I only have a few more months to speak as a "youth" before I turn thirty. After that point, I'll be on the other side of the looking glass, lavishing praise on "the future of our movement" while my mind and body decline into senescent irrelevance. Okay, not really. I'll surely get old, of course. But I consider the artificial delineation of people into chronological identity groups to be one of the less obvious, more insidious ways that Modernity has undermined our worldview and crippled us as a people.

Our society's one in which we attend school in chronologically defined "classes", relocate to special age-delimited dorms when we come of age, and get carted away to grimy nursing homes to hide our suffering and death from our more youthful family members. Even our churches, those supposed outposts of tradition, segregate youths into special "youth groups" that deliver a more hip, modern, and casual relationship with a less judgmental God than our parents worship.

I do spend my money on different things now than I did when I was a teenager, and my spending habits will evolve in predictable ways as I age. To the marketplace, my age is much more relevant than my race, my ethnicity, my religion, my politics, or my personality. Personally, I resent being defined by my age—even while it remains flattering. It seems to me that people who wouldn't dare define themselves by their ancestors or ethnicity are quick to carry on at length about their "generation", reveling in generational identity cues in the same way healthy human beings would revel in the identity cues of their families, communities, and congregations.

I watched My So-Called Life when it originally aired on MTV, and will always have a special place in my heart for Claire Danes. I listened to Pretty Hate Machine with headphones on, played Nirvana Unplugged in my bedroom while writing bad poetry, and (with the notable exception of the notoriously difficult Lost Levels) have played and won every major Mario Bros. title. To some extent, those things do define me. But I would prefer to be defined by the family and community I'm from. My late grandfather never watched MTV and my father imbibed a different decade's pop culture, but I cling to the belief that I'm more similar in more important ways to them than I am to random cohorts in my age demographic.

Based on what the media had told me all my life about my coevals, I had always assumed I was entirely out of step with my generation. But a funny thing happened on the way to the new world order: part of my generation started speaking for itself. Part of my generation has left the establishment speechless by rallying in support of Ron Paul. The septuagenarian contrarian has managed to leapfrog the Baby Boomer generation altogether to forge a fanatical majority of young conservatives without any of the puerile pandering to "Young Republicans" that the GOP establishment has been floundering at for years.

How could it be that a subset of the population raised on an exclusive diet of self-esteem boosting happy talk, big government propaganda, and multicult mythologizing is turning en masse to an old White guy who's closer to John Birch than Jon Stewart? Libby Copeland, one of the feminists in Slate's menstrual hut, is trying to dismiss this phenomenon with a confused theory that Ron Paul's message attracts young men because they're politically unrefined rubes who gravitate to simplistic ideas.

The notion that this year’s election is a choice between freedom (in the form of Paul) and tyranny (in the form of any other candidate) encapsulates Paul’s grand appeal to men in their late teens and 20s: He traffics in absolutes. Political scientists point out that age and newness to politics predispose young voters to a less nuanced view of the political world. They’re less likely to take the long view, less likely to have patience, less likely to spin out the implications of their political theories.

Do any political scientists subscribe to my hypothesis that young women's disproportionate support of Barack Obama in the previous election was due to the vapors? Of course not. These "scientists" who peddle broad and disparaging gender stereotypes only do so in the anti-male direction. The political scientist in question, Peter Levine, is the author of "Young, Black, and Voting", "The Civic Engagement of Young Immigrants: Why Does it Matter?", and an amateurish novel in which his protagonist outwits nefarious Nazi scientists. He is a veritable caricature of Prof. Kevin MacDonald's Culture of Critique, and the notion that he's willing or able to objectively judge the voting, mating, or migratory habits of his historical nemeses—White males—is laughable.

Libby Copeland paradoxically condemns Dr. Paul's popularity and growing support base as mere branding because—wait for it . . .—he insists that his supporters immerse themselves in an extensive reading list of political and economic theory!

Unlike supporters of, say, Obama or Mitt Romney, Paul supporters tend to talk about an absolute truth, one that others would see, too, if they could just be persuaded to read certain materials. Among them: Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. These, of course, come from Paul, who gives an exhaustive list of recommendations at the back of what he calls his “manifesto.” [. . .] To the extent that voters try to communicate who they are through their candidate affiliation, Fairleigh Dickinson’s Cassino believes that what Paul offers more than any other Republican candidate is compelling branding.

