Antiwar Republican Congressman Ron Paul’s growing popularity in the 2008 presidential race reflects a furor among disenchanted voters at the war in Iraq and the political establishment. Paul’s campaign has broken records with his revolutionary-themed Internet fundraisers, held on the anniversaries of the attempted bombing of the British Parliament and the Boston Tea Party.

Despite his extreme right-wing program on many economic and social issues, Paul’s call for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq have led increasing numbers of antiwar activists to endorse him. This includes Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, editors of the popular left-wing website Counterpunch, who called on Paul to run as an independent presidential candidate in order to provide a “straightforward, uncompromising antiwar voice” in the elections.

As socialists, we agree with the need for a serious independent, antiwar challenge in the 2008 presidential elections. However, despite his opposition to the war and the Patriot Act, much of Paul’s program is thoroughly regressive and represents a right-wing threat to workers, women, immigrants, African Americans, and all oppressed groups in the U.S.

Rather than deserving our support, the Ron Paul campaign is a Trojan horse to pull people genuinely opposed to the war and to the corporate-dominated government behind a racist, pro-capitalist program.

Right-Wing Program
Paul has an extremely reactionary social and economic agenda that cannot just be glossed over. He wants to abolish the minimum wage and repeal the Occupational Safety and Health Act as well as all anti-trust legislation. He claims that these laws, which are the product of massive struggles of workers to gain protection from some of the worst abuses of the capitalist market, are unjust infringements on the sacred rights of private property.

According to his campaign website, “Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence – not skin color, gender, or ethnicity.” Yet the U.S., the world’s leading capitalist country, actually has one of the worst rates of social mobility in the world compared to other advanced industrialized countries with more of a welfare state.

Libertarians like Ron Paul then blame poor and working people for their own problems, rather than the system itself. Such rhetoric of “personal responsibility” cannot explain why they are not climbing the social mobility ladder.

Paul’s call for unregulated capitalism will only lead to a greater concentration of wealth and power into fewer hands and propel the U.S. into further war and poverty.

Paul wants to attack the 14th Amendment to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants born in the U.S. He has praised the Minutemen, an armed anti-immigrant vigilante group, and called for cutting off social services for undocumented immigrants, including access to schools and hospitals.

Paul is also a staunch opponent of welfare and affirmative action. Newsletters issued under Paul’s name in the 1990s regularly featured racist attacks on African Americans, such as “I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city [Washington, DC] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.”

While Paul claims he did not write this, he has become a favorite among white supremacist groups. Stormfront, a neo-Nazi group whose slogan is “White Pride World Wide,” along with other racist groups, have endorsed Paul.

While Paul says he favors privacy, liberty, and individual rights, all this stops when it comes to women’s bodies and homosexuals. As one of the most anti-choice politicians in Congress, he has repeatedly called for the repeal of Roe v. Wade. He also voted against gay adoption in Washington, DC, and argued that states should have the right to establish their “own standards for private sexual conduct,” allowing them to essentially criminalize homosexuality.

Build a Left-Wing Challenge to the Two Parties of Big Business
Still, some argue that Paul’s opposition to the war trumps all these reactionary positions, and therefore the antiwar movement should support his campaign. While this may seem pragmatic, since Paul has managed to generate significant enthusiasm thus far for his antiwar stance, it is profoundly misguided.

It is a mistake for activists and working people to support a libertarian who would turn back the clock on the positive gains of organized labor, women, the LGBT community, and people of color, despite his opposition to the war.

If Paul does run as an independent, as the editors of Counterpunch call on him to do, his campaign will help anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, right-wing forces organize and spread their ideas. It will lower consciousness by falsely blaming the problems of society on “big government” and the “welfare state,” rather than the corporate stranglehold over our society and political system.

Backing Paul is a dead-end for activists who want to stop the war and defend civil liberties, and will only complicate the task of building a genuine alternative to the two parties of war and big business. The support that he has received is an indication of the thirst for a real antiwar alternative in the presidential elections and the dissatisfaction that is building up below the surface of U.S. society.

Today, both Democratic and Republican frontrunners hope to keep the U.S. in Iraq indefinitely. Yet the vacuum of a prominent left-wing campaign has allowed Paul to capture voters hungry for change. This highlights the need for a strong left-wing candidate, independent of the two party system that is based on greed, corruption, and warfare.