The people who swoon over Ron or Rand Paul because they agree with them on one subject or another really ought to come to terms with the true nature of the Paul family. They have always been neo-confederates or Lost Causers, and that is never going to change.
A close aide to Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) who co-wrote the senator’s 2011 book spent years working as a pro-secessionist radio pundit and neo-Confederate activist, raising questions about whether Paul will be able to transcend the same fringe-figure associations that dogged his father’s political career.
Paul hired Jack Hunter, 39, to help write his book The Tea Party Goes to Washington during his 2010 Senate run. Hunter joined Paul’s office as his social media director in August 2012.
From 1999 to 2012, Hunter was a South Carolina radio shock jock known as the “Southern Avenger.” He has weighed in on issues such as racial pride and Hispanic immigration, and stated his support for the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
During public appearances, Hunter often wore a mask on which was printed a Confederate flag.
Prior to his radio career, while in his 20s, Hunter was a chairman in the League of the South, which “advocates the secession and subsequent independence of the Southern States from this forced union and the formation of a Southern republic.”
“The League of the South is an implicitly racist group in that the idealized version of the South that they promote is one which, to use their ideology, is dominated by ‘Anglo-Celtic’ culture, which is their code word for ‘white’,” said Mark Pitcavage, the director of investigative research at the ADL. The ADL said it does not necessarily classify it as a hate group.
This isn’t some kind of aberration. The Paul movement has always been intertwined with white supremacists and it always will be. That is who they are.
Of course he is. The Republicans in Missouri, Kentucky and West Virginia consider those states part of the old Confederacy.
Missourian Rush Limbaugh is a neo-Confederate. Texas-Kentuckian Rand Paul. …Only the national West Viriginia Republicans haven’t gotten with the program.
The amendment that Southern libertarians love the most is the all-holy Tenth, after the Second of course.
Another point. Although a bunch of the politicians are neo-Confederates, they are instructed to keep it under their robes. Most auslander Republicans who move to the South don’t see any distinction between them and say Pete King, Fred Upton, or Charles Grassley.
Of course the Scots-Irish mountain men of western VA were solidly pro-union during the War of Northern Aggression, probably moreso than border states KY and MO, which both engaged in all manner of shenanigans to get into the Confederacy. Hence Lincoln’s dogged insistence to get union troops into Western VA ASAP. WVa was the only state created during the Civil War, I think. Perhaps that history colors the WVa Repubs views?
As for its current unionist sentiments, I’d guess it’s up for grabs? Maybe Paul’s Confederate book partner has some ideas….
It is interesting that the areas that were most Unionist (generally Unionist Democrats) within the Confederacy in 1860 are exactly those that are most neo-Confederate today: northern MS and AL, eastern TN, western NC, north GA, upcountry SC.
All Republicans are philosophically neo-Confederate: what they call “Federalism” equals anti-Federalism equals nullificationism equals Jefferson Davis. It’s just that some (not very good readers?) really believe the US constitution is on their side and some (innocent?) really don’t want to be racists. Whereas your Missouri-Kentucky-West Virginia Republicans don’t even care.
When I first found The Southern Avenger in YouTube many years ago I thought it was a parody account. Mostly because of his voice and tone, but also because of his whacked out disgusting views.
Although the dropping of the nuclear bombs may or may not be terrorism (who cares), their dropping was definitely a war crime.
I hadn’t heard of him before, but yeah. You can’t take a guy too seriously when he’s bitching about Mexicans while wearing a lucha libre mask.
“dominated by ‘anglo-celtic’ culture”, yeah, that might be a code word for white supremacy, haha. But don’t you think the great majority of those who “swoon over” the Paul clan have not only come to terms with what that clan is, but strongly support such ideology?
The nation has been a fairly bad marriage from the very start, with many deep regrets over the union. Regional tensions have spawned several secessionist movements, the noble white Southern version just the most virulent and persistent. And as we move deeper into today’s “Conservative” Era, the more extreme strains of the “conservative” virus become more prevalent, having disposed of the the more moderate RINO versions. Comically, of course, the supremacist extremist Paul clan are somehow seen as some sort of “moderate” influence giving one an idea of just how crazed late “conservatism has become.
Thank goodness that the main goal of American culture is economic development, mindless commerce and plutocrat creation, since that’s about all the various regions could ever agree on. Once private enterprise exploited the great North American wilderness, helpfully subsidized by the federal gub’mint, there wasn’t much left to accomplish as a nation. As a political culture, some gains were made after the plutocrats nearly wrecked the system in 1929, but with the advent of the New Conservative Era in 1980, nothing of note has been accomplished by the American government, while the New Deal/Great Society gains are now all under attack and repeal. Hell, now our very solvency is up for discussion, thanks to “conservatism”.
