"With Romney confirming my early
prediction that the Republicans are
deliberately throwing the election, the neocons are on their way to
completely discrediting themselves politically. With that accomplished,
Republican politicians such as Rand Paul,
Justin
Amash, and others coming up in the ranks, who question the
war-all-the-time “foreign policy” dogma that has dominated the GOP since
the cold war era, will have much more space to advance their previously
heretical views. In the context of the past decade, the first order of
business for any pro-peace political movement must be the utter
destruction of the neocons’ political machine, which means ending their
influence in the Republican party. With Romney defeated -- in a
landslide, I predict -- the way will be opened to the further growth and
development of the Paulian movement."
Race for the White House,
2012: Whom to Root For?
Do you even have to ask?
by
Justin Raimondo,
October 01, 2012
In September of 1992, as the presidential election pitting George H. W.
Bush against Bill Clinton loomed, libertarian theorist and all-around
political junkie
Murray
Rothbard wrote a piece,
“
Making Our Way Back to the President,” in which he explained the key
difference between voting for (i.e. politically supporting) a candidate,
and “rooting for” one:
“Whom should we cheer for on Election Day? Whom should we hope wins
the election? Voting is a matter of personal conscience, and can be for
one of many minor candidates or for no one at all; rooting on who should
win is a different problem, because regardless of who you or I vote for,
or whether we vote at all, one of the two major candidates is sure to win
in November. Whom should we hope wins, or are all the considerations so
equally weighted that we should be indifferent? Regardless of our hopes,
no minor candidate will win, and the office of President, alas, will not
be declared vacant. … In 1992, I am indifferent to whom one votes for,
but I’m definitely rooting for Bush over Clinton.”
The reason? Well, wrote Rothbard, “he ain’t Bill Clinton.”
Irrefutable, to be sure. Reason number two:
“Bush has by far the most pro-American policy on the Middle East since
Jack Kennedy: he is the only president since Kennedy not to serve as a
lickspittle for the state of Israel, the only one not to function as an
abject tool of the powerful Zionist lobby, AIPAC, which somehow escapes
being a registered agent of the State of Israel. The greatest credit, of
course, goes to secretary of state James Baker, who formulated the policy
and maintained it under the most vicious pressure. But Bush deserves
credit for picking Baker and backing him up: further, with only a little
stretching, Bush-Baker can take credit for the Israeli election that
deposed the little monster Shamir, and brought in a more rational
government in Israel. Bush-Baker stood firm on denying the $10 billion
loan guarantee until Zionist settlements are slowed down on the Arab
lands of the West Bank.”
Reason number three: Bush the elder resisted calls to intervene in
Bosnia, where Bosnian Muslims and their American supporters -- including
the usual gaggle of neocons -- were raising phony cries of “genocide”
and demanding war in the name of “humanitarianism.”
Reason number four: Bush had “reconciled” with Pat Buchanan, who ran on
an anti-interventionist platform in the primaries, and had been invited
to speak at the
GOP national convention that year.
While I sometimes disagreed with Murray when he was till living, I find,
in retrospect, that I was mostly wrong: if you follow the above link to
that issue of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, you’ll find my
dissent, which Murray was good enough to publish, and his rebuttal, which
pointed out, ever so gently, that I just Didn’t Get It. And, as I realize
now, I didn’t: there is a difference between giving political support to
and actually voting for a political candidate, and rooting for same, the
subtlety of which eluded me at the time. Reading my remarks and
Rothbard’s rebuttal, all these years later, it’s clear Rothbard had the
superior argument.
Okay, so now that I Get It, the answer to my “rooting” conundrum in this
presidential election year is all too clear. If we apply the general
principles enunciated by Rothbard in 1992, there’s only one conclusion to
draw….
Let me preface this by saying: voting for any of the two major
party candidates for president this year is clearly impossible for
anti-interventionists, whether they be of the left or the right. The
reason is because the voter who casts his ballot for a candidate who then
unleashes, say, a horrific and unjustifiable war, must take
full moral
responsibility for the consequences, i.e. the deaths, the damage to
our liberties, etc.
In debating whom to root for, therefore, we aren’t talking about whom to
vote for: rooting for a candidate is quite a different matter.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way -- and bearing in mind that
Antiwar.com (and this columnist) never have and never will endorse any
candidate for any office, let us return to the question: whom to root
for?
