Pallin’ Around With Neo-Confederates
Earlier this week, there was a report from the Washington Free Beacon on the neo-confederate and neo-secessionist views of one of Senator Rand Paul’s aides. Jack Hunter is the guy and he helped Paul write his book, The Tea Party Goes to Washington:
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.
Surprise, surprise:
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.”
And yes, the League of the South is a real thing. The SPLC describes them:
The League of the South is a neo-Confederate group that advocates for a second Southern secession and a society dominated by “European Americans.” The league believes the “godly” nation it wants to form should be run by an “Anglo-Celtic” (read: white) elite that would establish a Christian theocratic state and politically dominate blacks and other minorities. Originally founded by a group that included many Southern university professors, the group lost its Ph.D.s as it became more explicitly racist. The league denounces the federal government and northern and coastal states as part of “the Empire,” a materialist and anti-religious society.
After Hunter’s involvement with these people, he became a shock jock — weighing in on Lincoln’s assassination (JWB was right!), racial pride (whites are victimized when they show any!), and immigration by Hispanics:
“That Americans, white or otherwise, don’t want Spanish-speaking people dominating their airwaves, neighborhoods, or country is no more racist than Mexico’s lack of interest in Seinfeld,” he wrote. “Native Americans had no illusions about how their land would change as boatloads of white men landed on their shores and modern Americans aren’t wrong to deplore the millions of Mexicans coming here now. A non-white majority America would simply cease to be America for reasons that are as numerous as they are obvious – whether we are supposed to mention them or not.”
Hunter also says that his shock jock history is what brought him to the attention of the Pauls and how he got his employment. And the GOP wonders why it can’t expand it’s appeal to non-whites. In this, though, Rand Paul is pretty much doing what his father did. Ron Paul wrote years of newsletters with very bigoted and otherwise dodgy content. Once this article was published, Ron Paul spent a good amount of time disowning those newsletters (with multiple stories), but never renouncing or distancing himself from the Stormfronters and others who were clearly a part of his Libertarian coalition. Think Progress looks at this in some detail:
That’s not say to say that the Pauls are racists themselves, but rather that they’re beholden to a constituency who is. Libertarianism is, right now, a very small movement very much on the political margins. The neo-Confederates continue to make up a significant portion of the libertarian movement (if not its intellectual ranks), partly due to a self-described “Outreach To The Rednecks” campaign orchestrated by leading libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard.
This creates what one libertarian writer, Reason Magazine’s Mike Riggs, calls a “paradox:” “Libertarianism is too small to afford infighting,” Riggs suggests, but “also too small to afford people like Hunter becoming representative.” The smart, well-meaning libertarians — the ones who could help the GOP and quite possibly the country — can’t kick out the neo-Confederates, which means that elected libertarian officials will always have some ties to some truly terrible folks. Libertarian power is capped by its own power base.
Indeed.If you are the natural home of some of the worst of America’s fringe elements, your destiny is to be the fringe element. Rand Paul is getting alot of press for making libertarianism the face of the GOP, except his libertarianism is pretty much the usual GOP bill of particulars. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the media will treat this re-naming as a spanking new thing and make sure that one more Paul is pretty much unaccountable for his retrograde associates.
In the meantime, some blowback is brewing. The Washington Free Beacon reports on a number of pro-Israel groups who are calling our Hunter and Rand and the Republican Jewish Committee is also calling on Rand to distance himself from Hunter.
Rand Paul is getting alot of press for making libertarianism the face of the GOP, except his libertarianism is pretty much the usual GOP bill of particulars.
That’s accurate with the exception of foreign policy and domestic surveillance.
This–The neo-Confederates continue to make up a significant portion of the libertarian movement (if not its intellectual ranks)–is not, although I will spot you that one could not tell by reading Lew Rockwell.
A large part of the difficulty here is that most folks who stand up and shout about neo-Confederates don’t actually realize what a tiny (if vocal) minority they are, and in general have no better grasp of American history between 1820-1880 than the people they are criticizing.
They may be a tiny minority (and I think that the Think Progress piece gets to that), but the point is that the neo-confederates, the neo-secessionists, the Stormfronters, etc., have a political home in the Libertarian Party. A home in a party that Rand Paul is laying some ideological claim to and certainly Ron Paul did. If you include these folks in your tent, you get to own these folks in your tent. I imagine that this bit of Politics 101 isn’t lost on either Paul. Shame that the non-secessionist, non-confederate, non-Stormfronter, etc part of the Libertarian Party understood the toxicity here. Because who wants to be a part of a group of people who thinks that is it is AOK for these types to be a crucial part of their coalition?
cassandra where you miss the point, I think, is here: (1) The Libertarian Party cannot control who categorizes themselves publicly or not as a Libertarian, nor does the party have control over who can register to vote as a Libertarian (if memory serves, David Duke was a registered Democrat albeit later disowned by Democrats). (2) you really do not want to play the purity game simply because the lunatic fringes of both the Republicans and Democrats are significantly larger than our entire party. You don’t spend your days disowning them because you would get nothing else accomplished.