Would it make sense to discuss secession with the Dead Enders of the South as Paul’s “anglo-celtic” book partner advocates, assuming that secession actually represents the sentiments of a Southern majority as it did in 1861? Certainly the union can be dissolved by constitutional amendment, it simply can’t be dissolved unilaterally by a secessionist movement of a limited number of states.
One big problem (among many) with consensual secession is that it would obviously create a politically insane regional monster, run by plutocrats (and American Talibaners), which would intentionally burn the maximum amount of fossil fuels that it could, both to power its filthy industries, and to say “Fuck You!!” to its new more lib’rul (and scientifically literate) neighbor. So (for now) the South must be kept in political check, shackled to the union, solely to protect the environment. But at some future date, that concern may be alleviated or mooted by climatic calamity. In a horrible marriage, getting worse every year, divorce shouldn’t be completely off the table….
My biggest fear is God forbid the Neoconfederate States of America should have nuclear weapons.
But you’re right, we are kind of stuck with them. They’d have a long border with Mexico, too, and it’s frightening to think what kind of solutions they’d come up with there.
Really we should have finished off the slave power when we had a chance. Letting them go would have been no better in 1861 than it is now, because the slave power was an aggressively expansionist power. Always looking for more land for their plantations, so we would have had to fight them sooner or later anyway.
Yes, vis-a-vis nuclear power, any future NeoConfederate States of America would have to be in the same boat as Iran….how quickly would they ask Russia to intervene for them? (satire)
It would be nice if the neo-confederates were at least honest about the Southern heritage they’re so proud of. John C. Calhoun taught that slavery was a positive good, so why do they want to sweep it under the carpet and pretend the Civil War was about states’ rights?
I was always clear that he was a racist grifter just like his Daddy. No shock in the least to me.
One correction: Anglo-Celtic is not equivalent to “white”. Southern Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Jews, and Arabs are not fully “white” in their eyes. You must be descended from ancestors in the British Isles to be Anglo-Celtic. With a Spanish/Italian surname, I am a “foreigner”.
In the winter, my kids would pass as Anglo-Celtic. By August, their small amount of Portuguese ancestry makes them tan enough to pass for Hispanic. Suffice to say, we will never live in the South.
If that were the totality of the appeal of the Pauls, daddy would have fared well in southern states in last year’s GOP primaries. He didn’t.
It’s really wider and deeper than that, and dismissing Rand Paul as a neo-confederate is too cheap and likely too ineffective to squelch his aspirations which should be very troubling to anyone with a social conscience.
His sole appeal, as near as I can tell, outside of right-wing circles has been his stance as an “anti-war” politician, much like his dad. For single-issue activists and voters, that seems sufficient for supporting the Pauls. Unfortunately, the rest of what the Pauls have offered is yet another flavor of neoliberal economics (to the extent that they seem to be true believers in the work of Hayek, von Mises, Rand, etc.) coupled with rather retrograde views on race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc. The social consequences of a Paulian government would be enormously damaging – the sheer organizational and structural violence embedded in their views and policies are, in my opinion, every bit as devastating – if not more so – than the violence caused in contemporary warfare. I honestly do not see a way to reconcile any sort of leftist or left-leaning viewpoint with support for the Pauls. To slightly rework an old John Lennon/Paul McCartney lyric from “Revolution”: “If you go carrying pictures of Rand Paul, you’re not gonna make it with anyone here at all.” By “here” I mean not only the Frogpond, but any virtual space that identifies as leftist or progressive.
How many CPAC straw polls did Ron Paul win?
Agree with what you’ve said, but you may be discounting the hold Hayek and von Mises have on a certain, mostly white and mostly male, segment of the population. I’ve only known well one such man — and he is not a racist or sexist. The isolationist ethos also remains alive in the US population, but that tends to closer to racism than other strands that the Pauls exploit.
I’m still trying to sort this all out — primarily because I sense that it is more robust than liberals recognize and it’s also dangerous.
I think it’s dangerous because it’s a natural ideological appeal to people like me (young, male, white, hetero, middle class).
For a while I thought maybe it’s got more appeal with my generation than in years past? But from what I’ve read it seems that it’s a regular thing: young white guys latch onto it, then most of them grow out of it as they get older. But do you think it’s taking more hold this time around? I’ve gone back and forth. I still think the Dems need to stop pussyfooting around and endorse marijuana legalization, now. At the very latest, the 2016 primary. Once you attract people with one or two issues, they usually end up swallowing the whole enchilada.
