What is it that unnerves me so much about the media’s duly-appointed Presumptive Republican Front-Runner, Senator John McCain? Is it the rampaging militarism? The austerely fascist aesthetic of his campaign materials? The newsmedia’s idiotic enthusiasm for any politician who can, in some sense or another, be packaged as a straight talker, without consideration for what the content of the straight talk might be? (So he says, with some conviction, that we ought to bomb the world. Great.)

Well, yes, yes, and yes, but there’s something that runs deeper, too. Just something about him, a certain I-know-not-what about the way he holds himself, and the way he talks, and the way he rallies his troops, that I can’t quite put words to. Where have I seen this before? Oh, wait…

Yeah, that’s it.

Here’s something I wrote a little more than a month ago about principled libertarians who have thrown in for the Ron Paul campaign:

As for rising libertarian consciousness, or openness to libertarian ideas, I'd like to believe that it's true, but I'm not especially convinced. If it is true, though, I would suggest that absolutely the most urgent thing to do is to start those conversations and unhitch them as quickly and as thoroughly as possible from the Ron Paul train, because we have a very short window of time — somewhere in the vicinity of 1-3 months, depending on the breaks — before Ron Paul's prospects in the primaries are completely decided. If nothing significant happens in that direction between now and then, then I think that a lot of money and a lot of organizational energy will disappear right into the same dark, lonely station where the Clark train, the Buchanan train, the Perot train, the Nader train, and the Dean train are sitting idle after all these election cycles. That'd be a shame, because, as much as I dislike some of what they're producing, they are certainly showing a lot of genuine organizational intelligence.

I’d say that recent news — Ron Paul’s next-to-last performances in early primaries, and the rippling effects of the recent brouhaha over the newsletters published under his imprimatur — is as good a reason as you could hope for for believing that time is up. Either the Paulistas unhitch themselves now or they will be carried far away from their intended destination.

Yes, yes, the New Republic article is a sloppy hatchet piece, which mixes genuinely fucked-up shit (such as the vile racism and authoritarianism of the law-n-order pieces that appeared in the early 1990s) together with bogus smears (such as the attempt to use longstanding criticism of U.S. military support for the Israeli government as evidence for a charge of anti-Semitism). And yes, yes, Ron Paul’s relationship to the newsletters was weird and there is some complicated and ongoing movement history that makes the full story much less straightforward than Kirchick’s narrative would imply. But that genuinely fucked-up shit is genuinely fucked-up shit. If you’re interested in an overview of the authorship question and of some of the salient movement history, you can see the article and comments at Kn@ppster (2007-01-08), and also Wirkman Netizen (2007-01-09). As I see it the full story, once told tends to make Ron Paul a little less guilty than Kirchick claims, but much more guilty than his kneejerk defenders claim.

That’s a conversation well worth having, and perhaps I’ll join in in the future. But for the time being, the point that I’d like to stress is this: whatever the full, nuanced, correct understanding of the matter may be, there is no realistic chance whatsoever that the necessary nuance will fit into either person-to-person electoral outreach or political media commentary within the amount of time that remains. News media and politicking in the critical months of primary season just don’t provide a medium for that kind of nuanced discussion to happen. It just doesn’t have the bandwidth to get through anything much more complex than Google Ron Paul, Ron Paul’s a crazy racist, Is not, Is so, Your moms! etc.

So Ron Paul’s chances in the Republican primaries, if he ever had any to begin with, are on death’s doorstep, and all that remains on this point are a number of damning associations with his name that radical libertarians will not be able to dispel or to dissociate within the electoral forum. Those radical libertarians who have tried to use Ron Paul’s personality and campaign, warts and all, as an indirect means for educating people about and persuading them of anti-war and radical libertarian views had best give it up. Those radical libertarians who have tried to use mix with Ron Paul’s other supporters as a source for new recruits had best give up on trying to work together with the Paulistas within the context of Ron Paul’s campaign, and start working on poaching them from the campaign into other projects. Any further effort at bolstering the campaign is, as far as I can see, going to be wasted effort. The campaign is just about dead in the water, and ongoing libertarian efforts to talk it up are, as far as I can tell, very unlikely to educate anyone about the real nature of libertarianism. What they are far more likely to do is undermine any efforts to educate people about what genuine radical libertarianism entails. If these efforts are not simply ignored, then what they will accomplish is not mainly to push more anti-libertarians and not-yet-libertarians towards libertarianism, but rather to push them towards associating radical libertarianism with the reactionary bigotry of the hard Right. What would be far more productive is a concerted effort to break that association, by publicly dissociating from and criticizing the Ron Paul campaign, on the grounds of clear, public, and unapologetic statements of radical libertarian principles.

