Ron Paul, the Civil War, and the War on Terror

  

In the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, Ron Paul’s anti-war stance has won him a lot of support from people who might otherwise consider themselves left-wing / liberal / progressive / whatever. This has happened despite Paul’s radical free-market ideology, his ‘leave it to the states’ position on social issues, and some embarrassing past positions on race. It’s disturbing, and in my view reflects a misguided rejection of the Wilsonian foreign policy tradition, and of executive power itself, by sections of the American left.

In the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who covers a lot of African-American history, has a three-part series of posts highlighting Paul’s objectionable views about the Civil War, and debunking them using contemporary sources as well as more recent historical works. While reading them, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between Paul’s rhetoric about the Civil War, and that of the opponents of the War on Terror. When Paul labels Lincoln the aggressor, when in fact all the steps taken to escalate the conflict were taken by the South, he sounds exactly like those who denounce everything done by the United States in the Islamic world as aggression while excusing everything done by terrorists. When the neo-confederates damn the Lincoln Administration for a few suspensions of habeas corpus here and there or for preventing the Maryland legislature from voting to secede, they sound exactly like those who use extraordinary rendition and Guantanamo Bay to denounce an endeavour grounded in true Wilsonian principles.

The second of Coates’ posts discusses the economics of slavery, with reference to Paul’s support for compensated emancipation along the lines of the British Empire’s abolition of slavery in 1840. (I love how Coates ties it into modern political discourse by referring to it as a “bailout”.) He reiterates the huge barrier to emancipation overlooked by apologists for the Confederacy: the cost. The total value of all slaves held captive on American soil had risen from $300 million around the time of the Revolution to $3 billion on the eve of the Civil War. It seems that Paul would have preferred that the Union leave future generations of Americans with a massive debt than to see white people die for black peoples’ freedom. If one believes slavery to be wrong, one must support its abolition whatever the cost. The whole thing is eerily reminiscent of the 1930s pacifist catchphrase “why die for Danzig?” and of Cindy Sheehan’s contention that her son “killed for lies and for a PNAC neocon agenda to benefit Israel.”

In the third post, Coates talks about Paul’s contention that slavery could have been ended without recourse to ‘violence’, noting that if keeping human beings enslaved isn’t ‘violent’, the word doesn’t have much meaning. In addition, the regular use of military force to put down slave rebellions surely constitutes violence. On this point, Paul again echoes the arguments of the Moorite-Chomskyite left. The latter bemoan the use of ‘violence’ by the U.S. military in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, conveniently ignoring that those societies were dictatorships characterised by abominable human rights records. The rulers of Orwellian tyrannies are violent towards the citizens’ liberties every second of their existence. It makes no sense to attack the United States for putting an end to the supposed peace and tranquillity of life under the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Gaddafi (and perhaps, in the near future, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad).

The thread which connects neo-confederate thought to the modern anti-war crowd is their shared rejection of Wilsonianism. In his classic study of American foreign policy, Special Providence, Walter Russell Mead defined Wilsonianism as one of the United States’ four constituent foreign policy traditions. It is characterised by the pursuit of universal human rights standards and international law, and while not necessarily supportive of actions which harm America’s standing in the world, it doesn’t put as much stock in defending the ‘national interest’ as other foreign policy creeds. The Wilsonian impulse to put American power at the service of the advance of liberal democracy predates Woodrow Wilson himself, and has guided the United States’ pursuit of the Civil War and both World Wars, and its key role in reconstructing a framework of international co-operation after each of the two world wars.

When free-market fanboiz like Ron Paul attack Wilsonianism, they do so because they see it as an extension of the interventionist economic policies they abhor at home. Right-wing isolationist literature is full of references to Wilsonian ‘do-gooders’ – the same slur used domestically by the right to denounce attempts by the left to use the state to alleviate suffering and injustice. This is why Ron Paul retroactively opposes the Union’s prosecution of the Civil War – just as the right of the elites to their ‘private property’ precludes the amelioration of the condition of the poor and working class today, it precluded the liberation of the slaves then.