Ron Paul's Racism (Part 1)

On Sunday, December 23rd, 2007, Ron Paul appeared on Meet the Press. In the course of the interview, Russert asked Paul a number of very predictable softball questions. But about three-quarters of the way through the interview, the topic turned to race and civil rights. Since this an area that is of keen interest to me (and in fact an area I've studied), my curiosity was piqued. It was all the more interesting because of the controversy surrounding some of Paul's past communiqués, and the racism supposedly found in them. The transcript can be found here (the relevant portion is on page 4), and the interview was captured on YouTube (the relevant portion, beginning around 04:045, can be found here):

Russert begins by referring to a speech that Ron Paul gave in 2004, in which, as Russert quotes him saying, Paul claims that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "did not improve race relations or enhance freedom," "contrary to the claims of its supporters." Rather, Paul argues, it "increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty." Russert claims that the Act "gave equal rights African-Americans to vote, to live, to go to lunch counters, and you seem to be criticizing it." Although Timmeh is being really stupid and patronizing, as appears to be his wont, since the Act didn't give rights to anyone, but attempted to ensure that those rights ceased being infringed, the voting-rights provisions weren't given any teeth, there were no housing discrimination provisions in the '64 Civil Rights Act, and the fight was about a hell of a lot more than just being able to sit at a lunch counter, he is nevertheless correct in raising it as an issue.

Paul's response is to suggest that it would be appropriate for the federal government to desegregate "a federal lunch counter...or...the military." As a non sequitur, he throws out that the "government...caused all the segregation in the military until after World War II," as if the government was not simply reflecting the social norms of the people that made it up and that it represented; but his real point is that "you're not compelled in your house to invade strangers that you don't like. So it's a property rights issue. And this idea that all private property is under the domain of the federal government I think is wrong." Leaving aside the malapropism here (since it's clear that Paul means "invite" and not "invade"), not only was this not the rubric under which the Act was passed, it completely ignores the fact that the Act was very limited in its scope, especially as compared to later bills; this is a favorite libertarian scare-tactic, and the targeting happens to make it a favorite White Supremacist scare-tactic as well. The suggestion that African-Americans were demanding that the federal government force whites to let the former into their homes is ludicrous as well as blatantly prejudiced. Indeed, the Act was specifically passed pursuant to the Congress' powers to regulate interstate commerce as a result of late-19th-century Supreme Court cases that held that the Congress was not able to regulate private behavior that may violate equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, only States.

The Constitution expressly gives the Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce; even if Paul were to try to argue that this does not apply to industry, substantial provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would still be applicable to the lunch counter situation, as it is unambiguously engaged in commerce, i.e. the sale of goods. Let's assume for a moment that the interstate commerce clause does not give the Congress the power to regulate a Woolworth's lunch counter; wouldn't a judgment in favor of the government in suits brought under the Act be a failure of the courts to properly interpret the definition of interstate commerce, rather than the law itself? Paul seems to think that the federal government basically doesn't have the power to regulate commerce unless the commerce in question is specifically interstate, i.e. the goods are in the process of being moved across state lines. This sort of strict interpretation is laughable, and also dangerous; Paul claims to be an originalist, but in Gibbons v. Ogden, the Supreme Court under John Marshall (who wrote the opinion) ruled that "[T]he power of Congress does not stop at the jurisdictional lines of the several states. It would be a very useless power if it could not pass those lines." Subsequent courts have upheld this interpretation.

One could argue about the merits of this position, and this is not intended as a blanket endorsement of the opinions of the Court, but I will say that I lean toward a favorable position even if I'm not wholly in agreement. I think that, in order for the Congress to effectively be able to exercise its power to regulate interstate commerce, it necessarily requires the power to act even where goods are not in the act of crossing state lines. Of course, this means that virtually all commerce is now subject to the jurisdiction of the US Congress, as virtually all commerce involves something that crosses state lines or national boundaries. I can empathize with an argument that the power is interpreted too broadly in some instances, but if Paul wishes to restrict the power of the US Congress to regulate this kind of commerce, then he should sponsor a Constitutional Amendment and say so, not complain that the federal government is unconstitutionally infringing on individual liberties.