Ron Paul is the anti-branding candidate, having actually made a point to eschew opportunities to deliver catchy sound bites and slick branding in favor of long-winded diatribes and relentless grassroots hustling.

“The Ron Paul brand is actually relatively intellectual,” Cassino says. It’s “A brand that’s about, ‘I’m smarter than you are.’ . . . ‘All the politicians are telling you one thing but I know better.’ ” This is the brand for those who feel different, who see themselves as a little bit brainier and more marginalized than everyone else. “If you’re playing Dungeons and Dragons, this is your political movement,” Cassino says.

Oh, snap! Copeland's article is one big desperate attempt to drag Ron Paul down to the same level as the majority of mainstream politicians from both the left and right. 'Sure, he seems intellectual, but that's empty posturing and it's really about subcultural status cues!' Frankly, it smacks of projection. By attempting to imagine what could possibly compel somebody to vote for somebody as extreme as Ron Paul, they betray a bit too much about what compels them to behave as they do. Ron Paul's supporter's aren't vapid hipsters self-consciously preening their political perspectives to achieve the adulation of their peers. They're men of my generation who are calling "bullshit" on the triumphalism and happy talk the Baby Boomer generation wallows in.

Men of my generation do share a thing or two in common due to our collective experiences. We were subjected for the first half of our lives to a school system that bloated our self-esteem with unwarranted praise and inflated our optimism with empty promises. Then the twin towers imploded on us. Then one sector of the economy after another imploded on us while our experts and educators insisted that everything was hopeful and changing for the better. More than anything, we've been longing for somebody on the national stage to level with us about how bad we suck, how disastrously off-course we've gone as a society and a nation, and how hope and change can only be had in exchange for deep and painful sacrifices and a radical realignment of priorities.

As a Radical Traditionalist, I reject Ron Paul's libertarian ideology as a misguided doubling down on the very mercantile morality that got us into this mess in the first place. I disagree with Ron Paul and his supporters on the scope and nature of the problem, but he has--more than anybody else on the national stage--embodied the deep visceral reaction to decades of pandering and pampering we've endured while it all falls apart around us. He has managed to become the voice of my generation because he's the last of a dying breed of men who roamed this country before this dark age of impenetrable arrogance, pandering to demographic focus groups, and all the happy talk. Our support for Ron Paul is the predictable "blowback" from decades of insufferable and irresponsible happy talk.

Back in 2008 I was excited about Ron Paul’s candidacy in the then forthcoming presidential elections.

His formula appealed to my individualism and my loathing for the system of fiscal predation and debt slavery. I also liked his rejection of neo-conservative foreign policy and his apparent rejection of America’s colonisation by Third World peoples.

I did not think he would fix everything, but he seemed a step forward.

Things look different in 2012.

I now think a Ron Paul presidency would accelerate existing trends, even if he successfully reformed the monetary system and ended America’s foreign wars.

Abolishing the Federal Reserve, rebasing the dollar, and ending wasteful wars, and government programmes would be a good step towards putting the American economy on a sounder footing.

To truly achieve this, however, he would have to decree a debt amnesty and institute a neo-mercantilist economy based on savings, investment, manufacturing, and exports.

And this, whether because of ideology or because of its impracticability, I doubt he would be able to do. At least within his allocated four years.

Yet this is not the main problem.

The main problem is the fact that, as a rationalist believer in free markets and sovereign individualism, he represents not fundamental change, but rather a more pure expression of the worldview that led the United States to its present predicament.

Americans suffer today not because they abandoned these values, but because they pursued them like no one else.

Ron Paul has grass-roots support because in American terms he is traditional. On the surface, his outlook is materialistic and secular, and the latter would appear untraditional; but this is not so, for his is a materialist theology, and in this sense he is consistent with both the English ethic of capitalism and Karl Marx, with whom he shares a common ideological origin.

Moreover, we can also conceive his campaigning brand of economism as a form of evangelical puritanism.

Ron Paul’s quantitative conception of life relies on rational arguments and empirical evidence, not on transcendent authority or spirituality, or millenarian tradition.

