To Ron Paul Apologists: Racism is Never OK

Ron Paul will not win the Republican nomination for president, though I think he'll launch a third-party run this year.

But his racism is not a disqualification for his candidacy in the Party.

The GOP candidates love racism as a tool, and they love their states' rights. [States' rights to take away a woman's right to choose; states' rights to gerrymand voting districts; states rights to obstruct voters, and so on.]

Paul's racism is a disqualification from the more civilized members of our community and Paul's apologists deserve a knock-down.

By Phil Scarr

Ta-Nehisi Coates takes Ron Paul to the woodshed over his position on the abolition of slavery. It’s a thing of beauty.

For those who don’t know, Ron Paul was not OK with freeing the slaves through the Civil War. It represented an illegitimate theft of private property from the southern plantation owners (property the rest of us casually refer to as “people”).

Here is Ron Paul speaking with Tim Russert and blaming the Civil War on Lincoln.

MR. RUSSERT: I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln. “According to Paul, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery.”

REP. PAUL: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn’t have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic.

MR. RUSSERT: We’d still have slavery.

REP. PAUL: Oh come on, Tim. 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. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years? I mean, the hatred and all that existed. So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. I mean, that doesn’t sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.

Ta-Nehisi Coates points out the gaping flaw in Dr. Paul’s logic (the same Dr. Paul who thinks the gold standard is just ducky, he shouldn’t have to share a toilet with gay supporters and that the Federal Reserve should be abolished):

When Ron Paul claims that Lincoln “shouldn’t have gone to war,” he is deploying a convenient and erroneous frame which necessarily holds that the inciting aggression was not in raising an Army, seizing federal property and arms, urging revolution among ones neighbors, and then firing on a federal fort, but in democratically electing a president with whom slave-holders disagreed.

Throughout the War, Lincoln attempted to bring about a peaceful and magnanimous end. He pitched compensated emancipation, and was rebuffed, not by the Confederates, but by slave states still loyal to the Union. When Union armies brought states back under federal control he urged easy paths to regaining citizenship.

The racist states-rights advocates have been advancing the same, tired argument since 1865.

Some things never change.