Ex Cathedra

I’ve been listening: If we just suffer long enough, we’ll not only have a sound economy, we’ll become better people.

But why are people on the Right such pricks themselves?

Bubbling up to the top of our attention pot now that Rand Paul is in the news: Who Wrote Ron Paul’s Newsletters?

Libertarians in Alabama, a group even more blindingly white than conservatives in Alabama, are huge fans of Llewellyn (Lew) Rockwell.  Libertarianism exalts privilege and the power of wealthy elites, but Rockwell’s brand of elitism now looks like it has strong anti-black, anti-immigrant, and anti-gay components, which would further attract white people in Alabama and might also explain the unfortunate tendency of some  Alabama libertarians to talk approvingly of the white supremacists at Ruby Ridge and to pass along neoconfederate tracts.  One libertarian I know here  seemed to be running for president of the John Wilkes Booth Fan Club. The Rockwell – Mises Institute – Paul family  connection is further evidence of this correlation being more than mere coincidence.

Reason magazine, the northeastern, genteel voice of libertarianism, has quite reasonably tried to put distance between itself and paleolibertarianism, but the paths of influence between Right libertarianism and southern style bigotry have yet to be fully explored.

It used to be the libertarians were the more genteel voice of the extreme Right, despite some unfortunate racist and homophobic postings in Ron Paul’s newsletter.

Now, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch, they’re going full bore angry white guy.

We’re accustomed to thinking of the libertarian Right as smug economic fundamentalists with an inflated sense of their own intelligence.

Here in north Alabama and possibly elsewhere there’s a strong crypto-Kluxer thread in the libertarian Right.