02/15/08 – John V. Walsh – The Scott Horton Show

I'm Scott Horton and our next guest today is John V. Walsh.
He's a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts and a regular at Alexander Coburn's Counterpunch.
He's also written a couple for Antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, John.
Thanks very much.
Actually, it's a professor of physiology, but that's okay.
Oh, physiology.
Right, right.
Well, what?
I was looking up a different John Walsh in a different department at your same university then.
Okay, I'm going to...
Oh, wow.
No, no.
I just typed...
I just read it wrong, I guess.
That was supposed to be a joke.
It just wasn't funny.
It's a problem.
Anyway, so I got all these fancy ideas about a new political realignment in America.
In my community college government class, they taught me about the different political realignments in America where not necessarily one party fell and was replaced, but at least one party became completely different, that sort of thing.
And for example, in the 1930s and the New Deal, it was never repealed.
When the Republicans took power, they didn't do anything to really roll it back and that's been the consensus since then, that kind of big realignment in American politics.
What I want is a realignment against foreign empire, first and foremost, and obviously right there, tied for first place really, is the preservation of the Bill of Rights.
American political opinion is so divided from not just left and right, but all different kinds of left and right, that it seems like the people who love the empire and don't mind trashing the Bill of Rights, they're all united, and yet those of us in opposition can't seem to get our act together.
And John, I read in your recent article on Counterpunch, shame on us all, the anti-war movement divided and conquered, that you feel about this the very same way I do.
And I'm a plumb line libertarian, and I don't mean to categorize you, but some version of left-winger, right?
Well, actually, I begin to wonder these days what it means to be on the left.
It's not so well-defined anymore, and if I, for example, I think one of the mistakes that the left is making is that, the so-called left, is that they see themselves as having more in common with, say, the Democratic Party, which they may object to in many ways, than they do with independents or libertarians.
But I think if they would pause for a moment and actually think about it, and forget the old stereotypes, they would see they have much more in common with libertarians than they do with the Democrats.
Now they, we may disagree, for example, let's say on national health insurance, okay, just to take that as an example, we may disagree on that, but if somebody from the left were to look at it, honestly, the Democrats don't agree with the left on that anyway, so they're no good there.
On the other hand, if you take a look at civil liberties, and the empire, and war, we disagree with the Democrats on that, and yet, and we agree with the libertarians, so we should be able to get together with the libertarians on that.
In other words, we agree with the libertarians on the most important things, the things on which our survival and our liberty, our freedom, our democracy depends.
We disagree with the Democrats on things that we're supposed to have in common, like national health insurance, so we go with the libertarians, we get something.
We go with the Democrats, we get nothing.
So that is just counter, you know, there's no thought to that.
And I go along with you, I think there is need for realignment, or something like that.
My best example is actually the birth of the Republican Party, I think in 1854, at the beginning of 1854, it didn't exist, in 1856 it ran its first presidential candidate, in 1860 it ran its second, and it won.
So these things can happen very, very fast.
Well, and you know, I think, to the degree that people are actually even really kind of literate in political theory on the mass level, they have sort of this, somewhat vague probably, but it's the modern political spectrum of left and right, where you have Stalin on the left and Hitler on the right, and you're supposed to be somewhere, you know, moderate between them, I guess, is where moderation lies.
It seems to me like the so-called moderates, the centrists, are actually the most extreme and violent of us.
For example, especially in the political party level, John McCain, the liberal Republican, and Hillary Clinton, the conservative Democrat.
These people are killers, and extremely dangerous.
And they're the so-called moderates, they're the centrists.
And what I want to do, is I guess, I want to change in people's popular perception, what the center is.
Those people are extremists.
They might be, you know, the conservative Democrat and the liberal Republican, but really, you know, they're the crazies.
What ought to be in the center is the libertarian halves of the left and right, not the extreme halves of the left and right.
Well, you know, if one looked today, I want to go back to the fundamental question, but if one looks today at, you know, in the late 1980s, early 1990s, people were talking about the peace dividend.
