Some Sarah Palin-endorsed Republican women did well last night, revealing once again the importance of the Tea Parties. But one shouldn't underestimate the power of Southern black people voting for the Democrat listed alphabetically at the top of the ballot. Exhibit A -- Alvin Greene: 

An unemployed 32-year-old black Army veteran with no campaign funds, no signs, and no website shocked South Carolina on Tuesday night by winning the Democratic Senate primary to oppose Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). Alvin Greene, who currently lives in his family's home, defeated Vic Rawl, a former judge and state legislator who had a $186,000 campaign warchest and had already planned his next fundraising event. Despite the odds, Greene, who has been unemployed for the past nine months, said that he wasn't surprised by his victory. "I wasn’t surprised, but not really. I mean, just a little, but not much. I knew I was on top of my campaign, and just stayed on top of everything, I just—I wasn't surprised that much, just a little. I knew that I worked hard and did," Greene said in an interview.

Greene insists that he paid the $10,400 filing fee and all other campaign expenses from his own personal funds. "It was 100 percent out of my pocket. I’m self-managed. It’s hard work, and just getting my message to supporters. I funded my campaign 100 percent out of my pocket and self-managed," said Greene, who sounded anxious and unprepared to speak to the public. But despite his lack of election funds, Greene claims to have criss-crossed the state during his campaign—though he declined to specify any of the towns or places he visited or say how much money he spent while on the road.

"It wasn’t much, I mean, just, it was—it wasn’t much. Not much, I mean, it wasn’t much," he said, when asked how much of his own money he spent in the primary. Greene frequently spoke in rapid-fire, fragmentary sentences, repeating certain phrases or interrupting himself multiple times during the same sentence while he searched for the right words. But he was emphatic about certain aspects of his candidacy, insisting that details about his campaign organization, for instance, weren't relevant. "I'm not concentrating on how I was elected—it's history. I’m the Democratic nominee—we need to get talking about America back to work, what's going on, in America."

The oddity of Greene’s candidacy has already prompted speculation from local media about whether he might be a Republican plant. But Greene denies that Republicans or anyone else had approached him about running. "No, no—no one approached me. This is my decision," he said. A 13-year military veteran, he says he had originally gotten the idea in 2008 when he was serving in Korea. "I just saw the country was in bad shape two years ago…the country was declining," he says. "I wanted to make sure we continue to go up on the right track." But when asked whether there was a specific person or circumstance that precipitated his decision to jump into politics, Greene simply replied: "nothing in particular...it's just, uh, nothing in particular." South Carolina Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler speculated that Greene won because his name appeared first on the ballot, and voters unfamiliar with both candidates chose alphabetically.

Greene has yet to speak to any Democratic officials, either. After filing to run, his campaign went dark. According to this report, he didn’t show up to the South Carolina Democratic Party convention in April and didn't file any of the required paperwork for candidates with the state or Federal Election Commission. When I spoke to him, the state’s Democrats had yet to contact him after his victory was announced.

Greene insists that he's planning to work with state and national officials to ramp up his campaign and raise money "as soon as I can." And he plans on putting his unemployment at the center of his campaign. "I’m currently one of the many unemployed in the state and this country. South Carolina has more unemployed now than at any other time," Greene says. "My campaign slogan: Let's get South Carolina back to work." He adds that he would like to see "one Korea under a democracy."

With a mention by the New York Times's favorite conservative, Ross Douthat, one might surmise that "paleoconservatism" is undergoing a renaissance of sorts. Even Jeb Bush has picked up on the term, as, according to my sources, he recently joked at a New York State Republican convention, in between pronouncing pleasantries en español,

I don't know who the paleocons are, but I think they are the ones with pitchforks who want to take us back to an agrarian economy.

He's right about the pitchforks.

And though I've never suffered from technophobia, I'd much prefer an "agrarian economy" to the post-industrial, Latino service-economy wasteland that Jeb thinks is a sign of America's advancement.