But complain he does. "If it were written the same way, where the federal government's taken over property--has nothing to do with race relations," he replies to Russert's question whether he would vote against the Civil Rights Act "if it [were] today." It has nothing to do with race relations? According to the definition of race relations I found in the dictionary, "cultural contacts and relations between people of different races," where relations are defined as "[t]he mutual dealings or connections of persons, groups, or nations in social, business, or diplomatic matters." This seems the most logical and precise definition of "race relations" for this situation; clearly, the Civil Rights Act does have something to do with race relations in this sense. I'm inclined to suspect that Paul is speaking in some sort of code, here; I can't say with any certainty what he actually means, but his statement is prima facie false.

Although I can't say with any certainty what he actually means, I can make a few educated guesses. The first thing that comes to mind is that he means some sense of "diplomatic relations" between the races; I'm tempted to leave aside the obvious category errors here, but then they'd just be white elephants in the room and hinder my purpose here. Race as a sociological category may be useful in analyzing society but it is not a valid anthropological category; it's purely social construct, with no real empirical basis. Race is a vague reflection of certain physiological differences that appear as a result of selective adaptation of sub-populations to differing environments, and maps these onto cultural adaptations and variances. Unfortunately, culture differs so wildly even among "racial" groups that it's impossible to do this in a way that will be verifiable with empirical observation; you're always going to get false positives and false negatives because you're comparing apples and oranges.

That aside, one can legitimately, while acknowledging the lack of anthropological validity of racial categories, speak of race as a sociological phenomenon. But the sense in which Paul appears to be speaking of race relations, that is, explicitly excluding anything but racial sentiment, excludes most of the empirical underpinnings of real race relations. Ron Paul knows full well that you can't legislate racial sentiment; he is arguing against precisely this point, so the statement is valid only rhetorically. Thus, he effectively argues that the government should not and can not pass legislation that makes it illegal for someone engaged in commerce to discriminate against anyone on the basis of several factors, race being the most salient for the purposes of this discussion. Paul, then, is arguing that property rights trump all other considerations.

This is a fairly extreme stance, and one I'm sure a great number of Americans would disagree with if they thought it about it even briefly. Leaving aside the complex issue of what precisely constitutes property (which is a legal concept in the first place), let's allow that there is such a thing and that there are rights attached to having it. Also leaving aside the complex issues surrounding the purpose of our property rights regime and its history, we can agree that at its basis it's intended to prevent wholesale expropriation by any party of the basis of human livelihood. That material goods are necessary for human survival, happiness, and progress cannot be questioned, and so in order to promote what we feel is the best use of these goods, we create this concept of property and attach rights to its use. So property is intended as a means of ensuring people's welfare; property rights were never intended to be sovereign.

Only people can own property. But Paul's argument only makes sense if real people aren't involved, since ownership of property is only intended as a means of ensuring welfare. Property rights being sovereign in themselves only make sense if property itself is viewed as a person: but this is fetishism! Ron Paul is acting as if property itself can have rights. In addition to leading to racism, this is just nonsensical and irrational.

Moving on, he takes a curious position about Lincoln and the Civil War: That he started the Civil War to free the slaves, and expand the power of the Federal Government. There are a few problems with this statement. First, Lincoln didn't start the Civil War. Second, the war wasn't started to free the slaves. Third, Lincoln's intent was not to expand the power of the Federal Government.

As with any conflict, the Civil War was the culmination of a long series of events. Ascribing the beginning of any war to a single event is dangerous, because it risks oversimplifying the complex way that events tend to slide into war; World War II, for example, is commonly regarded as having begun with the Nazi invasion of Poland, but one could argue that it actually began with the invasion of the Sudetenland, or the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. In order to be able to discuss the conflict as a meaningful whole, it's necessary to somewhat arbitrarily pick a point which one can label as the beginning and to go on from there. In the case of World War II, the invasion of Poland is chosen because the UK and France finally chose to go to war after this, precipitating the global conflagration that we call World War II.

The Civil War, however, is even more complex because of the ongoing violence over slavery. The question of slavery was controversial as far back as the Founding, and the drafting of the Constitution; many people were opposed to its continuation, but in order to get the Constitution ratified, several compromises were reached, including the "Three-fifths compromise," and the clause preventing abolition of the slave trade before 1801. As successive compromises allowed the further expansion of slavery, the issue became more and more controversial. In particular, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 created the conditions which led to Bleeding Kansas, arguably the true beginning of the Civil War.