The modern secular bias may see this as a strength, but it is a weakness: arguments can be defeated with other arguments, data with other data. It is always possible to produce both abundantly in support of any point of view, irrespective of their relationship with the empirical world.

The radical Left has been doing this successfully for decades and having the data against has made no difference to the reigning intellectual paradigm.

Many think Ron Paul is anti-establishment because he attacks the Federal Reserve and wants to reduce the size of government. This is to ignore that the establishment has multiple facets, and his represents one that looks like change simply because it has not been dominant for a while and the popular imagination associates it with a time of prosperity.

And I say imagination, rather than memory, because many of Paul’s supporters are young and they were not around when government was small, money was sound, and taxes were low.

Many have turned to Ron Paul because, believing him to be anti-establishment, he is appealing in a time of instability, when it is clear the dominant paradigm has failed.

Yet, like Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, Ron Paul’s quantitative, rationalist, individualist outlook makes sense only in prosperous, stable, racially homogeneous societies.

In times of austerity, instability, and racial heterogeneity it poses an existential threat because the collectivism and authoritarian bias of competing non-White groups enable them better to exploit the opportunities opened to them by crises and uncertainty.

The White man wants to have a civilised reasoned debate, but neither Blacks nor Hispanics are interested in that.

As Jared Taylor amply illustrated in White Identity, Blacks want and practice Black Power, Hispanics want and practice Brown Power—legal or illegal, logical or illogical, whatever advances their cause, rationality, civility, equality, constitutionality, history, or logical consistency be damned.

What is more, the Anglo-American White is an island, fiercely concerned with his independence. He resists group memberships and when he does accept them they are always loose, distant, contingent, expedient relationships based on legal, contractual, or philosophical abstractions. In contrast, the coloured man from everywhere else is much more ready to combine with others of his kin, and the relationship is nearly always essential, biological, inescapable, not soluble through argumentation.

In times of crisis and uncertainty, Whites argue with each other, while the 'wretched of the Earth' unite against them.

Worse still, in times of crisis and uncertainty, people have demonstrated quite willing and capable of sacrificing freedom in exchange for security.

Thus, crises and uncertainty benefit whoever is more rigid, harsh, and intolerant, since authority and strength, or at least its appearance, provide a sense of security, and security is always preferable to uncertainty even when that security is unpleasant.

With his grandfatherly manner, open, free-for-all proposition, Ron Paul’s ideological purity would be no match for the brutal disturbances ahead.

In fact, since the crisis we face already means every White man for himself, squared, Paul would sanction the very condition that opens the way for a more frank and ruthless level of racial and economic predation.

It would be every White man for himself, cubed.

And every coloured man for his collective, also cubed.

In some ways, the Ron Paul phenomenon represents an act of denial: the tacit wish that things are not as far gone as they seem and that by electing the right Republican candidate, a return to traditional American values of small government, sound money, free markets, and sovereign individualism will put America back on course. It also represents the erroneous belief that America has ended up where it is because it went off course, when in reality it is where it is because it is exactly on course.

What we are witnessing is not a deviation, but a fulfillment of potentialities that go back even before the founding of the Republic.

Having said this, Americans desiring change would do well not to ignore Ron Paul or the tactical value of his campaign, for with his grass-roots support he offers an opportunity to attack the system from within, even if he represents a puritanical expression of the system.

The attacks on him by establishment opponents amount to more than a squabble between two Leftist factions, even if that is what it is, for they imply a recognition by the reigning establishment faction that he represents the thin end of a wedge able to operate on an area of shared discontent between an ill-informed public and the non-authorised, alternative Right.

The Ron Paul campagin against the Fed, war on Iran, neo-conservatism, big government, and the nanny state provide popular, socially acceptable critiques that contribute to weaken and discredit the dominant faction. In turn, he provides a popular but weak alternative made inappropriate by the ever-worsening crisis.

The reigning faction both fails to understand how Ron Paul could benefit them in the long run and fears, correctly, that a free-for-all opens the way for fundamental change in our direction. After all, free-for-all conditions, laissez faire competition, also opens the way for non-authorised factions to act without restriction.

From this standpoint Ron Paul offers both denial and possibility.