Now, I believe firmly in honesty, and in open radicalism, and I think that if an extreme position is correct, then public indignation at it, or smears of it, are ever a good reason to abandon, or moderate, or dissemble about your position. You just keep at it, against wind and tide, until your intransigence and the rightness of your position have succeeded in shifting the debate. But when we move away from the moral question of fidelity to principle, and to the strategic question of supporting a particular candidate warts and all, the issue is no longer one of honesty but rather one of whether your chosen means are actually well-suited to your ends. If the hope is to convince non-libertarians through education and persuasion, then you’re not likely to promote that goal through boosterism for Ron Paul’s good name and electoral prospects, after his electoral campaign has become moribund and his name is no longer especially good. If Ron Paul boosterism ever was an effective way to get things done, it no longer is, and it’s time to find a better way.

About a month ago, I criticized an article by David Gordon that criticized left libertarians who criticized Ron Paul. David Gordon later criticized my criticism of the criticism of the criticism; I posted a rejoinder; and Gordon posted a reply to the rejoinder. Meanwhile, Keith Halderman and I had a go-around about my views on libertarian feminism. Just in case that’s not enough dialog for you yet, Roderick has two long and very thoughtful posts at Austro-Athenian Empire, To Paul or Not To Paul, Part 2 and To Paul or Not To Paul, Part 3, about the exchange between me and Gordon in particular, and about libertarian electioneering in general. Be sure to read through the comments sections as well, for rejoinders from David Gordon.

I don’t have much to add beyond what Roderick has already said. One quick clarification about the use of terms, though. In comments, Roderick says:

I’m willing to grant that Ron Paul counts as a libertarian. (I think Charles denies this on the grounds that Paul subordinates liberty to constitutionalism, but I’m happy to grant the label.)

I have argued before that the positions expressed by Ron Paul in his campaign are constitutionalist rather than libertarian. Whether I would call Ron Paul a libertarian or not depends on what is meant by the term. There’s a broad, cluster-concept sort of sense in which Ron Paul could be called a libertarian, and, on some issues, a fairly hard-core libertarian at that. That is, he would fall pretty far towards that corner of the Nolan Chart if you mapped out where he stands on various questions of policy. There’s another sense of libertarianism, which has to do with the ideological reasons that underlie those policy positions — that is to say, a radically individualist theory of justice and political legitimacy, which happens to be incompatible with constitutionalism or any theory that subordinates moral claims for liberty and justice to legalistic proceduralism. To the extent that Ron Paul has been willing to sacrifice libertarian policies for the sake of non-libertarian or anti-libertarian goals, such as a fundamentalist reading of the U.S. Constitution or the so-called rule of law, he must be operating on some theory of political justice other than libertarianism, and so is (in the ideological sense) a Constitutionalist, or a decentralist conservative, or whatever, and not a libertarian. So how happy I am to grant the label depends on how the label is being used in a particular case. There are some reasons, both of temperament and of deliberate rhetorical choice, why I tend to talk about libertarianism in the ideological sense more than I tend to talk about it in the Nolan Chart sense, but I’m certainly happy to grant that Ron Paul has at least as good a claim (often a better claim) to the term libertarian as most of the Libertarian Party, or many of the paradigm cases of libertarians in the mainstream public consciousness.

Hope this helps.

Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from Henry Mayer’s masterful biography, All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery. I was re-reading it recently because of an interesting debate over the Ron Paul campaign on LeftLibertarian2, in particular some interesting comments by Brad Spangler, who has been beating the anti-electioneering drum for some time, to the effect that he thought support for Ron Paul represented progress in people who would be otherwise be state liberals or state conservatives, but that the real shame was when radical libertarians, who ought to know better got sucked in to the same constitutional-statist song and dance.

Garrison agreed with [Abby Kelley and Stephen Foster] that the allure of the presidential campaign threatened the movement’s identity. Abolitionists should not bow down to the house of Rimmon, alluding to the parable (2 Kings 5:18) illustrating the dangers of false worship and conformity with outmoded rituals and reprehensible customs. The first duty of abolitionists, he concluded, was to avoid becoming Republicans. To the Fosters’ intense annoyance, however, he argued that the amount of conscience in the party and the sectional basis of its opposition to the slave power made it a political entity that the movement had to take seriously. Kelley conceded that the party may be the work of our hands, but she insisted that such progeny, like other children, required a great deal of reproof to bring it up in the way it should go. Garrison agreed, but sweetly added that, as in child-rearing, it was important to praise the party when it tried to do good work, as it had on the issue of nonextension.