The South had been threatening to secede for decades. The question of secession came up in 1828, during the crisis provoked by the Tariff of 1828, called the "Tariff of Abominations" in the South. Jackson, and the Congress, responded by passing legislation aimed at preventing any attempt at secession or resistance to federal authority in enforcing the Tariff. The Southern response was to abandon support for Jackson and the formation of the southern wing of the Whig Party, and attempted to re-define "states' rights," (which Paul references) away from merely a "weak, inactive, and frugal" federal government, according to historian Richard Ellis, toward one which "expand[ed] the powers of the federal government so that it could more effectively protect the peculiar institution," i.e. slavery. So much for states' rights!

The Missouri Compromise had been designed to prevent this by balancing the number of slave states with the number of free states admitted to the Union; for every free state that was admitted, a slave state had to be admitted, so as to preserve parity in the Congress, and especially the Senate, ensuring that slavery was protected from abolition and tariffs such as the Tariff of 1828. Since the South had very little manufacturing capacity, it was dependent upon imports; Europe, and especially Great Britain, had a stronger manufacturing sector than the United States and so could afford to sell better goods at lower prices. The Tariff of 1828 was designed to raise a protective wall to assist the nascent American manufacturing sector in building up its capacity; cheap British imports were hampering this, and industrial capacity was the key to economic and military success against other "civilized" powers. It was for this reason that it was so vociferously opposed by the South; they wanted continued access to cheap British imports. However, the North was beginning to heavily industrialize and therefore wanted to create internal conditions favorable to the kind of economic development that would be required to build (what then constituted) a modern industrial base. Since free states hosted a larger proportion of independent craftsmen and manufacturing centers than slave states (where free labor had a harder time competing with slave labor), the populations were more generally in favor of these sorts of measures.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act did away with this system, which, although imperfect, was generally regarded in its time as a reasonable compromise. In its place, it instituted the system of popular sovereignty, in which the population of a state would decide whether it would come into the Union free or slave. This, of course, was ripe for abuse. Southerners had a history of filibustering expeditions aimed at expanding the amount of land brought under cultivation by slaves (agriculture was the predominant pursuit of slave labor); a prime example of this was Texas, and the Mexican-American War was triggered largely by White Southerners invading and attempting to bring it into the Union, supported by a sympathetic Federal government. Much like Israel today, they sought to create "facts on the ground" that would promote their agenda. It was for this reason that they sought to colonize Kansas. The first large-scale settlement of the territory was by pro-slavery Southerners who, for various strategic reasons in addition to the Senate seats it would create, sought to bring Kansas in as a slave state. Anti-slavery Notherners organized their own immigrations to bring it in as a free state.

In November 1854, several thousand Southerners poured into Missouri in order to steal an election to Congress of a territorial delegate, in which 6,000 votes were cast in a territory which had 2,900 registered voters. A repeat of this scenario occurred in March 1855, during the territorial legislative elections. In response to the legislature's acts to cement slavery in Kansas, anti-slavery forces began an armed uprising. However, it was the "border ruffians" which committed the first major act of violence, the massacre at Lawrence, Kansas. It was arguably the electoral fraud in 1854-1855 that started the Civil War; they certainly precipitated Bleeding Kansas. The die had been cast; after this, there would be no peaceful resolution of the controversy. In fact, so polarized had the issue become that the infamous beating of Senator Charles Sumner by Congressman Preston Brooks occurred the next day in the Senate chambers.

If, however, one wishes to stick to the traditional date of April 12, 1861, the fiing on Fort Sumter, then hostilities were undeniably begun by the South. All questions of whether, upon secession, the property of Ft. Sumter should have gone to the State of South Carolina aside, there were ongoing negotiations on the issue. Indeed, Lincoln inherited a state of tension over the Fort, as his predecessor, James Buchanan, had refused to surrender the Fort. Further, the State of South Carolina had already acted to seize control of other installations and customs houses, without waiting for Lincoln to be inaugurated. They had already created a hostile environment; when Lincoln sent in an expedition to deliver supplies, which he notified the Governor of South Carolina he was doing, the Confederates opened fire. Whatever claim they might have had was abrogated by their initiation of hostilities. Ft. Sumter was designed to protect Charleston Harbor from naval bombardment, not shore bombardment, and thus posed little threat to the Confederate forces besieging it; if the fort had opened fire on Confederate ships, then the Confederates would have been well within their rights to open fire. However, until that happened, because of the complicated nature of the secession question, cooler heads should have prevailed. But the reality was that neither side was much in the mood for compromise; indeed, that word had become an epithet.