If we apply Rothbard’s criteria, excerpted above, the answer is clear:
Obama, of course.
I can hear the groans, the boos, the cat-calls even before this edition
of Behind the Headlines is written and posted: What???!!??
The
drones!
The
wars! The
attack on civil liberties!!! Raimondo -- have you gone nuts?
I would advise these cat-callers to calm down, and remember: rooting
isn’t voting. And I would ask them to consider the arguments Rothbard
made in favor of rooting for Bush (the elder) -- because they limn, to an
amazing degree, the issues that frame this presidential
election.
Under
relentless pressure from the government of Israel and its powerful
amen corner in the US, President
Obama has
resisted calls to go to war with Iran and stubbornly pursued the
diplomatic route. While it’s true his resistance has none of the Jim
Baker-esque in-your-face style that characterized the George Herbert
Walker Bush administration’s well-known
disdain for the Israel lobby, the sad truth of the matter is that the
Lobby’s power has increased exponentially since those relatively halcyon
days, especially within the President’s own party. That’s why Obama, as a
candidate, has
groveled and crawled before Israel’s fifth columnists,
insisting against all the evidence that the US and Israel are on
the same page when it comes to policy in the Middle East.
However, the reality is that it’s just not so -- as Bibi Netanyahu has
spent
the last six months relentlessly pointing out. Bibi wants war with
Iran: Obama wants negotiations. The Lobby, in response to their leader’s
call, has been beating the war drums so loudly that the voices calling
for peace and reason have been drowned out and yet the President has
refused to comply with his marching orders from Tel Aviv. He deserves a
lot of credit for that at least, so far. Of course, he may be
playing us all, and waiting for
just the right moment to launch a war say, after the November
election. Yet this possibility seems to me unlikely, for the simple
reason that war with Iran would spell
instant economic catastrophe for the US as the price of oil triples
and expenditures veer completely out of control.
On the issue of the “settlements,” the Israelis have been
implacable, while the President at least made an attempt to rein them
in. Unfortunately, Obama backed down: his request for them to cool
it had no teeth in it no threat to hold back on “aid.” That’s
because, as I’ve said, the Lobby’s power is much greater now, and Obama,
alas, is a politician who must bow to pressure coming from within
his own party not least of all from the Clintonites, who control
the foreign policy apparatus and are in the Lobby’s
back pocket.
And while Bosnia’s Muslims are no longer in the headlines, there’s
another war-to-save-the-Islamists on the horizon this election season:
Syria, where our professional “humanitarians” have been calling for US
intervention in order to save al Qaeda-affiliated jihadists from Bashar
al-Assad’s torture chambers. It’s true
US tax dollars are going to subsidize these terrorists, who are
causing
tens of thousands of Christians and other religious minorities to
flee Syria, but the administration is holding back from giving them
all-out support. Romney, on the other hand,
would have no such compunctions.
There’s a reason why Netanyahu is
brazenly intervening in an American election in an unprecedented
manner, doing everything he can to diss Obama and boost Romney and it
has nothing to do with pursuing peace or American interests in the
region. Take a look at Romney’s
foreign policy team: it’s the
same old neocons who brought us
eight years of bloody misery under George W. Bush. With Romney in the
Oval Office, the neocons would return to Washington in triumph, empowered
to unleash a new string of wars that would make Iraq and Afghanistan look
like child’s play.
Lastly, but certainly not least, we have Romney’s relationship to the
budding anti-interventionist movement in the GOP. Back in the days of
Bush I, that movement was just beginning to form: the Buchanan campaign,
for all its faults, was the necessary precursor to
Ron Paul’s recent challenge to the party Establishment. Unlike Bush
I, however, Romney never reconciled himself to the insurgents, in this
case the Paulians: instead, he made an attempt to co-opt them by securing
the
support of Paul’s
overly ambitious son and pushing through
rules changes in the party’s nominating process that would nip future
Paulian-type insurgencies in the bud. In addition, the Romneyites
purged
Paul’s delegates in a number of states, in spite of their being duly
elected and, to add insult to injury, they
refused to count Paul’s votes in the official roll call, making him
an official “un-person.” How low can you go?
