Wendy Kaminer Is Drinking the Flavor Aid

In a piece posted yesteray, she describes Ron Paul as "the only candidate standing up for individual liberties":

But for all his faults, Paul remains the only major candidate, Democrat or Republican, who has taken a stand against our endless wars (including the war on drugs) and the authoritarian national-security state -- the most urgent, dire threat to individual liberty today. It should be but isn't a shock to realize that he is the only major candidate to oppose presidential power to summarily assassinate American citizens.

So it's not surprising that Ron Paul has attracted younger voters than his Republican opponents and the support of the occasional left-wing civil libertarian (notably Glenn Greenwald¹.) But liberal support for Paul is quite weak, and telling: it reflects the dangerous, anti-libertarian drift of today's liberals and progressives. With some exceptions, liberals tend to focus on Paul's alleged bigotry, his newsletters, and his opposition to anti-discrimination laws, while ignoring his lonely support for fundamental liberties.

In case you're wondering, "all his faults" are enumerated in the previous paragraph:

A most imperfect advocate for individual liberty, Paul favors state laws against flag desecration (core political speech) and federal laws against abortion, and he opposes separation of church and state, which is essential to the religious liberty of minorities.

Much shorter Wendy Kaminer: despite Ron Paul's opposition to fundamental individual liberties, Ron Paul is the only candidate standing up for fundamental individual liberties.

Setting aside the obvious point that Ron Paul's "civil liberties" positions aren't actually about civil liberties, I think this is an example (one of many) of an extremely distorted focus on a small handful of civil liberties issues at the expense of a much broader conception of civil liberties (that happens to be more consequential for more people). Look at all the civil liberties she's willing to trade away for the handful of narrow civil liberties issues where she thinks Paul agrees with her: reproductive choice; free political speech; religious liberty. (And she doesn't even mention his issues with the 14th Amendment.) The national security-based encroachments on civil liberties over the last 10 years are pretty bad, but calling them "the most urgent, dire threat to individual liberty today" doesn't pass the bullshit test. (More urgent than millions losing their right to vote? More dire than state-mandated forced childbirth?)

The reason there's so little momentum for undoing some of the post-9/11 abuses is that they directly affect so few people. That's frustrating for those of us who do care about them, but it's also a reality check: there are other civil liberties issues that have a much broader impact, and we can't dismiss them and still claim to support "civil liberties".

(The comments, by the way, are a toxic stew of anti-choice vitriol, Civil War revisionism, declarations of states' "rights", and other flavors of Paulbot lunacy. Kaminer is clearly trying to sell Ron Paul to liberals; the folks weighing in on her side will, thankfully, undermine that effort.)


²Oddly, I haven't seen any angry denunciations from Greenwald for this. Surely he'll accuse Kaminer of lying about him, right?


[And huge thanks to Steve M. for the opportunity to post here on a semi-regular basis. Steve has run one of the most consistently sharp and insightful blogs for about as long as blogtopia has been around, and it's a real honor to be able to share space with him and his other guests.

Also: this morning I did a 15-minute phone interview with Sam Seder that, if they use any of it, will run on Saturday's edition of Ring of Fire Radio. I hope I didn't come off as a complete idiot. If you're listening in and you hear a voice that I totally hate, that'll be me.]