Now all the candidates, all the principal candidates, so far as I know, Obama, Clinton, McCain, they all agree on adding 100,000 more troops to our armed forces.
Of course, already the biggest in the world.
What is the sense of that, if not for an empire?
There's no enemy out there of that magnitude that threatens our existence, and you know, as they say, poses an existential threat.
No such enemy exists.
But they're all gearing up for a bigger war machine and for more empire.
And so, and actually, I was reading this morning about, I was reading Justin Raimondo's column, usually very, I agree with most of what he says, but he seems to hold out some hope for Barack Obama.
And I don't think that's true.
I was reading something, his principal foreign policy advisor is a woman named Samantha Power, and she is a real believer in what you might call humanitarian imperialism.
That is, it's the job of the United States, via military means if necessary, alone if necessary, to go around the world and to establish democracy, protect peoples from what the United States alone calls genocide.
And that is really a setup.
Benevolent imperialism is no better than, I don't know, rough and tumble imperialism.
Call it what you will.
They're both lethal.
And since World War I, and I think the paleoconservatives, or whatever you want to call them, and the libertarians, have put their finger on the problem here since World War I, when Wilson said we were lying through his teeth, that we're going to make the world safe for democracy.
One of the underlying motives that's pushed people towards war is the idea, you know, that we're going to do good, that we're humanitarians, we're a benevolent empire.
Like in that first Gulf War, Bush once had a famous story about the incubator babies that the Iraqis came into Kuwait and threw babies out of the incubators.
We have to protect human life, and we have to protect the world from monsters like that.
It turned out, of course, that was a lie.
And we go on and on like that, with this combination of fear, which the Bush administration seems to like, and do-gooding, which the Democrats seem to like.
But in the end, it's empire-building, and we get nowhere with it.
Wait, wait, hang on one second.
These two both are getting a lot of play this week, and I'm going to go ahead and do it.
You brought it up.
They had kids in incubators, and they were thrown out of the incubators so that Kuwait could be systematically dismantled.
While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns.
They took the babies out of incubators.
Took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor.
I'm sorry.
I especially love the George Bush one about, they took the kids.
You know he's lying right there.
I'm sorry, I just said this in the very last interview, too.
I know that, and actually, that's a very interesting tape.
That woman, she knew she was lying at the time.
Yeah, the president did, too, or else he wouldn't have called them kids.
If he was talking about infant babies, he would have really, you know, if he had meant infant babies in a real situation, he would not have used the word kids.
To me, well, that's his tell to me.
I don't know.
I'm just making that up.
But that's my speculation.
But, of course, that woman, she should get an Academy Award or something because she was able actually to elicit tears when she knew she was lying.
But the point of the article, to go back to the point of the article, you know, what we have here is we have people with a shared commonality and, I guess that's redundant, we have people with things in common on the question of war, empire, and liberties.
We have, and with vast spending on our military machine, and actually with corporate welfare, too.
Those are a lot of things that we have in common.
And yet, we don't, because of views of Social Security or Medicare or tax policy, we can't seem to get together.
And I think especially, my belief is that the so-called left is more guilty of this than the right, because as soon as you say nice words about Ron Paul, the left-wing is all over you.
They, you know, not only is he a cool man that wants people starving in the streets, but he's a Hitler.
He's a Nazi.
It's just, it's almost as though they're afraid of people of their base discovering the libertarians.
And so, now how do you break through that, and how do you get from A to Z?
So I picture something like this.
You ask people, just to take an example, could you settle for a Ron Paul for president?
And many people on the left say, no, no, no, I couldn't do that.
And you ask people, libertarians, could you settle for Ralph Nader for president?
No, no, no, I couldn't do that.
And then you ask, you point to the similarities, and there are huge numbers, but the difference is out, seem to outweigh the similarities, and that serves the war party.
That's how they prevent us from getting together.
And I don't think, you know, the Green Party, for example, is sort of an upper class, well, I don't want to say that, but in many places, it's an upper middle class phenomenon.
