We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Remember The New Republic?  It’s the bi-monthly political magazine that disgraced itself so severely in the Scott Beauchamp affair.  For those fortunate enough to have missed that mess last summer, TNR published an article in which a soldier serving in Iraq confirmed all the darkest stereotypes that the left holds about the US military.  The story turned out to be almost entirely false, but TNR stood by it as long as possible, twisting and turning for months to avoid the necessary retractions and apologies.  Last month the magazine reviewed the whole drama in some detail and concluded after thousands of words that the story was in fact, actually, really truly, false.  If there’s an apology in there somewhere, I couldn’t find it.

All that is background for the latest blockbuster article from The New Republic, this one savaging presidential candidate Ron Paul for articles in newsletters with his name on them:

Finding the pre-1999 newsletters was no easy task, but I was able to track many of them down at the libraries of the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Of course, with few bylines, it is difficult to know whether any particular article was written by Paul himself. Some of the earlier newsletters are signed by him, though the vast majority of the editions I saw contain no bylines at all. Complicating matters, many of the unbylined newsletters were written in the first person, implying that Paul was the author.

But, whoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul’s name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him–and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing–but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.

I don’t like Ron Paul.  I think he’s a nut, especially on foreign policy.  Men who say things like this just can’t be taken seriously:

You’d pull American troops out of Korea, Germany, the Middle East, everywhere?

I would. Under the Constitution, we don’t have the authority to just put troops in foreign countries willy-nilly when we’re not at war.

Conservatives already unhappy with Ron Paul will be tempted to use this TNR article to pile on his and drive him out of the race.  But that would be a serious error.  The fact that Ron Paul is a nut doesn’t mean that the hit piece against him is fair or accurate.  My reading of the article is that it’s the kind of overheated political hatchet job that got TNR in so much trouble over Beauchamp.

One of my stranger idiosyncrasies is a belief that I can spot most falsehoods based solely on the presentation and deportment of the people presenting them.  People behave—and write—in very specific ways when they’re trying to push an idea that they know isn’t fully supported.

I’m not talking about liars; they’re an entirely different group with different behaviors.  It’s much more common to find writers who completely believe in what they’re saying, but who also realize that their readers wouldn’t share that belief if they knew exactly what the writer knew.  The classic example is Dan Rather with his forged memos, who last I checked still believes that George Bush shirked duty in the National Guard in the early seventies.  It wasn’t a lie, because Rather believed it.  But he also knew that the available evidence wouldn’t be enough to convince the public, so he stretched that evidence, and went too far.

The Beauchamp story followed a similar pattern.  As good liberals, the TNR editors believe (as fervently as any religious zealots) that US troops are inhuman monsters and baby-killers.  So when offered suspicious evidence to demonstrate what they ‘knew’ to be true, they dispensed with much of the fact-checking and rushed to press.  It’s the same error that conservatives will soon make with Ron Paul: They know that the conclusion is true, and so they assume that the evidence offered to support the conclusion must be valid.  In formal logic, we call this Affirming the Consequent.

The first hint that something is awry with the TNR article on Ron Paul is in the way that it presents a web of people, organizations, and ideas, but offers only the flimsiest of connections between them.  For example, we learn that Ron Paul hired Lew Rockwell as his Congressional chief of staff for four years, and that Rockwell founded the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and that a senior faculty member at the institute founded a group that TNR labels “secessionist” and wrote a book that TNR describes as a “pro-Confederate, revisionist tract.”  In 1995, Ron Paul spoke at an institute event about which Rockwell wrote: “We’ll explore what causes [secession] and how to promote it.”

See, at TNR they ‘know’ that conservatives are somehow the political descendants of the Confederacy, and they all secretly yearn to pull the country back 150 years to an age of slavery, misogyny, and so forth.  So if Paul has had anything to do with people who write approvingly about secession, then that proves that his views are identical to those held in the Confederacy.

This is TNR logic at work: Favoring a right of secession means that you have an “alliance with neo-Confederates,” which in turn “helps explain the views his newsletters have long espoused on race.”

And what are those views on race?  You’ll have to take TNR’s word for it that they’re really, really bad, because the actual quotes in the article don’t prove much.  The quotes will only tell you that Ron Paul dislikes welfare recipients and racial preference programs.  It’s also racism, in TNR’s mind, to disapprove of post-game looting by black basketball fans.

But remember, this isn’t a lie; it’s just a stretching of the truth.  Some parts are probably accurate, such as a spasm of race-war paranoia in the early nineties, some disapproval of the political changes in South Africa, and some over-the-top criticism of Martin Luther King.  But the author’s goal is to weave these little fragments of evidence into a conclusion much larger than what they can sustain.

The pattern is similar in the sections on gays, Jews, and the far-right militias that became such liberal bogeymen in the 1990s.  There are little bits of evidence here, but they don’t add up to nearly what the author wants to conclude.  The article’s goal is to weave scant evidence into the liberal stereotype of extreme conservatism.

Ron Paul is a kook, but he isn’t the type of kook that the liberals like to imagine that all conservatives secretly are.  He’s a very different kook, one much too far from liberal stereotypes for the TNR editors to understand.  Conservatives should not rise to the bait that TNR offers.  If they seize this article to condemn Ron Paul, they’ll end up agreeing with its very liberal and wildly inaccurate premises.