Paleoconservatism -- a hastily assembled, rear-guard action against the neocon ascendancy in the conservative movement -- reached its zenith in the '92 meeting of the John Randolph Club, at which Tom Fleming, Murray Rothbard, and Sam Francis gave command performances. Murray famously announced that the insurgent movement wouldn't just "turn back the clock" -- but break it! With Pat Buchanan, the paleocons could even boast, quite correctly, that they had a presidential candidate of its own.

I've always avoided associating myself with the term, in part for ideological reasons, in part because the movement's time has clearly come and passed, and in part because those now associated with it have gone off in different directions. This said, the conservative wars of the '90s was an important moment in American political history -- and paleoconservatism was (and is) infinitely more interesting and culturally literate than what's on offer at NR, The Weekly Standard, FrumForum, and the rest.

Douthat seems to associate paleoconservatism with the political bloggings of Daniel Larison, which is unfortunate, since Larison is currently staking out a position of being "thoughtful" ... which, as far as I can tell, means publishing long, barely penetrable blog posts dedicated to hair-splitting with various Beltway wonks. Larison also brags of his lack of a coherent ideology, which means that he won't reveal to us what he actually thinks about, say, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which launched the recent "paleocon" dispute. One must surmise, however, that he's very, very "thoughtful" about the issue.

"Paleoconservatism" might be turning into a convenient straw man for the Establishment -- "Eww, look at those reactionary, racist paleos who don't like MLK and want to turn Americans into traditionalist farmers! But this also means that people like Douthat, Frum, and Jeb recognize it as a threat. Being a "paleocon" might, in its current manifestation, begin to represent something like "thinking dangerous, impossible thoughts." And for that, this new paleo-cussword is a hopeful development. Indeed, some of us might want to consider adopting it.

In two articles I could’ve predicted were coming this week Frum Forum worries that Rand Paul will turn minorities away from the Republican Party while Paul Gottfried denounces Republicans for worrying about such a possibility and kissing up to Martin Luther King.

This got me to wondering if pandering to nonwhites on a large scale ever works.  I checked the state by state exit polls of 2008 Senate races to see whether any Republicans were able to capture the all elusive black vote.  Using Senate races is better than presidential election data, where it’s the same person in each state.  Having a wide variety of characters helps us determine whether there’s any candidate or election strategy out there which can cross the racial divide.  Here are the results, going from most to least popular GOP candidates among African-Americans.

Tennessee-Alexander 26%
Kentucky- McConnell 13%
South Carolina-Graham 13% 
New Jersey-Zimmer 13%
Iowa-Reed 10% 
Alabama-Sessions 8%
Texas-Cornyn 8%
Virginia-Gilmore 7%
Mississippi-Cochran 6%
Michigan- Hoogendyk 5%
Georgia-Chambliss 4%
Delaware-O’Donnell 3%
Illinois-Sauerberg 2%
Louisiana-Kennedy 2%
North Carolina-Dole 1%

The first and most obvious question we have to ask is, what did Lamar Alexander do?  His popularity is based on his winning over black women, who were nine percent of the electorate in his state and gave him 30% support.  Black males were only two percent of the Tennessee voting public, and a little algebra tells us that they probably voted around eight percent for Alexander, though CNN apparently didn’t think the sample was big enough to give us any numbers for them.

The New York Times noted Alexander’s success about a week after the 2008 election, telling us that the Senator “had a record of appointing blacks to government and education positions.”  He wasn’t shy in letting the voters know it either, as this ad demonstrates.

One local blogger called the message “After You Vote For Barack Obama, Vote Lamar.”  Alexander also secured the endorsement of the black mayor of Memphis.  It’s worth pointing out too that the Republican was a two term governor and incumbent, giving him all the name recognition one could hope for.

So if a Republican can somehow get liberal black Democrats to vouch for him, appoint a lot of blacks to high places, be the most well known state politician and run against a weak opponent he can sometimes get a massive quarter of the African-American vote.  The question is whether they can do that without demoralizing significant parts of the much larger white electorate.

Update: A commentator writes "May I point out that 'Lamar Alexander' sounds very plausibly like a typical black name?"

