government. Hence the “tree of liberty” stuff that everybody knows.
Paul and Nader make strange bedfellows as challengers of the basic philosophical and structural assumptions that shape the way we think about political possibilities. For the most part they come to opposite conclusions, but win small, passionate followers because they stand up for broad ideas rather than tweaks to a system that is not subject to basic criticism. Where do those who agonize over the apparent failure of our political and economic viability turn for fundamental rethinking of entrenched notions of how things can and should work? For revolutionary thought, in other words?
Not to the mainstream of the Dem or Rep parties. Among those who have some connection with the political power structure, we’re pretty much left with Paul and Nader. Some of what Paul says appeals to me — ending the drugwar, rejecting American exceptionalism, fighting for the right to privacy and freedom from spying. I can’t be a fan of his, nor would I vote for him because he’s too inconsistent — how does a liberatarian advocate letting government take away a woman’s choice about her own body, for example? And then of course there’s the mindless repetition of Ayn Rand’s econonomic “thought”. It strikes me that Paul’s failings arise from a distinct lack of intellectual horsepower. I’ve been embarrassed for him watching interviews as he struggled to present coherent arguments. Still, for those of us who believe radical change is coming, he, like Jefferson in his time, is one of very few with anything potentially useful to say. Which says a lot of sad things about the so-called American Left.
Ron Paul believes the Civil Rights Act is unconstitutional and that it should be abolished. Abolishing that act would cause great harm to my community. I believe that it would cause great harm to women in general. He’s also against a woman’s right to choose and believes abortion should be outlawed. Is it worth getting rid of the
Fed just to lose more basic civil rights? Or do the rights of black folks not apply? The rights of women? Wasn’t it just a few days ago that everyone here was crying about the Stupak amendment and what it what it would do to poor women in this country? The very amendment they will be voting on shortly? But it’s okay for Ron Paul to spout garbage because he’s against the Fed and he’s against war. We can live with an intrusion in our personal lives and we can live without basic civil rights because we like Ron Paul. For those of you who excuse Ron Paul’s racism, it probably says more about you than it does about Ron Paul.
You’ve described the devil’s bargain that Paul offers quite well.