Ramzpaul: Life As American Political Dissident

Watch the video.

Ramzpaul’s exile and relocation to Hungary for his heretical rejection of Americanism is directly related to this:

“Over the last year or so, though, it’s become increasingly clear to me that one of the great tides of American politics has turned and is flowing out to sea. For almost precisely two hundred years, this country’s political discourse has been shaped—more powerfully, perhaps, than by any other single force—by the loose bundle of ideas, interests, and values we can call American liberalism. That’s the tide that’s turning. The most important trends shaping the political landscape of our time, to my mind, are the descent of the liberal movement into its final decadence, and the first stirrings of the postliberal politics that is already emerging in its wake. …

Three major social issues formed the framework around which the new movement coalesced. The first was the abolition of slavery; the second was the prohibition of alcohol; the third was the improvement of the legal status of women. (The movement traversed a long and convoluted road before this latter goal took its ultimate form of legal and social equality between the genders.) There were plenty of other issues that attracted their own share of attention from the movement—dietary reform, dress reform, pacifism, and the like—but all of them shared a common theme: the redefinition of politics as an expression of values.

Let’s take a moment to unpack that last phrase. Politics at that time, and at most other periods throughout human history, was understood as a straightforward matter of interests—in the bluntest of terms, who got what benefits and who paid what costs. Then and for most of a century thereafter, for example, one of the things that happened in the wake of every Presidential election is that the winner’s party got to hand out federal jobs en masse to its supporters. It was called the “spoils system,” as in “to the victor belongs the spoils;” people flocked to campaign for this or that presidential candidate as much in the hope of getting a comfortable federal job as for anyother reason. Nobody saw anything wrong with that system, because politics was about interests. …

Values, in the thought of the time, belonged to church and to the private conscience of the individual; politics was about interests pure and simple.

Newborn American liberalism, though, rejected the division between politics and values. Their opposition to slavery, for example, had nothing to do with the divergent economic interests of the industrializing northern states and the plantation economy of the South, and everything to do with a devoutly held conviction that chattel slavery was morally wrong. Their opposition to alcohol, to the laws that denied civil rights to women, to war, and to everything else on the lengthy shopping list of the movement had to do with moral values, not with interests. That’s where you see the impact of the movement’s Protestant heritage: it took values out of the church and tried to apply them to the world as a whole. At the time, that was exotic enough that the moral crusades just mentioned got about as much political traction at the time as the colorful fantasies of the 1960s did in their own day. …”

That’s exactly it!

We’re strangers in the “mainstream” American political landscape. It is because we think in terms of interests, not values.

Why is it in our interests to become a despised, persecuted minority in our own lands? Why is it in our interests to admit a million Syrian refugees into this country? Why is it in our interests to support civil rights laws which have destroyed our great cities? Why is it in our interests to fight all these stupid foreign wars and to defend the borders of foreign countries like Ukraine and South Korea, but not our own border?

But but … muh values, says the mainstream Right and Left! Don’t you believe in “American exceptionalism”? Don’t you believe in Freedom, Equality, Tolerance, Human Rights, and Progress? Don’t you recite the catechism of the Declaration that “all men are created equal”?

In this country, you can’t just say: no, not really, I don’t believe in your hoary bromides and shopworn values. I believe in facts, reality, empirical evidence and the pursuit of my interests. If you show the slightest doubt in Freedom or Equality, you are tagged EVIL and WICKED and banished into social and political exile.