Its an essay by Matt Stoller who once worked for Alan Grayson and is now apparently a Ron Paul supporter.
His argument is that liberals have been deceived into supporting massive military buildup and wars by Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR via the Fed or monetary policy. He implies that only Ron Paul can tear down the twin evils of war and our financial havoc by supporting him and letting him dismantle the Fed.
Its an elaborate essay but here are some highlights-
And-
I think the guy is just trying to appeal to two things liberals (he means progressives) hate most - war and Wall St. His desperate attempt to connect central banks and military buildup/war is obvious. Or are some progressives actually aligning with Ron Paul in an attempt to End the Fed?
I say he has no credible argument. It seems that Fed conspiracy theories are all in fashion now after the unprecedented intervention in 2008 and Ron Paul’s popularity. Is he pandering or (partially) correct?
There are some hard-core pacifist liberals around, but there aren’t a lot. Most liberals want a smaller military and fewer foreign military adventures like Iraq, but I don’t think they’re really “against war” in the sense that they absolutely do not want the US to be able to fight wars and would accept decentralization to make sure the federal gov’t would be unable to pay for armies.
And indeed, the examples the guy picks seem to accentuate the point. How many liberals are upset that centralization of finance allowed the US to win the Civil War and the World Wars? Again, except for a few pacifists, I expect the answer would be pretty close to zero. Liberals are pretty happy we were able to finance and fight those wars, and its kind of silly to think that they’d be excited about policies that would make fighting similar wars in the future.
So the essay has both an unconvincing point and it doesn’t argue it very well.
Most plausible? If that’s the case then I’m not seeing this one as ‘the best’ CT. The fact that left wing AND right wing nutters might believe it on some level just makes it funny.
(ETA: various 9/11 CT’s also seem to be one of those things that draws nuts from all over the political spectrum. Left wing nutters are going to always assumed Bush did it, and right wingers…well, their nutballs believe just about anything)
Also, as an aside, I hate Wall St as much as the next red blooded American, but: “This strain can be exploited by the creditor class, who also disliked how slavery – which they saw as a property right rather than a labor and human rights issue – was destroyed by state power.”
As little as I think of the current crop of bankers and financers, I seriously doubt they’re all pissed off about the end of slavery.
“Best” is open to viewer interpretation. In case someone agrees with Stoller it could be construed as positive.
NC is a blog followed by many financial enthusiasts who despise the Federal Reserve and claim to be progressive. Also many MMT fans - which is some type of monetary theory they never mentioned at my school.
My posting privileges were revoked after two posts.
It’s not completely inaccurate to refer to Abraham Lincoln assuming dictatorial powers (he did for instance suspend the writ of habeas corpus at the start of the Civil War). It would be well to ask ourselves what Ron Paul might have done in Lincoln’s place. Paul would probably have rejected a Federal role in keeping the Union together, as well as condemning any anti-slavery action as interfering with property rights.
I can also understand how libertarians detest Wilson and F.D.R., especially F.D.R. - Not only did he preside over a significant expansion of federal power in combatting the Depression, he acted counter to the strict isolationism favored by many politicians and groups like America First. If Ron Paul had been around in the '30s-early '40s, he likely would have been a figure complementary to Charles Lindbergh, urging that America give no support to countries like Britain which were struggling to survive against Nazi Germany (whether Ron’s penchant for associating with racist figures and ideas would’ve made him sympathetic to Hitler despite his abhorrence of centralized government is another matter).
And that’s where many progressives/liberals part company with Ron Paul. They agree that the U.S. has been too quick to involve itself militarily in foreign conflicts, but don’t think we should idly sit by and ignore all threats and genocide.
That’s not what he’s implying. What he’s saying is that though progressives are generally against militarism and imperialism, the American left has generally been rather tolerant of active American involvement in various foreign ventures and interventions by our military, and the concomitant expansion of federal government power necessary to finance this state of affairs. Ron Paul has been outspoken in his resistance to this state of affairs. Stoller’s argument is that the American left doesn’t have a real argument against this stance, so they focus on his apparent racism and what they believe to be his true motive, which is his desire to weaken the federal government in favor of the states.
Now Stoller may have a point. But I don’t agree that it’s somehow illegitimate to highlight all of Paul’s beliefs, as they do clarify what his motives are. Ron Paul may be against the drug war and militarism, but you can’t examine the arguably bad policies our federal government favors while ignoring what individual states are likely to do if given authority to decide such matters. After all, most people imprisoned for drug offenses are imprisoned in state prisons, and some states have proposed various “personhood” amendments to effectively ban abortion and voter identification laws that would disenfranchise certain classes of voters. Many battles in this country have been fought to prevent the states from involving themselves in matters such as civil rights. And if Stoller’s essay is meant to critique the rationalizations that Obama supporters have made to explain why he seems to have adopted so many conservative positions in areas such as foreign policy, then it ignores the role of Congress and corporate interests in driving the federal government towards such positions. Some of Ron Paul’s ideas might make positive contributions to the debate, but it doesn’t follow that Ron Paul would be a good president simply because he espouses these ideas.
It’s completely inconceivable that Paul, had he been born and lived in that time and place, would have had political ideas remotely resembling the ones he holds today, or had his position been an analogous one, that he would have been President.
I can sort of see Paul existing as an opponent to Roosevelt, but he really has no good equivalent in 1859. Ideological positions are rooted in context and can’t be transferred around like that.
In addition to the Civil War, WW1 and the New Deal, I would propose another milepost in America’s evolution away its original ideals: The Spanish-American War, most especially the US occupation of the Phillipines. Historian Barbara Tuchman’s book The Proud Tower’s third chapter is subtitled “End of a Dream”, and is devoted to that period of American expansionism. Despite the jingoism of the time many were appalled at the idea of the US- itself once a colony which fought for its freedom- now establishing colonial possessions of its own. Moreover, it was in the wake of the war that Congress converted the last of the old state Militias into the modern National Guards.