In many places, not all.
But there was a meeting of the Green Party here in Massachusetts, and we went out to the center of the state, which is a poor part of the state, very working class, to have a meeting there.
And those are not the kind of people, in my experience, that join the Green Party, very few of them.
But as soon as we got off the highway, there was a huge sign, Ron Paul for president.
Now, some people can be reached through a Green perspective, some people can be reached through a libertarian perspective, but if we could reach them all through a shared perspective, we would be the majority, and we could work out our differences.
I frankly don't know how to do that.
I don't either, because, you know, Ron Paul is the one, I mean, he, you know, people who are particularly consider themselves Greens, they might not completely agree with his environmental perspective of, you know, get rid of the regulations, but make sure to really protect people's property rights in civil court, so that, or even, you know, criminal penalties for people violating each other's rights by polluting on each other's property, that kind of thing.
They might not completely agree with that, but there's so many issues, particularly on the Bill of Rights and the foreign war, and, you know, it seems to me like Ron Paul is the perfect candidate to be that libertarian center.
And you're right, I mean, there are some people on the left, I guess, who have put aside differences to support him, but not that many.
So what you have to do here is, so what people are doing here, as I said in the article, they're playing the game of either, I don't know, they're dealing in theology, not politics, with these rigid ideologies, and you have to, which explain, there's nothing in the world that can be explained by a theory.
There's no, even in, you know, there's a book actually called Humanitarian Imperialism by a Frenchman, Jean Riesemont, I think, excuse my French, maybe I'm getting that wrong.
But he actually is a physicist, and writes on politics, and every physicist knows that except for a few simple situations, which can be very powerful, reality is far too complex to be encompassed by a theory.
And if you can't do that for a stream of water that's tumbling over rocks, how are you going to do it for human society?
And so, to some degree, we have to, I think, step back from our theories and stereotypes a little bit, and say, you know, we're going to work on the problems of the moment that we can deal with, the problems that are the most striking to us right now.
And see, I think that's what Ron Paul was trying to do by putting the Constitution at the forefront, and especially emphasizing federalism, that, you know, if you want to have a very liberal state, isn't it best to set your state free from the national government as much as possible?
And isn't, I mean, haven't, you know, liberals and leftists of all descriptions learned in the last eight years that centralizing power in D.C. ain't necessarily the best way to go?
Can't we agree to decentralize at least?
I think many people, I mean, that is actually, now there's another case, the Greens and the Libertarians agree that smaller is better, that it would, to the degree you can have local government, you're better off.
And we see that, you know, in Washington, D.C., you know, so I'm going to come at this from a different perspective, when I was working very hard for national health insurance, I gave up in Washington, D.C.
I have no way, or very little way, of affecting the power structure there.
At the state level, I have more power.
At the city level, still more.
So, you know, if you're talking about actually, so you might need a federal government for some things, but for the things you don't, that aren't necessary, I don't think you want it because it gets out of control.
And so I think the problem that's set for us is, I think, your word, realignment.
But I don't know, for example, I have friends who read the American Conservative, and I have friends who read The Nation.
Actually, the American Conservative is better, in my opinion.
But they won't read the other magazines, especially the, well, especially the left, it's like there's going to be something in that magazine that's going to infect them forever.
It's like reading something, it's like reading one of Hitler's tracts or something.
And actually, people should read Hitler's tracts, they should know, they should know where those kinds of humans think and how they think.
It's like, it's actually, having been raised a Catholic, it's like in the Catholic Church, there were certain things that you were not allowed to read, there were certain things you weren't even supposed to think about them.
And there is kind of that self-imposed or socially imposed thought control going on here, which we've got to get out of it, otherwise we may blow ourselves up.
Well, and this is why I guess I'm just lucky that I found libertarianism so young that I never had a chance, really, to be a liberal or a conservative, or to really fall in that trap.
So I don't mind reading The Nation or the American Conservative, even though I agree and disagree with both of them on all kinds of different things.
