The Ron Paul variety of Crank Disease seems to turn clueless but otherwise benign whiteboys into vicious little pricks who lash out at any suggestion that he’s anything short of the Messiah. At the beginning of this month, I idly tweeted something about the racism in Ron Paul’s newsletters and immediately got a backlash from people who weren’t even following me. You would think I’d recommended a flash mob of disemboweling cats.
The desperation that drives liberals to believe in Ron Paul says a lot about the progressive movement over the last thirty years. Ron Paul’s popularity is based a lot on selling cherry-picked quotes to young white men for whom the importance of reproductive rights and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are abstractions. But more importantly, just as the Republicans are so fucking desperate to nominate anyone who’s not a Mormon from Massachusetts that they’ll even give Santorum his fifteen minutes in the spotlight, progressives are desperate to believe in anyone who can lead them out of the wilderness, even if that person’s a conservative.
One of the fundamental problems with progressive movements since the Reagan Era is that we, the people, have let ourselves become convinced that we have no voice. All of the big left-wing pushes over the last few decades have been based around finding that Messiah, the one who will speak for us, the one who will lead us to the Promised Land. It has its roots in the misguided nostalgia for JFK and his so-called “Camelot”; many assassination theorists are driven by the fantasy that had Kennedy lived, we would have been spared the agony of Vietnam, that he would have saved us, despite his history of being a good and loyal Cold Warrior. It’s even present in the idolatry of Martin Luther King, which not only transforms the courageous organizing of thousands of people into passive, sheeplike following of a single man, but erases King’s own words and beliefs by reducing everything he ever said or thought into the Hallmark-like sentiments of “I Have a Dream.”
” Ron Paul: Freedom to Die in the Streets