With Romney confirming my early prediction that the Republicans are
deliberately throwing the election, the neocons are on their way to
completely discrediting themselves politically. With that accomplished,
Republican politicians such as Rand Paul,
Justin
Amash, and others coming up in the ranks, who question the
war-all-the-time “foreign policy” dogma that has dominated the GOP since
the cold war era, will have much more space to advance their previously
heretical views. In the context of the past decade, the first order of
business for any pro-peace political movement must be the utter
destruction of the neocons’ political machine, which means ending their
influence in the Republican party. With Romney defeated -- in a
landslide, I predict -- the way will be opened to the further growth and
development of the Paulian movement.
Now, remember: by no stretch of the imagination is rooting for a
candidate the same as voting for him. The very idea of giving political
support to Barack Obama, who has not only continued but in many ways
escalated the worst aspects of his predecessor’s administration, is a
non-starter to anyone who values peace and/or liberty.
On the other hand, the reason to root for him over his opponent is
simple, and very similar to Rothbard’s rationale for rooting for Bush I:
he ain’t Romney.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
My libertarian readers may be grumbling, at this
point: but what about Obama’s domestic policies? Isn’t he driving us over
a fiscal cliff and setting us up for a “socialist” welfare state with
Obamacare, etc.?
Again, I refer to the Rothbardian strictures when weighing the pros and
cons of presidential candidates, and Murray was very clear about this:
foreign policy was the main determinant. The President, after all, has
minimal control of what comes out of Congress, and his role in
determining our course on the home front is very far from omnipotence:
Bernanke has more actual clout than Obama does. When it comes to foreign
policy, however, the President wields absolute control. He can take us to
war on a whim.
Secondly, and this is really the key argument, a candidate’s foreign
policy views are the key to understanding his entire philosophy of
governing. In spite of all the guff about “smaller government” and
“deregulation,” the Republicans forget their rhetorical commitment to
“freedom” in the abstract when it comes to allegedly protecting the
“national security.” Should we be locking people up without trial and in
secret, including American citizens? The neocon-led “small government”
Republicans say
yes, yes, a thousand times yes. That’s because their love of war
trumps their alleged love of liberty.
Not that Obama hasn’t gone beyond even Bush II’s depredations against the
Constitution, as
Glenn Greenwald has been so good about underscoring. The difference
is that, rhetorically, the Obamaites are forced to pay lip service to
civil liberties, for purely political reasons, quite aside from their
actual record. To the neocons, disdain for civil liberties in wartime is
a matter of high
principle, to be flaunted on every possible occasion: for today’s
liberals, i.e. Obama supporters, it’s their secret shame.
This contempt for human freedom applies not only to matters like
government spying on citizens, but also inevitably carries over to the
economic realm: in spite of the Republicans’ formal commitment to “less
government,” the expenditures required to carry out their foreign policy
of perpetual war ensure the expansion of the size and power of
government, and its growing involvement in every aspect of our lives. Our
interventionist foreign policy and the even-more-interventionist policy
championed by Republican hawks means more money in Washington’s pocket,
and less in the pockets of ordinary Americans. It means power continues
to be transferred from the people and the states to the lords of the
District of Columbia. Maintaining our overseas empire
means
more money-printing, more inflation, higher prices, the death of the
American dollar and the death of the ostensible Republican agenda of
“less government.”
Rothbard
understood
this: that’s why, back in the day, he joined the League of
Stevensonian Democrats, and actively campaigned for Adlai Stevenson for
President, based on the candidate’s support for a Nuclear Test Ban
Treaty. Rothbard argued that the warmongering Republicans, given the
opportunity, would soon turn the cold war hot. And indeed it did hotten
up considerably, with both parties competing to see which one could
warmonger more relentlessly and effectively. With the “isolationist”
Robert A. Taft and his followers cheated out of the 1952 nomination by
the Eastern (i.e. Wall Street) Establishment, Rothbard and his fellow
“Old Rightists” were justifiably bitter, and aligning with Stevenson, the
prototypical liberal “egghead,” underscored the dilemma of politically
homeless libertarians of that era. In any case, you can read all about it
in my biography of Rothbard,
An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard,
published by Prometheus Books in 2000, and still in print.
For
Rothbard,
who forged an independent libertarian movement at a time when
libertarianism was often confused with conservatism, the State’s ability
to dominate and tyrannize over its subjects was epitomized by its ability
to commit mass murder. For him, this was the symbol and summation of all
that statism represented, and had to be opposed to the bitter end even
if it meant aligning with the hated lefties and other “subversives” who
were the cold war’s Muslims.
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/09/30/race-for-the-white-house-2012-whom-to-root-for/
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