Ron Paul and Louis Farrakhan - Birds of a Feather?
Ta-Nehisi Coates

In trying to get a handle on the mania around Ron Paul, I've been thinking a lot about another figure who, despite a history of bigotry, once inspired a rabid following by speaking to deep truths. It is first necessary to journey back to the Crack Era -- the late '80s and early '90s -- when the general sense was that the black youth of America had lost their minds. In our cities, young black men were bleeding in the streets. All of us had friends who were dead or jailed. All of our high school classes included at least one young woman who was a mother or about to become one. All the brothers were out.

The need was real. And the man who best perceived that need, Louis Farrakhan, preached bigotry, and headed a church with a history of violence, and had patriarchal and homophobic views. We knew this. Some of us even endorsed it. A few of us debated about it. But, ultimately, we didn't care. Farrakhan -- and his cadre of clean, disciplined black men and modest, chaste black women -- spoke to our deep and inward sense that we were committing a kind of slow suicide, that -- as the rappers put it -- we were self-destructing.

In the late '80s and early '90s, Farrakhan beguiled young African-Americans. At the height of his powers, Farrakhan convened a national meeting of black men on the Mall. (Forgive my vagueness. The number is beside the point. It was a group of dudes.) The expectation among some media was violence. What they got instead was a love-in. I was there. I don't know how to describe the feeling of walking from my apartment at 14th and Euclid, down 16th Street, and seeing black women of all ages come out on the street and cheer. I can't explain the force of that. It defied everything they said we were, and, during the Crack Era, so much of what we had come to believe.

During Farrakhan's peak years, national commentators generally looked on in horror. They simply could not understand how an obvious bigot could capture the imagination of so many people. Surely there were "good" Civil Rights leaders out there, waging the good fight against discrimination. But what the pundits never got was that Farrakhan promised something more -- improvement, minus the need to beg from white people. Farrakhan promised improvement through self-reliance -- a tradition stretching back to our very dawn. To our minds, the political leaders of Black America had fled the field.

As surely as Ron Paul speaks to a real issue -- the state's broad use of violence and surveillance -- which America's political leadership has failed to address, Farrakhan spoke to something real, something unsullied, which Black America's political leadership failed to address, Both Paul and Farrakhan, in their glamour, inspired the young, the disaffected, the disillusioned.

To those who dimly perceived something wrong, something that could not be put on a placard, and could not move the party machine, men such as these become something more than political operators; they become symbols. Substantive charges against them, no matter the reasons, are dismissed. The movement they represent means more. But as sure as the followers of Farrakhan deserved more than UFOs, anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories, those of us who oppose the drug war, who oppose the Patriot Act, deserve better than Ron Paul.

We are faced with a candidate who published racism under his name, defended that publication when it was convenient and blamed it on ghostwriters when it wasn't, whose take on the Civil War is at home with Lost Causers, and whose take on the Civil Rights Act is at home with segregationists. Ostensibly, this is all coincidence, or, if it isn't, it should be excused because Ron Paul is a lone voice speaking on the important issues that plague our nation.

But the dispatches must be honestly grappled with: It must be argued that a man who could not manage a newsletter should be promoted to managing a nuclear arsenal. Failing that, it must be asserted that a man who once claimed that black people were knowingly injecting white people with HIV, who fundraised by predicting a race war, who handsomely profited from it all, should lead the free world. If that line falls too, we are forced to confess that Ron Paul regularly summoned up the specters of racism for his own political gain, and thus stands convicted of moral cowardice.

Let us stipulate that all politicians compromise. But the mayhem and death which attended the talents of Thomas Watson and George Wallace renders their design into a school of sorcery all its own. I do not mean to be unsympathetic here. It is regrettable to find ourselves in this untenable space, where all our politicians cower and we are bereft of suitable standard-bearers. But the fervency for Ron Paul is rooted in the longing for a redeemer, for one who will rise up and cut through the dishonest pabulum of horse races and sloganeering and speak directly to Americans. It is a species of saviorism which hopes to deliver a prophet unto the people, one who will be better than the people themselves.

But every man is a prophet until he faces a Congress.