Paul Rosenberg on Ron Paul and Old Right isolationism

Paul Rosenberg at Open Left has a long, thoughtful post about Ron Paul and the Paulian movement, the "Ron Paul phenemenon", as the Paulians like to call it. In Glenn Greewald's Ron Paul Problem - And Ours 11/17/07, he writes:

What Glenn fails to appreciate is that Paul is simply articulating the standard conservative ideology of 1937/38. Like them, he is an isolationist-so rabidly so that he would denounce FDR as a war-mongering tyrant for wanting to stop Hitler. Also like them, he is utterly opposed to the welfare state, and idealizes 19th Century capitalism, staunchly refusing to acknowledge the reality of the Great Depression and its direct connection to his ideal. He decries as teasonous, socialistic and unconstitutional FDRs Hurculean efforts to save both capitalism (a threat exemplified on the world stage by the Soviet Union) and democracy (a threat exemplified by Nazi Germany).

Paul is not a conservative in one of the most plausible senses of the word-supporting the organic nature of existing society against radical restructuring. In this sense, Paul - every bit as much as Bush - is a stark raving anti-conservative. He wants to go back to a pure conservative past that never was, and he calls this "constitutionalism." But Paul's vision is no more "constitutionalism" than televangelists' mamon-worship is "Christianity." Like any textual fundamentalist, he simply reads his own beliefs into his sacred text, and then reads them back out again, denouncing as a heretic anyone who disagrees with him.

I might quibble a bit over whether Paul's Old Right isolationism could be identified as "standard conservative ideology"; it appears to me to be more like the hardcore isolationism of some of the most reactionary groups of that time.

Tags: authoritarianism, glenn greenwald, isolationism, paul rosenberg, ron paul