You both raise good questions, and ones I suppose I am batting around as well – with no real satisfactory answers.
Back in the 1980s, when I was in college, I certainly knew as acquaintances a few white, middle-class, hetero males who were really into the emo-libertarianism espoused by Ayn Rand. Most of us looked upon them as oddballs, and basically tried to steer clear.
But things were a little different then. The US has always been something of an outlier as far as individualism goes, but we seem to have only become more so in the intervening decades (and I’m talking less in terms of self-expression and more in terms of “every man for himself” – Michael Parenti’s book “The Culture Struggle” captures this evolution in our culture quite aptly). Back then we still had a struggling but functioning left that acted as a counter-weight. Then the 1990s came along.
White males were probably more secure in their status back then as well. At this point, we seem to be hitting a tipping point in terms of white minority politics (to use a phrase from moderate conservative writer John Avlon). The Pauls might be able to tap into that angst a bit more easily now than might have once been the case.
We also did not have a thriving right-wing media that could transmit ideas that once were consigned to isolated compounds to otherwise sober mainstream pundits and politicians.
Those are some of the strands in my head right now. Still not really sure where to go with this, other than to acknowledge that I agree that there is something potentially dangerously toxic in our political atmosphere that needs keeping an eye on.
Ronald Reagan was POTUS in the 1980s and the functioning left was decimated in those years. (Did anyone ever ask Obama who he voted for in 1980 and 1984?)
Suspect that only those that have bothered to read Ayn Rand appreciate what an irrational and narcissistic nutball she was. (Perhaps the only good sense her acolytes have ever exhibited was not to wade through the turgid prose in her books.)
I was in college during the age of Raygun – yeah, leftist activism was far easier during the early years of that sorry decade than later on. Living through it, there was the feeling of going through a rough period, but not necessarily that a movement essentially dying. By the time the USSR started visibly crumbling, reality finally sank in – the jig was up for the remnants of the Old Left and the by then old New Left. Something new would have to take its place, but it was not clear what that would look like, or if I would see it in my lifetme (after all, “the end of history” was at hand). At least it’s the way I remember it back in my little corner of the US.
I made the mistake of reading through some of Rand’s prose (as well as some of the paranoid rantings of Leonard Peikoff)- I’ll never get that wasted time back. A lot of otherwise very bright people – in many cases far brighter than me – got snookered by the Randian mentality.
So it goes.
Does sort of beg the question why Ayn Rand gained a college age audience in the 1980s when for two or three decades she and her writing were a joke amongst that age group.
what if he did, does it matter?
On February 18, 1981, Obama made his first public speech, calling for Occidental’s divestment from South Africa.
Six months after the 1984 elections, he moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer among laid-off union members.
So, obviously, we’re talking about a two-time Reagan voter.
but the question still remains, what if he did, would it matter?
When I was young, there wasn’t such a huckster around to so successfully exploit those demographically similar to you. Also suspect that social conscience and consciousness was higher back then as we were in that period of enjoying the fruits of the New Deal socialism and regulations. The Democratic Party lost young men in two ways. The obvious one was the Vietnam War. The more long lasting one was the failure to articulate the positives of economic inclusion for women and minorities for white men. Nixon exploited the former by ridding us of the draft. Reagan exploited the second giving rise to the rhetoric of white male resentment. (Personally it didn’t seem to matter to my white male, peer co-workers that I worked harder and longer hours, and was technically far superior to them for them to resent my promotions and new assignments. No similar resentment from the older men who not only quickly adjusted to a woman in their ranks but found it interesting and amusing.)
Emotion driven, internally inconsistent political movements are always dangerous. More so when the troops are a collection of disparate single issue folks that have no other home and are dimly or superficially conscious. When the emotion veers into fanaticism (seen among Obama supporters but not nearly as intense as I’ve seen among Paul supporters) and the historical roots or underpinings of the standard bearer are not understood or worse, denied, supporters can’t see the well-worn and disastrous path they’re on.
The premier US “libertarians” are the Kochs and Pete Peterson. The John Birchers of my youth that men my age were smart enough not to rally around (or maybe just too stoned and the Birchers weren’t preaching drug legalization back then). In Rand Paul I see a twit and punk — but “believers” see macho man.
There’s more — but as I said, I’m still trying to work my way through this and any contribution you want to make would be appreciated.
It has been weird, and not a small amount of depressing, to watch as the full John Birch program became supported by tens of millions of Americans. The First Black President has been a super-accelerant on a fire which was already burning in these people.
Propaganda- it’s a helluva drug.