Ron Paul has a real chance of winning next week’s Iowa caucuses. And not surprisingly “the Smearbund” (as Murray Rothbard termed it) has returned—along with discussion of those newsletters, which have haunted the Congressman for 15 years.

The GOP establishment will tolerate Paul so long as he remains a folksy and charming long-shot. (He’s even useful in that he keeps Constitution-thumping die-hards within the Republican fold.) But the second it looks like the man might actually win, the gloves come off.

To be sure, most of the smears of Paul’s brand of Old-Right libertarianism are unfair and ungrounded; and they usually amount to a variation on theme—“You don’t want to invade [Insert Middle Eastern Country], ergo you endorse [Insert cruel dictator]! Such logic is invariably accompanied by allusions to Hitler, “the lessons of Munich,” yadayadayada. (This past week Dorothy Rabinowitz shrieked that Paul is a “propagandist for our enemies.”)

That being said, the claim that Paul’s newsletters from the ‘90s are “racist” (at least as that word is commonly defined) is, in fact, quite fair.

One can defend most of what is written on libertarian, non-racial grounds, as Justin Raimondo did in his powerful 2008 piece from Takimag. But the fact remains that the newsletters were “racist” in the sense that race is real—it has a remarkable analytic and predictive capacity—and the newsletter authors (whoever they might be) were willing to “go there.”

Sadly, Ron Paul seems to have flipped on immigration: 

VDARE's "Washington Watcher": 

Congressman Ron Paul’s apparent entry into the presidential race will certainly be welcomed by many on the anti-Establishment “Alternative Right”. Paul’s heterodox views on foreign policy and the Federal Reserve, along with his consistent opposition to government spending, had earned him an army of loyal supporters since before his long-shot presidential campaign in 2008.

(Indeed, VDARE.com columnist and patriotic immigration reform leader Rev. Chuck Baldwin has just proclaimed: “The Tea Parties Now Have Their Man.”)

VDARE.com wrote extensively about Ron Paul’s mixed but interesting immigration record during the 2008 campaign, including an interview he did with Peter Brimelow. Back then we noted that he was generally good on the issues of amnesty, sovereignty, welfare for illegal aliens, and above all birthright citizenship (of which very few professional politicians had then heard). He was bad on E-Verify and Real ID. And his positions on legal immigration were disturbingly vague.

But as the 2008 campaign wore on, it became clear that Paul had no idea how to use the immigration issue, with the result that the chameleon Mike Huckabee and the amnestiac John McCain(!!) regularly outpolled him among self-reported immigration patriots—greatly to the disgrace of his campaign managers.

Since the presidential primaries, Paul has been virtually silent. His post-campaign book, The Revolution, did not mention immigration at all.

{snip}

Now, at last, Paul has finally given a comprehensive discussion of his views on immigration—in his latest book Liberty Defined, where he lists his positions on fifty different issues.

But what he—or the left-libertarian faction that seems to have his ear/ byline after the strange death of Rothbardian paleolibertarianism—actually says about the issue of immigration is a profound, and in fact tragic, disappointment.

Ominously, Paul begins by trying to triangulate between the Open Borders Left and a non-existentrestrictionist straw man.

Thus his immigration chapter opens: “There seem to be two extreme positions on immigration: completely closed borders and totally open borders.”

Bunk! No patriotic immigration reformer want a “closed border.” We want a secure border—where we control who comes in and does not. No-one wants to get rid of tourists, cross-border commerce, or even all legal immigration. We just want to keep out drugs, illegal aliens, and terrorists out, while limiting and selecting the inflow of legal immigrants.

Paul’s triangulation continues:

"One side says use the US Army, round them up ship them home.  The other side says give them amnesty... The first choice—sending twelve to fifteen million illegals home—isn't going to happen and shouldn't happen…if each case is looked at separately, we would find ourselves splitting up families and deporting some who have lived here for decades, if not their entire life, and who have never lived for any length of time in Mexico. This would hardly be a Good Samaritan approach to the problem. It would be incompatible with human rights."

