Ron Paul – hope for Americans in 2012?
Posted by admin978 on February 7, 2012 · Leave a Comment
Ron Paul (left) with Don Black (centre), founder of the Stormfront nationalist internet forum, and his son Derek Black, Republican Party activist and radio host.
The 2012 presidential election might yet break the mould of American politics, with Texas congressman Ron Paul winning substantial support for policies that are the direct opposite of everything that has dominated the Republican Party since the 1950s.
So-called ‘paleo-conservatives’ have been unsure how far Ron Paul shares their views, since he has shown little interest in the social conservative agenda (such as opposition to ‘gay rights’ and abortion) that was the main plank of previous challenges from the Republican right. Paul is also opposed to the protectionist economic nationalism espoused by Pat Buchanan, the strongest previous conservative opponent of the Washington insider consensus, though he backed Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign. He has a radical libertarian commitment to the ideals of the U.S. Constitution, and supports the laissez-faire and sound money theories of the Austrian economic and political theorists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.
While libertarianism might seem the opposite of racial nationalism, there can be little doubt that Paul’s determination to cut the federal government’s bloated spending programmes would in practice advance the interests of White Americans, who now have to subsidise a bloated politically correct bureaucracy supporting welfare-dependant ‘African-Americans’.
Ron Paul (right) as a young congressman was strongly endorsed by Ronald Reagan, even though Reagan's policies in office diverged from the fiscal conservatism he had espoused in the 1970s.
Paul has also attacked the source of America’s financial troubles, with calls to audit the Federal Reserve. As he writes on his campaign website:
The Federal Reserve is the chief culprit behind the economic crisis. Its unchecked power to create endless amounts of money out of thin air brought us the boom and bust cycle and causes one financial bubble after another. Since the Fed’s creation in 1913 the dollar has lost more than 96% of its value, and by recklessly inflating the money supply the Fed continues to distort interest rates and intentionally erodes the value of the dollar.
During the current financial crisis, terrified by the prospect of Paul harnessing public anger at the bankocracy, Washington’s political establishment has not taken him on directly, but instead has sought to sideline his proposals through detailed amendments in congressional committee sessions.
Even more radical than his financial arguments – and quite impossible to reconcile with the Ziocon agenda that dominates Capitol Hill – is Ron Paul’s foreign policy agenda.
Instead of securing our borders, we’ve been planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression. … America first. That is what Ron Paul‘s national defense proposal is all about. And with America he means all Americans, not just the elite. If elected President, Ron Paul will continue his efforts to secure our borders, safely bring our troops back home, and finally overhaul the intelligence apparatus in cooperation with intelligence professionals rather than political opportunists.
As Scott McConnell points out in the February 2012 issue of The American Conservative, this non-interventionist position represents the views of:
…a group of millions that can claim no prominent leaders in Congress, no regular newspaper columnists to shape and focus its thinking, no significant representation on the cable news shows to validate and amplify its ideas. What might happen if this group found a political voice? More than any other factor, this question accounts for the vehemence of the attacks on Ron Paul.
Sure enough a mysterious group of internet hackers has targetted the website and emails of the American Third Position, a small party run by Prof. Kevin MacDonald and Dr Tomislav Sunic, to discover “evidence” of connections between Ron Paul and the racial nationalist movement. The chair of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has denounced him in strong language:
Ron Paul has a terrible record when it comes to Israel, and when it comes to the issues that matter to the Jewish community and when it comes to his apparent views about Jews in general.
So far Paul has not won a primary or caucus, but polled 21.5% in Iowa, 23% in New Hampshire, 13% in South Carolina (where his opposition to military spending and lack of interest in social conservatism was expected to be a big handicap), 19% in Nevada, and 27% in Minnesota.
The social conservative agenda is represented this year by former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, whose Christian Zionism often takes a rabidly apocalyptic tone, at the opposite pole from the Ron Paul / Pat Buchanan foreign policy.