I hadn't thought of this.  Imagine the typical Memphis voter hearing all these black voices on the radio praising "our boy Lamar" and all he's done for the community.  It's certainly plausible that many of them thought that he might be "one of us," and not just politically.  I must confess that this certainly works against my name recognition theory, but polls tell us that more than half of Americans can't name their Senators.  I suspect governors are better known, but Alexander was in that position a long time ago.

I'm shocked to hear about Rand Paul's recent caving-in to the liberal-neocon establishment. From the evidence it would seem that our minimal-government senatorial candidate from Kentucky regrets he could not have marched with MLK during the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s. Never mind the fact that vocal opposition to King and to both his tactics and rhetoric extended from National Review (when it was still a recognizably conservative publication) to the New York Times, and from WFB to Will Herberg, and Harry Jaffa. We are now supposed to bow down before all the authorized Civil Rights Icons, and this is especially true for Republicans, whose electoral support among blacks since they began their ritualistic groveling has shrunk from about 10 to two percent. With a little more kowtowing, the GOP and Rand Paul may succeed in driving the numbers even lower.

As for Rand Paul's comment that set off the media hysteria, it was bland enough to have been ignored, if GOP magnates and civil rights leaders had not weighed in. Does Congressman (and House Minority Leader) John Boehner honestly believe that Paul's failure to back every jot in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, including the enforcement of non-discrimination in accommodations in Title I, would cause a mass defection of his otherwise likely voters to the opposition? Will Paul's share of the black vote now shrink because of his seemingly tactless reservation about one title in the Civil Rights Act? How the hell can the GOP get "government off our backs," if Title I and the agency it requires for its enforcement legitimate constant government incursions into the workplace?

John McCain's acceptance speech for the 2008 Republican nomination contained a curious section that few commentators discussed in much detail. (Peter Brimelow was one of the only one I know of.)

A lot of prisoners had it worse than I did. I'd been mistreated before, but not as badly as others. I always liked to strut a little after I'd been roughed up to show the other guys I was tough enough to take it. But after I turned down their offer, they worked me over harder than they ever had before. For a long time. And they broke me.

When they brought me back to my cell, I was hurt and ashamed, and I didn't know how I could face my fellow prisoners. [emphasis added]

McCain claims "they broke me," but in the ellipsis between paragraphs, he leave out what his capitulation entailed and why he felt so "ashamed" around his fellow prisoners...  

When people get to my age (48), we are warned about the wrinkles, the hair loss, and the sleep difficulties, not to mention the price of beer-belly-evasion being eternal vigilance. What we aren’t warned about is a more unfortunate condition still: the embarrassing tendency to drone on in public about events which nine out of every ten hearers are too young to have heard of, let alone to remember.

Sir Harold Nicolson, diarist and George V’s biographer, amazed his readers in 1948 -- upon turning 60 -- by announcing that he was old enough to have seen Tsar Nicholas II, “surrounded by his bodyguard of enormous Cossacks, blessing the [River] Neva.” Similarly, I find myself more and more acquiring a mythic antiquity in young people’s eyes, for no better cause than that I have vivid memories of Nixon’s resignation speech and the Berlin Wall’s collapse. These memories, in turn, set me to thinking about my own undergraduate life, which, unfortunately, is best described in the words by which British poet Philip Larkin summed up his own youth: “a forgotten boredom.”

I should love to possess a Damascene conversion in my résumé, the way David Horowitz metamorphosed from Ramparts head-kicker to shrill neocon without the slightest hint of incongruity, let alone of anything so vulgar as contrition. Sorry, no dice.

In the aftermath of the Rand Paul civil rights controversy a surprising number of self-identified libertarians have endorsed state-restrictions on freedom of association. In essence, the argument is that historical and contextual circumstances can warrant the broadening of anti-discrimination laws to the private sector. This  is not just  a trivial exception to the general libertarian support of strong property rights but also to the view that the *withholding of a benefit* should not be treated as a harm and punished by the state. As a matter of fact, it seems to be an argument that past “crimes against humanity”  and “group rights” should trump peaceful individual choice.