That Garrison accorded the Republicans a measure of respect he had never conceded to the Liberty Party remnant should come as no surprise. He always had more interest in politicians who lifted themselves toward an acknowledgment of moral principles than he had in moralists who lowered themselves into partisan activities. For the Republicans to support and elect candidates willing to condemn slavery as wrong would be productive agitation, for it created something where nothing had previously existed. For Gerrit Smith to advance himself as a presidential candidate was ludicrous, in Garrison’s view, for he had no practical organization and demeaned himself in the futile process of making one. For Frederick Douglass to make persistent attacks on Garrisonian abolition as passé–as a phase of moral education through which the movement had inevitably traveled en route to more enlightened forms of practical agitation–was more than a continuation of their personal feud; it was the old Liberty Party idea that a token candidacy offered a greater opportunity for moral agitation than did the prophetic apostleship of Garrison. While the Republican nonextensionist approach had the virtue of exposing the constitutional compromises that prevented abolition, moreover, the Smithites continued to dwell, Garrison believed, in the realm of constitutional fantasy. They tried to claim the Framers as architects of an antislavery politics and advanced all sorts of schemes–a congressional repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law, a reconstruction of the federal judiciary through the appointment of antislavery judges, the fixing of a date certain for abolition in the states and federal control of states in default–that had no chance of peaceably breaking the national political deadlock and, far from saving the Union, would make a military confrontation inevitable. Theirs was an oblique disunionism that masked itself behind the facade of constitutional interpretation. For Garrison the special work of abolition lay not in adopting the model of politics, but in creating a redemptive vision. We see what our fathers did not see; we know that they did not know.

Powerful organizations never espouse great reforms, the editor told a December 1855 meeting called to celebrate the desegregation of Boston’s public schools after a decade-long struggle by abolitionists of both races. Social reform, he said, begins in the heart of a solitary individual and grows strong among humble men and humble women [who], unknown to the community, without means, without power, without station, but perceiving the thing to be done … and having faith in the triumph of what is just and true, engage in the work…. He always regarded the abolitionists as a saving remnant who would create the preconditions for reform. Theodore Parker compared such non-political reformers either to the windlass that raises the anchor while the politicians haul in the slack or to the spinners and weavers who make the material from which politicians cut their clothes, but Garrison found the humblest metaphor of all in the baking of bread. By and by, he said with the apostle Paul, the little leaven leavens the whole lump … [and] this is the way the world is to be redeemed (1 Cor. 5:6). The most popular metaphor for the progress of reform in the 1850s, however, drew from both mechanics and nature. The world moves, people said, having found a shorthand way of remarking social change that evoked at once the lever of Archimedes and the stubborn faith of Galileo that the earth itself revolved in obedience to higher laws.

–Henry Mayer (1998), All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, pp. 456-457.

A couple of weeks ago, I criticized an article by David Gordon that criticized left libertarians who criticized Ron Paul. (David Gordon later criticized my criticism of the criticism of the criticism; I posted a rejoinder; and Gordon posted a reply to the rejoinder.) Along the way in my first remarks, I mentioned (by way of an example) my views on libertarianism and anti-statist radical feminism:

I don't think that libertarianism should be subordinated to certain cultural values such as radical feminism. I believe that libertarianism, rightly understood, is both compatible with and mutually reinforcing with the cultural values of radical feminism, rightly understood. (For a more detailed explanation of the different kinds of links that there may be between libertarianism and radical feminism, see my reply to Jan Narveson on thick libertarianism.) The independent merit of radical feminism is one reason to support libertarianism as a political project (because opposing the patriarchal State is of value on feminist grounds), but that's never been the sole reason or the primary reason I have suggested for being a libertarian. The primary reason to be a libertarian is that the libertarian theory of individual rights is true. From the standpoint of justice, the benefits that a stateless society offers for radical feminism are gravy.

The views I was briefly referring to here are views that I already expressed in much greater detail in an essay on libertarian feminism that I co-authored with Roderick Long, which was linked from the same post. Over at Liberty & Power, Keith Halderman picked up on the shorter version of my remarks on radical feminism and lodged objections. You can see how it goes from there in the comment section; I complained that his post indulges in a ridiculous cheap shot, that it falsely attributes a view to radical feminists that as far as I know none of them actually held or hold, that it falls into some vulgar libertarian confusion between free market principles and defending the socioeconomic arrangements that actually exist in our unfree market, and that libertarians perhaps oughtn’t get so worked up about the dreadful menace that angry feminists pose to the safety of men’s penises.

Halderman then responded to my complaints with what I think amounts to more confusion, along the way questioning [my] commitment to limited government. As well he should, I suppose; but his suspicious glances are pointed in the wrong political direction, and based on a clear misreading of my comments. For replies, see my first and second follow-up comments.