As to the question of freeing the slaves, Lincoln, although he was opposed to slavery, made it absolutely clear that he had no intention of pressing for abolition. Even then, no lover of the Black Man was he; as a solution to the race problem, he advocated "colonization," that is, transporting freedmen to Africa. He also supported the Corwin Amendment, which, although aimed at the border states and not the deep south, would have preserved slavery where it already existed. Although, of course, the question was always present and everyone understood that the war was provoked by slavery, there was no talk of abolishing slavery or freeing slaves up until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862. During his first inaugural address, Lincoln said

Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican Administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that—

I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

Furthermore, he stated

The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere. Where hostility to the United States in any interior locality shall be so great and universal as to prevent competent resident citizens from holding the Federal offices, there will be no attempt to force obnoxious strangers among the people for that object.

So much for freeing the slaves! Ron Paul claims that Lincoln went to war "just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic" (I assume he means enhance the power of the federal government and get rid of the original intent of the republic). I'm not sure what Paul understands to be the original intent of the republic, but I also question what the relevance was. Lincoln was elected in 1860; the Constitution had been ratified 72 years previously, and the generation that brought it about was long dead. It's unlikely that anyone was around that remembered the ratification debates, and even more unlikely that there was anyone around that remembered life under the Articles of Confederation. The social and economic conditions facing the Framers no longer existed, and the understanding of what it meant to be American had changed. Furthermore, I'm sure the Framers would have been turning in their graves if they'd known about such things as the Fugitive Slave Act. Notwithstanding the questionable relevance of the "original intent" (whose original intent?), it should be observed that Madison wrote a letter intended for publication to Edward Everett repudiating secession during the Nullification Crisis.

As to enhancing the power of the federal government, Lincoln's expansion of the federal government's powers were a result of necessary emergency measures taken to prosecute the war. One does not need to accept the Civil War as legitimate in order to at least understand that Lincoln was doing what he thought needed to be done in order to ensure that the federal government prevailed. His imprisonment without trial of the Maryland government was arguably excessive, but the fact remained that the government was pro-secession and tolerated anti-Union rioting; Lincoln sent in troops to restore order. If Lincoln's aim were to quash all internal opposition, to push a radically centralizing agenda, and to free the slaves, why did he countermand orders confiscating slaves and release copperhead politicians? Furthermore, he claimed in a letter to A. G. Hodges, editor of the Frankfort, KY Commonwealth, "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong … And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling ... I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." Hardly the thoughts of a man pushing a strongly centralizing agenda. Of course, we never got an opportunity to find out precisely what Lincoln had in store for the postwar period, since he was assassinated by John Wilkes Boothe in 1865.

Paul also claims that slavery "was phased out in every other country of the world. And the way I'm advising that it should have been done is do like the British empire did. You, you buy the slaves and release them." His first sentence requires careful parsing; does he mean that slavery had already been phased out in every other country of the world? Given the ignorance he's already shown toward the actual history of the Civil War, Civil Rights, and race relations, it would not be at all surprising if, in Ron Paul's fantasy world, this was the case. Like his position on the Civil Rights Act and race relations, but unlike his interpretation of the causes and consequences of the Civil War, this is empirically false. Slavery has continued into the present day; even assuming that Paul means the sort of chattel slavery that was practiced by European colonies, it's still false, as Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888. One might excuse this as a minor error (one country), but Brazil had a significant slave population. Furthermore, although persons of African descent were being freed, other peoples (natives) were being enslaved into the early 20th Century in South America during the rubber boom. I suppose his ignorance on this count can be excused, since the topic is relatively obscure, but one would think that he or his staff would do more research before making such a categorical statement.

Moving on to his claim that, if only Lincoln would have offered to compensate slaveholders for their property, the Civil War could have been avoided, he again shows his preference for his ideological constructs over real history. I would like to see his evidence that anyone in what became the CSA would have been interested in selling their "property," or that there would have been such an opportunity if Lincoln had offered to do so (which he did). The entire basis of the South's position was the maintenance of slavery; they "rights" that belong to the states that they were complaining about was the right to own other people as property. There is ample evidence in the historical record that, even when faced with obsolescence, ruling classes prefer to remain in power (threatened with obsolescence in the sense that the economic system upon which their power rests is threatened with obsolescence; since the are the system (the system is theirs, only benefits them qua a class, and continues to exist because they will it), they are themselves threatened qua a class). If Paul has evidence that enough important Southerners were talking about getting rid of slavery altogether (there was talk, and the South did call some Blacks into service, but this was an act of desperation; the proposal to arm Blacks did not come until 1865, and they never saw action) or replacing it with some other form of servitude, I would like to see it. Indeed, there was resistance within the CSA to many of the measures that Richmond wished to institute to win the war; many state governors believed that Davis was trying to impose the same sort of "tyranny" which they'd just seceded in order to escape. As I mentioned in a discussion with bucky1 on Glenn Greenwald's Salon blog awhile back (on this same topic, ironically), the South would have itself faced a civil war if the central government had tried to seriously manumit the slaves, one which Richmond was by no means guaranteed to win.

