Jason Zengerle: The Roots of Rand Paul’s Radicalism
[Jason Zengerle is a senior editor of The New Republic.]
In 1984, Ron Paul ran for the United States Senate. It was an audacious gamble. Paul, who represented Texas’s twenty-second congressional district, had to give up his safe House seat to compete in the state’s Republican Senate primary. What’s more, his chief opponent was Phil Gramm who, despite having recently switched from being a Democrat, had the support of Texas’s GOP establishment. And, while Paul’s unusual brand of far–right-wing politics—he was for returning to the gold standard and against a federal holiday for Martin Luther King Jr.—was a good fit for his congressional district near Houston, it was a tougher sell elsewhere, even in Texas. “It wasn’t often that Phil could portray himself as part of the mainstream,” recalls political consultant John Weaver, who worked on Gramm’s campaign, “but, thanks to Dr. Paul he was able to do that.” In the end, Paul’s gamble backfired. He lost the Senate primary, receiving only 17 percent of the vote, and went off into the political wilderness, not returning to the U.S. House for another 13 years.
But Paul’s disastrous Senate campaign did achieve one thing: It served as the political coming-out party for his son Rand. The third of Paul’s five children, Rand had been an avid student of his father’s political teachings. “As a young lad, he sat at his father’s knee and learned all he could,” says longtime Ron Paul campaign aide Jean McIver. By the time he got to Baylor University, Rand was a font of small-government dogma, conversant on the evils of the Federal Reserve and a floating currency. “Rand was pretty much a carboncopy of his dad,” recalls John Green, who belonged to a Baylor secret society called the NoZe Brotherhood with Rand. “He started drinking the Kool-Aid at an early age.” So, in 1984, when Ron Paul was called back to Washington for a House vote and had to miss a scheduled joint appearance with Gramm, he turned to his 21-year-old son to fill in for him. In front of 300 people, Rand Paul gave hisfirst political speech. “I listened to him pretty closely,” says Gramm, “and I remember the young man did quite well.”...
Ron and Rand Paul are often described as libertarians, but their politics represent a distinct—and peculiar—strand of libertarianism known as paleolibertarianism. While libertarians and paleolibertarians both start from the same limitedgovernment premise, paleolibertarians take that ideology in a decidedly populist, right-wing direction. Paleolibertarians’ enemyis not just big government, as the leading paleolib thinker Murray Rothbard explained in a 1992 essay (unearthed by Reason reporters Julian Sanchez and David Weigel in 2008), but rather, the “unholy alliance of ‘corporate liberal’ Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America.”
Paleolibertarianism’s intellectual hub is an Alabama-based think tank called the Ludwig von Mises Institute, which Rothbard helped found in 1982. (Rothbard had studied under its namesake, a famous Austrian libertarian economist.) Another one of the von Mises Institute’s founders, and its current chairman, is Lew Rockwell, who served as Ron Paul’s congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982 and remained one of his top advisers for years afterward. Rockwell, who has frequently brought the von Mises Institute into alliance with neo-Confederate groups such as the League of the South, has written in favor of racial separatism; and, in 2008, after The New Republic’s James Kirchick discovered numerous racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic passages in Ron Paul’s old newsletters, Reason’s Sanchez and Weigelreported that Rockwell was their likely author. (Rockwell has denied this.)...
Their influence on Rand Paul is readily apparent today. From his (now retracted) opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act to his claim that passage of cap-and-trade legislation will lead to the creation of “an army of armed EPAagents, thousands of them,” Paul, like his father, exhibits all the hallmarks of a paleolibertarian—including an affection for conspiracy theories. In 2008, for instance, while campaigning in Montana for his father’s presidential bid, Paul gave voice to a loony idea—shared by his father—about the construction of a nafta superhighway and the creation of a single currency, the Amero, for a North American Union. “It’s gonna go up through Texas, I guess, all the way to Montana,” Paul said of the superhighway. “So, it’s a real thing, and, when you talk about it, the thing you just have to be aware of is that, if you talk about it like it’s a conspiracy, they’ll paint you as a nut. It’s not a conspiracy. They’re out in the open about it. I saw the YouTube of Vicente Fox talking about the Amero. . . . I guarantee you it’s one of their long-term goals to have one sort of borderless, mass continent....