And you know, on this show, the subject is not libertarianism, the subject on this show is our government going around kidnapping, torturing, murdering people, starting wars, pretending the Bill of Rights was never written, that there are no limits whatsoever on their authority, signing statements, the militarization of our local police forces.
And you know, obviously I see libertarianism as the opposite of all of those terrible things, and I try to be a good spokesman for it in a sense, but it's a matter of, like you said, getting our priorities straight.
What's more important?
Stopping the world empire, or bickering over Medicare payments?
So I agree with that.
The real question is how, and I think, you know, if you go back to the war in Vietnam, people remember that Eugene McCarthy ran against Lyndon Johnson in New Hampshire, and that sort of pushed...
Unfortunately, the anti-war movement never ended the war, that's a myth, the United States got defeated, that's the only reason we came home.
But be that as it may, Eugene McCarthy was not the most left-wing of the Democrats.
He was considered something of a moderate, or a maverick, or something.
And he, as a matter of fact, he was not the first person approached, it's not well known that the people who tried to get somebody to run approached Robert Kennedy.
He said, no, I'm loyal to the President.
They approached George McGovern.
He said, no, I'm loyal to the President.
And Eugene McCarthy said, baloney, we're not going to go killing millions of people, I'm not putting my loyalty to my party above my loyalty to humanity, and that's the way he put it.
And unfortunately, there are too many people who don't get that, and who don't have the McCarthy mindset, or actually, he was quoting Daniel Webster before him.
People don't, it's a bad mindset, it's not a mindset, it's a herdset, and somehow we have to break through that.
And I think Anti-War.com, and Counterpunch, and the American Conservative, and Lou Rockwell, and the Future Freedom Foundation, those are the outlets that, to some degree, have constructed at least the beginnings of this conversation, and I'm just sad that I don't think we're going to be able to, that it's going to bear fruit in 2008.
Yeah, well, you know, when you brought up Ron Paul and Ralph Nader earlier, you're just reading my mind over here, because, not that I could get anybody in the world to listen to me, but if I could, I would like to see him go ahead and run with Ralph Nader as his vice presidential running mate, and try to get the nomination of the Libertarian Party, the Constitution Party, and the Green Party.
And then demand that John McCain and Barack Obama, or John McCain and Hillary Clinton, go ahead and join together on one ticket, as the Democratic-Republicans, and then we could actually have a two-party system, where we would have the party of taxes, tyranny, and death, on one side, and then the party of liberty on the other.
Well, you know, I have, a lot of people have thought about that, and of course, the immediate thing you will get is, you know, who's going to be president and who's going to be vice president.
Well, Ron Paul's the one with the money machine going on, and let's go with that.
But I don't think that's really, I don't think that's really very relevant.
Yeah, no, I don't think so either, and you know, Justin, Justin Raimondo, the Libertarian from Antiwar.com, wrote an article in the American Conservative, endorsing Ralph Nader for president in 2004, it was called Old Right Nader, and he said, I went and saw Nader's speech, and all he talked about the whole time was not the evil of business, he talked about the evil of the combination of business with government power, particularly in a state of wartime.
And, you know, I cheered at all the parts where all the left-wingers were looking at him like a dog that's just been shown a card trick and didn't understand what he was talking about, but I knew what he was talking about, and he sounded like Gore Vidal or one of these kind of paleo-liberal types who really do cherish the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the liberalism of America's founders, the real liberalism of America's founders.
I think that's true, that, you know, that Ralph is not, you know, not strictly speaking a left-winger.
He's definitely not a socialist.
He definitely believes in the entrepreneurial spirit and the importance of it.
I think he should maybe enunciate that a little bit more, because I think people would just tend to lump him in.
No, that's unfortunate.
And I think if you go all the way back to his heyday in the 60s, there was some gap between him and the movement that was to be found in the streets, because a lot of it was, I think, farther to the left than Nader.
As a matter of fact, the thing they say about Nader, if you've seen this documentary, An Unreasonable Man, and the main thing you'll see in there is the nastiness of the Democratic Party opposition to him.