Libertarians who advocate such restrictions on the freedom of association have argued that libertarianism should not be treated as an a-historical set of dogma’s. That is not an unreasonable argument but it is interesting to note that such claims are made by the same people who display a similar kind of dogmatism on the issue of open borders. It appears that dogmatism is more objectionable when it leads to politically incorrect conclusions.

The news of Rand Paul's big primary win (in a randslide) was certainly positive, tempered by his unclear foreign policy message. Now that he finds himself in the general election, the media is starting to ask questions about his views on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Politico reports on his waffling on the CRA:

Moving from the Republican Primary to the general election means, for Rand Paul, addressing a broader set of issues than the anti-tax, anti-spending focus of his campaign.

And while he's answered this question before, I'm not sure he's going to be able to get away with an evasive response to a question today on whether he would have voted for the Americans with Disabilities Act and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination in public places and in the workplace.

Paul has suggested in the past -- and been attacked for suggesting -- that the federal government has no place regulating private business decisions, even on issues like race and accomodations for the disabled, and was pressed on the question -- three times -- on NPR just now:

"What I've always said is, I'm opposed to institutional racism, and I would have -- if I was alive at the time, I think -- had the courage to march with Martin Luther King to overturn institutional racism, ad I see no place in our soc for institutional racism," he said in response to a first question about the act.

"You woul have marched with Martin Luther King but voted with Barry Goldwater?" asked an interviewer.

"I think it's confusing in a lot of cases in what's actually in the Civil Rights Case (sic)," Paul replied. "A lot of things that were actually in the bill I'm actually in favor of I'm in favor of -- everything with regards to ending institutional racism. So I think there's a lot to be desired in the Civil Rights -- and indeed the truth is, I haven't read all through it, because it was passed 40 years ago and hadn't been a real pressing issue on the campaign on whether I'm going to vote for the Civil Rights Act."

Paul explains his position further on the CRA at the one hour mark of this video interview with the editors of the Louisville Courier-Journal. He says he supports the parts of the bill that fought discrimination in the public arena and on public property, but disagrees with telling private business owners what to do. He then goes on a bit of a rant about his admiration for Martin Luther King Jr., and explains how he gets emotional when watching his speeches.

I have no doubt we will begin to see the media paint Paul as a racist, just as they attempted to do to his father. But the reality is that Rand , despite his positives as a candidate, is riven with many of the modern multi-culti pathologies that infect political discourse. Absent from his views on the CRA is any bit of understanding about the major cultural upheaval that resulted from the Act, and absent from his views on MLK is an understanding of the racial redistribution of wealth King advocated. Instead Paul tries to paint him as some anti-government crusader. In the end, I have no doubt that Rand is telling the truth about his views on the CRA; that it merely clashes with his ideological views on private ownership.

At any rate, Rand's clash with the media on the CRA is a healthy reminder of how hard it will be for a real alt-right candidate to infiltrate the PC state.

The title to this piece is a joke, of course, and I am glad that Rand Paul won the Kentucky Republican primary. I would have voted for him if I lived in the Blue Grass state. Paul's victory is also indicative of the power of the Tea Party movement, which originated with his father's 2008 presidential campaign but has taken on a life of its own. 

This said, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Rand secured victory, in part, by earning the endorsement of Sarah Palin, as well as that of RedState.com's terror warrior Eric Erickson. Maybe those two know something we don't? In his major TV spots, Rand promised not to close Gitmo, stated (albeit vaguely) that "fighting back" was the proper response to 9/11, and flashed a lot of images of Military-Industrial-Complex fighter planes soaring through the sky. Though I thought this kind of stuff was on the wane, the GWOT, "standing tall against Islam," and even Christian Zionism still remain integral parts of the identity politics of Red-State Christian white people. If he wins the general, Rand won't be riding into Washington on a wave of antiwar sentiment, and it's likely that many of his voters would feel surprised, if not betrayed, if there's a major Senate debate on attacking Iran, and Rand comes out staunchly against.    

This Essay on the regulation of hate speech and pornography addresses both practicalities and principles. I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate and promote this inequality, and that the uncoerced disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation. [...]

