Rand Paul Exposes Tea Party Racism in Libertarianism
5/20/2010 3:31:00 PM

John Judis has written a piece about the Tea Party movement at The New Republic which places it within the context of other conservative movements in the past in this country. It is a good piece. But he misses one very important element, the issue of race. Liberals in general hesitate to blame others for racism, to look racism square in the face, to use race as a critical factor in analysis of political movements. They do not want to be accused by the right of "playing the race card" even when the right itself plays that very same card over and over. Judis is a very good writer, and I recommend his article, but there is more to the Tea Party than he realizes.

That was exposed in an interview of Rand Paul on the Rachel Maddow show last night on MSNBC. Paul on Tuesday won the Kentucky Republican primary for the senate and somehow thought it would be a good move for him to appear on the Maddow show. He was wrong. Maddow asked him about civil rights, whether he approved of the 1964 civil rights law which opened public accomodations to black persons. Paul wouldn't answer the question directly, indicating he might have some trouble with the section of the law which requires that blacks be served at lunch counters of a "private" company. This, of course, means the government is telling a private company what to do, and Paul kept avoiding to answer the question directly, but Maddow kept pushing him to answer clearly. Paul kept saying over and over that he doesn't believe in discrimination but when it came down to it he did not want to admit that he opposed government enforcement of civil rights laws on so-called private institutions.

As the son of congressman Ron Paul, Rand Paul is a libertarian. Ron Paul has his own sorry history on questions of racism. The son may not be following the father on all aspects of the question, but the philosophy of liberatriansm was itself exposed in this interview. Rand Paul on election night associated himself directly with the Tea Party, that "he had a message from the Tea Party...."

The fact is that the political culture of the South continues to be driven by racism in many and various ways, it provides the underlying "energy" for the cultural power of conservatism in this country. The South absolutely hates and abhors the federal government, including the Supreme Court, for its role in forcing the South to change its ways of segregation. It cannot explicitly display racism in public so it comes out in relation to other issues such as abortion and gay rights for the religious right, and hostility to taxes (for education and social services to poor black people) and government for libertarians. The South's hostility to the federal government is the real energy of the more libertarian Tea Party movement.

Libertarianism is the political philosophy of most of the extreme right wing radio talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh. It is popular among these hosts because it does not require a lot of serious thought about what government is and how it should function. It is easy to be against anything government does, but it is also completely irresponsible. It is easy to say that government should not regulate business in favor of the free market, until an oil spill destroys the economy for lots of other folks along with the natural environment. It is easy to say that government should not regulate financial institutions, until they act in such a way as to destroy the economic functioning of the country and drastically reduce the wealth of millions of homeowners. The Tea Party movement is based on irrational rantings and ravings of talk show hosts who want to make their millions and then run away from any responsibility for what they have led people to believe. The fact that racism continues to be a major underlying factor in these rantings underscores how irrational and immoral are those media and political figures are who use this sort of rhetoric.

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The Political Use of Torture
4/25/2009 11:27:47 PM

In a column in the The New York Times Frank Rich summarizes current facts about the use of torture methods by the Bush administration. We had been told that such methods were necessary for purposes of national security. Now we are learning that these methods were used for political purposes, in order to try to get information which would link the 9/11 terrorists to Saddam Hussein thus justifying the war in Iraq. The Rich article is the best I have seen on this topic so far.
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The Significance of the Killing of Robert F. Kennedy
4/13/2009 3:03:13 PM

Last week Charlie Rose interviewed Robert Caro, the author of one of the best books I have ever read called The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. The book was published in 1975 and describes how the unelected Moses became the most powerful figure in New York City. Anyone at all interested in city planning, political power, and how cities develop should read this book. It is a classic.

Since then Caro has been doing meticulous research and writing books about Lyndon B. Johnson. I read his third volume called Master of the Senate which describes how Johnson was able to pass the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s by which the Democratic Party became associated with the cause of black people in the country and which resulted in the South turning to the Republicans to lead the fights against further gains for civil and economic rights for black people and the poor. I do not believe the politics of the last decades can be understood without a full appreciation for what Caro describes in this book.

Caro in the interview says he is most interested in how power actually works in this country, not how it is supposed to work, not about the legal structures of the government, but about how power is actually exercised. If the American people can better understand how power actually works then they can better pariticipate in a democractic society.

This man who has so closely studied power said something in the interview that was especially interesting to me. He talked about how both Lyndon Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy had great enmity for one another but shared a deep and authentic care for "the poor" of the country. Johnson had started out as a teacher of immigrant children in the hill country of Texas and never forgot that one reason he ran for office was to create better opportunities for such children to succeed in life. When he became president on the death of John F. Kennedy he was determined to initiate a "war on poverty" to create a more just society. Caro said that the Vietnam War kept Johnson from "transforming" American society, but many programs Johnson began are now taken for granted by people today such as Medicare. A full acounting of how Johnson improved American society has not been appreciated because conservatives over the past decades have been too successful in castigating the gains of the "Great Society."

But the comment that especially caught my attention was what Caro said about Bobby Kennedy. He said that if Bobby Kennedy had been elected president there would have been a real transformation in the country along the lines of what Barack Obama may be doing for the country today. That was interesting to me because I had in Chicago helped to begin a movement called "Citizens for Kennedy-Fullbright" to persuade Kennedy to run against Johnson in the 1968 election. Later he did enter the race and then was shot in California.

It will be interesting to read what Caro may have to say about all this in the fourth book on Johnson that he is now writing. Unfortunately, that book is three years from being finished, Caro said. Caro expressed deep respect for the brilliance of Kennedy as a politician. If Kennedy had been elected and the country had not gone into Vietnam we may not have had to endure the last decades of nasty Republican politics built on a backlash to the loss of the Vietnam War and the gains of civil rights in the 1960s.
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