Baloney! Far from offering a “third way” between the Left and Right, Paul sounds exactly like both Barack Obama and the GOP establishment:

• Newt Gingrich told a group of Hispanic Republicans last December: "We are not going to deport 11 million people. There has to be some zone between deportation and amnesty." [Newt Gingrich wants immigration overhaul, by Kendra Marr, Politico, December 2, 2010]

• Obama told an audience at American University last July:

“If the majority of Americans are skeptical of a blanket amnesty, they are also skeptical that it is possible to round up and deport 11 million people.  They know it’s not possible.  Such an effort would be logistically impossible and wildly expensive.  Moreover, it would tear at the very fabric of this nation—because immigrants who are here illegally are now intricately woven into that fabric.  Many have children who are American citizens.  Some are children themselves, brought here by their parents at a very young age, growing up as American kids, only to discover their illegal status when they apply for college or a job”

[Remarks by the President on Comprehensive Immigration Reform, Whitehouse.gov, July 1, 2010]

To his discredit, Ron Paul echoed Obama all the way down to the clichés about splitting up families and children without Mexican roots.

James Antle has more.  

The rumors are true: this afternoon, Ron Paul will announce that he’s running for president.

I think most AltRight readers would agree that Ron Paul and his platform are hardly The Answer to our problems . . . Moreover, for his 2008 run, Paul hired a bumbling, tone-deaf, and strategically inept staff, and there’s no reason to believe that they learned anything from their mistakes. (Paul would be wise to simply allow his talented and energetic grassroots to do everything for his campaign: ads, macro-strategy, fundraising (which they did last time anyway), and even the writing of talking points for debates and such. His hired staff will be busy enough getting him on the primary ballots.)

All this being said, Ron Paul’s candidacy is a good thing. And though I can’t endorse him in my institutional capacities, as an individual, I will be rooting him on over the next year or so.

In electronic conversations Tom Piatak, Grant Havers, and I attempted to figure out why Jonah Goldberg posted his recent idiocy, proclaiming the Civil Rights Act to be a bulwark of economic freedom and scolding Rand Paul as an ally of Southern bigots. One not necessarily wrong but insufficient reason for this rambling diatribe is that Jonah is an incoherent suck-up, like Ross Douthat and David Frum, someone who fawns on the liberal establishment when he's not posing as its critic. Significantly, Douthat and Goldberg both began their tirades against Rand Paul by saying reasonable things: in one case that Ron and Rand Paul may have been influenced by paleoconservative associations; and in Goldberg's case, that Rand Paul was expressing reservations about the scope of the Civil Rights Act once held by perfectly respectable statesmen. The two columns then lurch off into vitriolic attacks on Rand Paul, linking him to racism, anti-Semitism and other obscene practices. Needless to say, the allegations are never proved, and the minicon attack dogs rely on broad accusations, which obviously play well with the (predominantly Jewish) liberal media.

But without denying that the gratuitous attacks are intended to accommodate the media establishment, it seems to me that there is more at stake here. I can't imagine that anyone but engaged leftists and civil rights lobbyists would care much about Paul's critical thoughts from a distance of many decades about the Civil Rights Act, given the fact that, as Goldberg admits, the act is not likely to be revoked. Paul's objection, moreover, was painfully qualified, as Goldberg explains in the first half of his column.            

FrumForum's correspondent Alex Knepper is punching above his weight again ... so to speak ... this time, he's attacking the Mises Institute as the "anti-Semitic" "spawn of Murray Rothbard." The Poly Sci major at American U., who's dispensed with the tedium of research, has put forth a thesis that's quite bold and original -- Lew Rockwell, Thomas Woods Jr., and Ron Paul are "anti-trade." That this article was published speaks to the editorial rigor at David Frum's webzine.  

Kneppert also claims that LewRockwell.com publishes "racist" material...  From my standpoint, he missed the opportunity to bring up the fact that many Austrian School economists are (or were) immigration restrictionists. Indeed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe makes the strong case, in Democracy: The God That Failed, that restriction flows naturally from a society based on private property and that "free" immigration is actually intellectually incompatible with libertarianism, properly understood.

Anyway, it's not worth anyone's time to refute Alex Kneppert's smear, but, I do think it'd be helpful to explicate a few reigning Myths of the Minicons, which they repeat over and over again at the various movement gatherings I've attended and on websites like FrumForum. (I'm sure this blog will need to be updated many times, as I somehow keep ending up at movement events.)