Matt Taibbi: Why I Can’t Vote For Ron Paul
It struck me afterward that the Ron Paul strict-constitutionalist rhetoric is a very convenient mask for the Nixonian “Southern Strategy” racial-resentment politics. You rail against all government intervention, but the real anger is toward affirmative action, welfare, health care, and so on. Before George W. Bush imploded, that sort of thinly-veiled race-baiting politics was mostly the province of guys like Karl Rove and Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes. Once Bush and that brand of Republicanism lost popularity, though, the Southern-white-resentment movement needed to reinvent itself, and one of the ways it did that, I think, was to appropriate the more intellectual-sounding theories and rhetoric of Ron Paul. Instead of bluntly anti-immigrant, anti-minority manipulations like the famous Jesse Helms “white hands” commercial, now we’re just cheering for the Constitution and Freedom and “the Austrian school.”
Love reading Matt Taibbi and agree with him often.