Pat Buchanan twice entered the Republican nomination race during the 1990s, before finally quitting the party for his doomed Reform Party candidature in 2000. The 1992 campaign was a quixotic effort to unseat President George H.W. Bush. Buchanan focused mostly on economic issues and won 37% in the opening New Hampshire primary, eventually gaining 23% of the primary votes as the only serious challenger to Bush. Eventually backing the Bush campaign, Buchanan used his strong primary performance to influence the 1992 Republican convention, where his speech stressed the social conservative agenda:
There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.
In 1996 Buchanan fought his strongest campaign in a far more open field of Republican candidates seeking to take on Bill Clinton. Again his main focus was on the decline of American manufacturing industry, calling for protectionist measures and opposing the North American Free Trade Agreement – NAFTA – signed in 1994. After winning early caucuses in Alaska and Louisiana, and very narrowly winning the New Hampshire primary, Buchanan was overtaken by the better financed campaign of Senate majority leader Bob Dole, but he still ended with 21% of the overall primary votes.
2000 Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan (centre) with Mark Cotterill (left), then a member of his campaign staff and now EFP Chairman, and Edward Cassidy (right), then an activist with the American Friends of the BNP
Buchanan was now seen as the leading standard bearer of the conservative movement, and many racial nationalist activists (including H&D editor Mark Cotterill) rallied to his campaign in 2000 when he quit the Republican Party and won the Reform Party nomination. This third party was founded to support a presidential bid in 1996 by the maverick billionaire Ross Perot, who won support from a broad coalition of voters disenchanted by Washington insider politics, but had never in any meaningful sense been sympathetic to racial nationalism.
Significantly by 2000 Buchanan was stressing his opposition to ‘neo-conservative’ foreign policy, or what I have termed the Ziocons. This was more than a year before the events of 9/11 put the Ziocons in full control, but Buchanan and Ron Paul (who rejected early offers to defect to the Reform Party) were already highlighting the danger. Buchanan explained his resignation from the Republicans in these terms:
The Republican Party at the national level has ceased to be my party. This divorce began around the end of the Cold War when President (George) Bush declared it to be a New World Order party and began intervening all over the world. While he and I were allies and friends during the Cold War, I just felt that once the Cold War was over the United States should return to a more traditional non-intervention foreign policy.
Sadly Buchanan took the advice of his sister Bay and purged his campaign of anyone linked to racial nationalism – especially of anyone who had previously backed David Duke – failing to heed the warning of his old friend Sam Francis that this would eviscerate his campaign. He then compounded his error by opting for a black vice-presidential running mate, former high school teacher Ezola Foster. The resulting electoral meltdown saw the Buchanan-Foster ticket poll just 0.4%. Their 449,225 votes nationwide was less than David Duke had polled in the state of Louisiana alone, but was remarkably similar to the 431,750 polled by Ron Paul as a Libertarian candidate for President in 1988.
The logic of Ron Paul’s policies would push him into breaking away from the Republicans and fighting a third party campaign later this year, but I suspect that (having seen the dismal failure of the 2000 Buchanan campaign) he will be tempted to remain within the party, seek to influence the Republican convention platform, and build a long term presidential campaign for his son, Senator Rand Paul, elected in Kentucky in 2010.
Perhaps the most important short-term impact of Ron Paul’s campaign this year — and of the continuing activism and campaigning journalism of Pat Buchanan — will be to make it a lot more difficult for the Ziocons to railroad America into military conflict with Iran. The campaigns of Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich (the latter bankrolled by Jewish casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson), as well as the now defunct campaigns of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, were at the most warmongering end of the Christian Zionist spectrum, and even frontrunner Mitt Romney has generally echoed these themes, in more moderate terms.
The entire world — not only American conservatism — has cause to be grateful for the voice of sanity coming from just one presidential candidate in 2012: Ron Paul.
David Duke (centre) speaking at the 1999 St George's Day rally of the American Friends of the BNP with Roy Armstrong (left) and Nick Griffin (right), elected later that year to the BNP leadership. Former Louisiana state representative Duke had previously campaigned for Governor of Louisiana and in 1992 for the Republican presidential nomination.