The only reason that now you are taking libertarians seriously enough to berate them for Stormfront (and where the hell did you get the idea that my party supports, approves of, or tolerates that particular group) is because some libertarian ideas are beginning to penetrate political discourse on a larger scale. Unhappy with that, because you prefer safe GOP punching bags, you resort to shaming behaviors. Go for it.
“…libertarian ideas are beginning to penetrate political discourse on a larger scale.”
That’s a hilariously charitable way of saying that Rebulicans are looking for some new words to describe their damaged brand.
^ dirt, doo-doo, dung, excrement, excreta, feces, ordure, poop, scat, slops, soil, waste
,night soil, stool; dunghill, guano, manure, midden, muck; spoor; sewage, sewerage; coprolite
Oh! If they are looking some new words, I thought I’d help them out.
The Libertarian Party cannot control who categorizes themselves publicly or not as a Libertarian,
No, I definitely get that. But I also get that the Libertarian Party could make it very clear that there is nothing about the Stormfronters, neo-confederates, etc that they endorse or tolerate. It is called “distancing”. But you don’t. You just shrug and so people do think that this retrograde stuff is utterly OK with you. Which is fine, really, Ron Paul tried to have it both ways too — and only the true believers bought that load of crap. Put another way — remember when DD made his comment about republicans being round up and shot? You were over here screaming for the rest of us to denounce him or we would be seen as endorsing that bit of business. Remember that? Well, you can think of the same rules applying to the Libertarian Party here. Your problem is that this retrograde stuff is a genuine barrier to entry for a decent part of the audience you might be able to reach.
“…libertarian ideas are beginning to penetrate political discourse on a larger scale.”
LOL! Don’t mistake decent marketing on the part of the GOP as any real success on your party’s part. Because you are still stuck with Rand Paul as the face of your party, and still stuck with electoral support in the not worth worrying about range.
With the Libertarian Party being so small the problem is that it doesn’t really have a face other than the Pauls. And there’s the problem. Ron and Rand and all their racist baggage and supporters are becoming synonymous with Libertarianism.
And while I don’t think for a minute that these two (and their baggage) represent Steve one little bit, they do represent Libertarianism to the majority of people. Yeah, Libertarians like Steve have an uphill battle in front of them – which isn’t fair, but it’s true. Opinions are being formed and set. Right now, if you asked people to name Libertarians the only names 99% of them could come up with would be the Pauls. And that’s a big problem.
Well we could start by being honest–all those libertarian ideas that have been scraped up by the GOP–like marriage equality, ending the war on drugs, ending the surveillance state, withdrawing from Afghanistan, cutting the defense budget … yep they’ve become the face of the Republican Party all right. Curiously enough, however, Paul Ryan got the idea of draconian Medicare cuts of hundreds of millions of dollars from … Barack Obama.
That said, I don’t deny the reality that to many people the Pauls represent libertarians. In a sense that’s understandable: when you wait so long for somebody with access to media to champion your ideas there is a great temptation to latch on to anybody who even talks about some of your ideas (no drones) while totally embarrassing you with others (comparing gay marriage to zoophilia).
But to be perfectly honest I don’t really care about the national scene from that perspective because Delaware is an interesting test case. The GOP here is disintegrating even faster than it is on the national scale–(see Mitch Crane’s comment on Sussex County in the thread on vulnerable incumbents)–there is a possibility in this state for a different option to emerge.
It won’t be Green and it won’t be IPOD with its bizarre mix of black nationalism and far-far right ultra-conservatism, but it is going to have to be a ballot-qualified party.
I realize that it is a long shot (and I await jason’s witty one-line dismissal) but if the LPD can find and fund 1 or 2 qualified candidates in selected House races next year you could see something interesting. Then again, maybe not.
But I do know this: Democrats cannot afford for the GOP to completely disintegrate in Delaware without there being some sort of opposition party in existence.
Well we could start by being honest
Indeed we could. Because no one here is claiming that the GOP is actually taking up libertarian ideas. Just a branding, which is co-opting any space that these ideas might occupy. What we are noting is that while the GOP is co-opting the brand, they are also highlighting the giving a political home to the kind of folks that the majority of the rest of us don’t want to be associated with. And in the case of the Pauls, they give employment to these folks.
Democrats here in Delaware do need a functioning opposition party (emphasis on the functioning), but that doesn’t have much to do with Rand Paul embracing neo-confederates.