Read entire article at The New Republic
In 1984, Ron Paul ran for the United States Senate. It was an audacious gamble. Paul, who represented Texas’s twenty-second congressional district, had to give up his safe House seat to compete in the state’s Republican Senate primary. What’s more, his chief opponent was Phil Gramm who, despite having recently switched from being a Democrat, had the support of Texas’s GOP establishment. And, while Paul’s unusual brand of far–right-wing politics—he was for returning to the gold standard and against a federal holiday for Martin Luther King Jr.—was a good fit for his congressional district near Houston, it was a tougher sell elsewhere, even in Texas. “It wasn’t often that Phil could portray himself as part of the mainstream,” recalls political consultant John Weaver, who worked on Gramm’s campaign, “but, thanks to Dr. Paul he was able to do that.” In the end, Paul’s gamble backfired. He lost the Senate primary, receiving only 17 percent of the vote, and went off into the political wilderness, not returning to the U.S. House for another 13 years.
But Paul’s disastrous Senate campaign did achieve one thing: It served as the political coming-out party for his son Rand. The third of Paul’s five children, Rand had been an avid student of his father’s political teachings. “As a young lad, he sat at his father’s knee and learned all he could,” says longtime Ron Paul campaign aide Jean McIver. By the time he got to Baylor University, Rand was a font of small-government dogma, conversant on the evils of the Federal Reserve and a floating currency. “Rand was pretty much a carboncopy of his dad,” recalls John Green, who belonged to a Baylor secret society called the NoZe Brotherhood with Rand. “He started drinking the Kool-Aid at an early age.” So, in 1984, when Ron Paul was called back to Washington for a House vote and had to miss a scheduled joint appearance with Gramm, he turned to his 21-year-old son to fill in for him. In front of 300 people, Rand Paul gave hisfirst political speech. “I listened to him pretty closely,” says Gramm, “and I remember the young man did quite well.”...
Ron and Rand Paul are often described as libertarians, but their politics represent a distinct—and peculiar—strand of libertarianism known as paleolibertarianism. While libertarians and paleolibertarians both start from the same limitedgovernment premise, paleolibertarians take that ideology in a decidedly populist, right-wing direction. Paleolibertarians’ enemyis not just big government, as the leading paleolib thinker Murray Rothbard explained in a 1992 essay (unearthed by Reason reporters Julian Sanchez and David Weigel in 2008), but rather, the “unholy alliance of ‘corporate liberal’ Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America.”
Paleolibertarianism’s intellectual hub is an Alabama-based think tank called the Ludwig von Mises Institute, which Rothbard helped found in 1982. (Rothbard had studied under its namesake, a famous Austrian libertarian economist.) Another one of the von Mises Institute’s founders, and its current chairman, is Lew Rockwell, who served as Ron Paul’s congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982 and remained one of his top advisers for years afterward. Rockwell, who has frequently brought the von Mises Institute into alliance with neo-Confederate groups such as the League of the South, has written in favor of racial separatism; and, in 2008, after The New Republic’s James Kirchick discovered numerous racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic passages in Ron Paul’s old newsletters, Reason’s Sanchez and Weigelreported that Rockwell was their likely author. (Rockwell has denied this.)...
Their influence on Rand Paul is readily apparent today. From his (now retracted) opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act to his claim that passage of cap-and-trade legislation will lead to the creation of “an army of armed EPAagents, thousands of them,” Paul, like his father, exhibits all the hallmarks of a paleolibertarian—including an affection for conspiracy theories. In 2008, for instance, while campaigning in Montana for his father’s presidential bid, Paul gave voice to a loony idea—shared by his father—about the construction of a nafta superhighway and the creation of a single currency, the Amero, for a North American Union. “It’s gonna go up through Texas, I guess, all the way to Montana,” Paul said of the superhighway. “So, it’s a real thing, and, when you talk about it, the thing you just have to be aware of is that, if you talk about it like it’s a conspiracy, they’ll paint you as a nut. It’s not a conspiracy. They’re out in the open about it. I saw the YouTube of Vicente Fox talking about the Amero. . . . I guarantee you it’s one of their long-term goals to have one sort of borderless, mass continent....