What you see in there is a guy who, as they say, believes in it all.
He does believe in the Constitution.
He doesn't want to replace it.
He does believe in the entrepreneurial spirit.
He does want to regulate it.
But that gives us a foundation, really, to build on.
And you know, here's something else about Ron Paul which is very striking on the left, is that they will go after him for being anti-choice.
We can't work with such a person.
But they will work with religious leftists, Catholic activists, who are anti-choice.
So why can't they work with Ron Paul?
You see, there's a deeper fear than just one question or the other.
There's a deeper fear than just he doesn't agree with us on choice slash abortion.
There's something going on there where I think that a lot of these groups should have taken advantage of the end of the Cold War, but they're unable to.
They're too locked in their own beliefs and their own PC attitudes.
It's true for left and right.
I think it's more true for the left.
And somehow, as I say, I don't know how, it would be a dandy thing, a wonderful thing if Ron Paul and Ralph Nader could get together.
And if they haven't talked, then they too should be ashamed of themselves because I think they have an obligation to do that.
And you know, that could really help with the realignment.
You know, Joshua Frank has written some nice things about Ron Paul on Counterpunch as well.
And he told me basically the same thing that you mentioned earlier, that he thinks a lot of these leftist groups are jealous and concerned.
Here Ron Paul is getting all these young people to listen to him as he's preaching strict laissez-faire, absolute laissez-faire capitalism.
And these are groups that want these young people to be listening to them.
And for some reason, even though they are very hardcore anti-war in this time of war, the young people aren't turned on to their message.
Dennis Kucinich did not take off, Ron Paul did.
And that really worries them.
And I guess, you know, I'm trying to agree with you that if he could join up with Ralph Nader, that maybe that could neutralize some of that.
And of course it could also neutralize the idea that, oh, it's Ron Paul's fault that Hillary Clinton won because he hurt the Republican candidate kind of thing.
If there's a Ralph Nader as his running mate, as vice president or the presidential, whichever, then that neutralizes that argument, that he's hurting only one party over the other as a spoiler, that kind of thing.
And then the Ron Paul revolution continues, get the best of the left and the best of the right to coalesce around a libertarian like Ron, and then what?
I don't know.
And then the other thing is all this stuff about getting the ideas right, then what do we do?
Form, you know, a giant pact to get guys elected to the House of Representatives or what?
Well, I think what, I think if, in terms of the interesting thing about a presidential election is that the president really has power over the things that both the libertarians and the left agree on.
He has power over the Justice Department, over the Department of Defense, over foreign policy, over the FBI, over the CIA, which Ron Paul says should be abolished.
That's a great thing to come out and say.
So all those things we agree on.
So it doesn't really matter which one of us holds the presidency.
The things we disagree on will have to be settled in Congress.
And when I think that the, one of the things that both libertarians and leftists should do is make sure they have ballot access in all 50 states.
Now I don't know what the libertarians are doing about that this year.
In the past they've been very good.
But both of those parties should have, be able to immediately put candidates on the ballot in all 50 states.
I don't know whether, where we are with respect to that.
But that's a first step.
And actually, you know, once you have that, you become very valuable because the candidate can step forward.
He doesn't have to go through all the legal challenges and all the work of all the signatures.
You know, if you're a billionaire, you can buy it all.
But if you're not, you can't.
And so that really immediately puts in place the substrate for a serious national effort.
And in some places the libertarians might make a breakthrough, in some places the greens might make a breakthrough.
But together it would start to transform the, you know, the political stage.
And so that would be great.
But I don't, so far it hasn't been happening.
And maybe we'll get this conversation.
Yeah.
Well.
So could I thank you?
If I don't, I, if I'm not, if I'm not, if I'm not in class in a few moments, my students may have me fired.
Oh no.
Well, I was actually just about to say thank you.
But so there you go.
John V. Walsh, he's a physiology professor at the University of Massachusetts and a regular at Counterpunch.
Thank your students for letting you run a little bit late for me.
Thank you for having me on.
It was fun.