Paul also makes a curious assertion, that "it [slavery] lingered for 100 years" after the Civil War; he's obviously referring to the second slavery, the re-impositions of conditions of bondage and servitude (without the formal legal construct of slavery) following the end of Reconstruction. Yet I thought the Civil Rights Act of 1964 didn't improve race relations? I thought we got rid of slavery after the Civil War? This is a very deep, internal contradiction to Paul's position on this matter. He's concerned about two groups with absolutely irreconcilable differences; which one is he going to pick? It's obvious that Paul is courting the African-American vote, but his position is not going to sit well with the black masses, since, by and large, they think the federal government is still cheating them out of their just desserts (and it's hard to argue with this position, even if some of them have strange ideas about what they've been promised). Many of them don't think white people are even capable of viewing them as human, and indeed they appear to be relegated to the ranks of the subhuman in the way they're treated by society at large. They're unlikely to be sympathetic to the argument that government intervention cannot help them, although many would be quick to agree that it hasn't helped much (of course, many of them realize that these programs were designed to fail in many ways and were only half-heartedly carried out in the best of times). They want the law to represent them as equally as it does whites and asians, and they want their fair share of the pie.

But Ron Paul appears to be arguing that the pie should not only not be divided more fairly, but that the common table upon which the pie sits should be done away with and everyone should go get their own pie. This argument may sit well with more prosperous blacks, especially the ones that have a family history of relative wealth and prosperity and have become assimilated into the mainstream American "middle class." There will, of course, be the elements within the masses that think this would solve their problem as well. For those blacks who have had and continue to have access to the financial and other economic and social resources necessary to carry out this program successfully, I'm sure it would work rather well as they would be able to exploit their fellow African-American just as their white classmates do. But the majority would be utterly undercut, forced into a life of crime or indigence (which amounts to a life of petty crime and drug use).

I submit, then, that Paul's core audience is the lunatic fringe of the Old Right, the petty-bourgeois "rugged individualist" type that regards dark skin as a mark of inferiority or savagery; Nativists, in other words (as badly as this word is misused, as they are far from native). White Nationalists and other such fringe elements of the Old Right, the ones that weren't allowed into the New & Improved GOP when it went completely off the deep end under the Reaganuts. Oh, they've always been welcome to stop by, but it was the evangelical movement, the Religious Right, that provided the majority of the cannon-fodder for the flanking manuever on the American worker that the Reaganuts executed from the right. Increasingly, of course, none of these groups have seen their demands met, and while there's a certain degree of overlap between the Religious Right and these other groups, there are obvious fault-lines as well (and analyzing the complexities of this is a topic for another blog post, not to say a book). Paul is speaking to the Republican that isn't interested in seeing a theocracy (or, at least, a non-Christian Identity theocracy), wants his guns, wants to start a race war, thinks the US is under the rule of the ZOG, etc. He is reaching out to other demographics, in order to get himself elected President, but I believe that this remains his base.

None of this requires any particular bigotry on Paul's part. It may very well be that Paul is personally not prejudiced against blacks or other minorities. But racism is not (just) a belief system. Indeed, while racism entails a belief system justifying the racism, it is not necessary for that belief system to include positive assumptions of inferiority. What I mean by racism here is not an ideology of racial prejudice, but a set of policies and social institutions that, as a consequence of failing to correct for the damage that racial ideology has done to racial minorities, or through positive efforts to prevent this damange from being corrected, perpetuates inequalities based on racial identities. This does not have to be motivated by any particular belief about race; instead, it can be motivated on the basis of class. Paul's ideas may benefit some blacks, and Paul himself probably believes this; but it will benefit a particular social class within black society, while disadvantaging the majority, because Paul believes in a particular model of property and social organization that, as a consequence of the unequitable distribution of wealth that would result from implementation of that model, would end up hurting them.

On this basis, then, assertions of racism against Ron Paul are justified.