The question I pose is whether there are ways to achieve at least some of the goals of the anti-pornography and anti-hate speech movements without encroaching on valuable and ever more firmly settled First Amendment principles. [...]

In R.A.V., the Court struck down a local ordinance construed to prohibit those fighting words, but only those fighting words, based on race, color, creed, religion, or gender.2 Fighting words long have been considered unprotected expression-so valueless and so harmful that government may prohibit them entirely with- out abridging the First Amendment.3 Why, then, was the ordi- nance before the Court constitutionally invalid? The majority rea- soned that the ordinance's fatal flaw lay in its incorporation of a kind of content-based distinction. The ordinance, on its very face, distinguished among fighting words on the basis of their subject matter: only fighting words concerning "race, color, creed, religion or gender" were forbidden.4 More, and much more nefariously in the Court's view, the ordinance in practice discriminated between different viewpoints: it effectively prohibited racist and sexist fighting words, while allowing all others.5 Antipathy to such view- point distinctions, the Court stated, lies at the heart of the guaran- tee of freedom of expression. "The government may not regulate [speech] based on hostility-or favoritism-towards the underlying message expressed"; it may not suppress or handicap "particular ideas. [...]

Those who have criticized the courts for using the viewpoint neutrality principle against efforts to regulate pornography or hate speech usually have offered one of two arguments. First, some have claimed that such efforts comport with the norm of viewpoint neu- trality because they are based on the harm the speech causes, rather than the viewpoint it espouses.17 Second, and more dramati- cally, some have challenged the norm itself as incoherent, worth- less, or dangerous.l8 Both lines of argument have enriched discus- sion of the viewpoint neutrality principle, by challenging the tendency of such discussion to do nothing more than apotheosize. Yet both approaches, in somewhat different ways, slight the rea- sons and values underlying current First Amendment doc- trine-including the decisions in R.A.V. and Hudnut. The claim that pornography and hate-speech regulation is harm-based, rather than viewpoint-based, has an initial appeal, but turns out to raise many hard questions. The claim appeals pre- cisely because it reflects an understanding of the value of a viewpoint neutrality norm and a desire to maintain it: if pornography and hate-speech regulation is harm-based, then we can have both it and a rule against viewpoint discrimination. [...]

The four approaches are, in order: (1) the enactment of new, or the stricter use of existing, bans on conduct; (2) the enactment of certain kinds of viewpoint-neutral speech restrictions; (3) the enhanced use of the constitutionally unprotected category of obscenity; and (4) the creation of carefully supported and limited exceptions to the general rule against viewpoint discrimination. [...]

In accord with this reasoning, communities should be able not only to impose enhanced criminal sanctions on the perpetrators of hate crimes, but also to provide special tort-based or other civil remedies for their victims. [...] Civil actions involve fewer procedural safeguards for the defendant, including a much reduced standard of proof; as important, they may give greater control to the victim of the unlawful conduct than a criminal prosecution ever can do. Communities therefore should consider not merely the enactment of hate crimes laws, but also the provision of some kind of "hate torts" remedies. [...]

But even if this distinction holds, the hard question remains: should the Court accept pornography or hate speech as a low-value category of expression? The currently recognized categories of low value speech seem to share the trait, as Cass Sunstein writes, that they are neither "intended [nor] received as a contribution to social deliberation about some issue." That definition offers several lessons for any regulation, concededly based on viewpoint, either of hate speech or of pornography. In the case of hate speech, such an ordinance should be limited to racist epithets and other harassment: speech that may not count as "speech" because it does not contribute to deliberation and discussion. [...]

I have suggested in this Essay that the regulatory efforts that will achieve the most, given settled law, will be the efforts that may appear, at first glance, to promise the least. They will be directed at conduct, rather than speech. They will be efforts using viewpoint-neutral classifications. They will be efforts taking advantage of the long-established unprotected category of obscenity. Such efforts will not eradicate all pornography or all hate speech from our society, but they can achieve much worth achieving. They, and other new solutions, ought to be debated and tested in a continuing and multi-faceted effort to enhance the rights of minorities and women, while also respecting core principles of the First Amendment.