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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
but they have fallen for the claptrap the right has been spewing forth for years about how the "guvmit" is always the enemy. Just dismantle the laws, services, and agencies that are necessary to operate a modern, functioning society and see what happens. I guess that would be the hard way for Americans to learn just how important government is, but we would all suffer, as several previous commentors have ably pointed out -- those few who are not Paul-worshippers on this thread.
Paul would throw the baby out with the bathwater. As our neighbors in Europe demonstrate, however imperfectly, you can have rational government, offering health and human services, and still have freedom and basic civil liberties. This is the message that the right has fought desperately to deny.
The compromise and dull workings of a modern industrial democracy are just not sexy enough for the purveyors of our current dumbed-down political discourse. So we have Ron Paul, lionized because he believes government is the problem, ignoring the fact that without enlightened government, based on truly democratic decision-making, we will revert to social Darwinism, where the only law is the law of the jungle, the survival of the economically fittest -- the old, sick, and the disadvantaged be damned.
Save us from the horrors of the FDA, Ron! Give us back the freedom to sell Radium Water over the counter again! Don't let that, ahem, fleet-footed Barack Obama get in your way!
I've never understood the small government=freedom line.
If you don't have a quality education, you can't be free.
If you don't have access to affordable healthcare, you can't be free.
If you aren't paid a living wage, you can't be free.
And here's your Ron Paul special: if the government can force you to go through nine months of pregnancy and then childbirth, you are not free.
What an amazing story. This is the story I've been wondering about for so long.
You know, wondering things like: why hasn't the media truly picked up on the Ron Paul Revolution yet? Why are they still asking about Paul's Libertarian Party run in 88? Why are they constantly repeating the old "will you run as a third party candidate" line? Why is it that every single interview spends half of the alloted space talking about how he's "harnessed" the internet?
I kept wondering when a hungry reporter was going to get out there and do some REAL journalistic reporting on the grass roots inferno that is the Ron Paul campaign. The story is in the boots on the ground, the multitude of supporters from Oregon to Ohio, the massive freedom movement that's spreading across this great country, not with the official Ron Paul campaign and the questions he's answered thousands of times before.
Well, I have to wait no longer, because you Mr. Scherer have finally done the Paul campaign justice with this brilliant little piece. Kudos to you!
How can anyone read this article and say, "y'know, I still like Hillary"
Paul the way.
I don't care if people on the left don't "get" Ron Paul or the concept of libertarianism/laissez faire. There are perhaps unbridgeable differences there at an axiomatic level. I'm not offended if people with whom I have nothing in common call me an idiot or a kook, though I try to have the good manners not to respond in kind.
What bugs me is the reaction of people on my side of the political divide to Paul's candidacy. I live in the Northeast, in a heavily Republican enclave. People have winced (I have actually seen a doubletake, like out of a cartoon) at my Ron Paul button and bumper sticker. There are waves of hostility emanating from the center-right and the neo-cons(not as much from the religious right) at Paul's candidacy. My last bastion of smugness at not being a Democrat is collapsing: I recall thinking, after 2000, that at least we Republicans would never have been as vicious to a fringe candidate as mainstreams Democrats were to Nader and his voters.
There are different breeds of Republican. Some are in the GOP because their parents and grandparents were. Some are evangelical Christians or family values types. Then there are the neo-cons and others who support the war on terror. I suppose there are a depressing number of racists and sexists who see the GOP as an alternative to the civil rights platforms associated with the Democrats.
But then there are people like me. Hard-core libertarians who at some point in their youth heard the Republicans referred to as the small-government party and plighted their troth then and there. My completely unscientific estimate is that about a quarter of the population, and somewhere between a third and a half of the GOP, are libertarians. The more intellectual members of the group are into Austrian economics and read histories that explain how the effects of the Great Depression were exacerbated (indeed largely created) by FDR's misguided Keynesian policies. Other people don't care about theory so much, they just have an instinctive thirst for personal liberty and a suspicion of a government which seems at every turn to be snatching it from us.
The largely center-left mainstream media basically ignores the libertarian right. Many voting trends and polling results can be explained by this. The New York Times seems particularly confused when, for example, it finds that majorities of the American public oppose the war and the Patriot Act and yet don't seem to vote for anti-war candidates in the same numbers. Another example is Bush's big-government programs, such as his education and prescription drug plans. The MSM assumes that all the opposition for these programs comes from the left, from, say, those who want a more generous drug benefit. A lot of it is libertarian opposition, but that gets lost in the wash. Ditto health-care reform: libertarians agree with everyone else that our health care system is a mess, but we locate the problem in excessive government interference in what should be a free market in health care rather than insufficient government control and dissemination of an entitlement. In polls, however, libertarians get lumped together with liberals as dissatisfied with the system.
Not this election cycle, and maybe not even the next one, but sooner or later, the libertarian vote will be up for grabs. We're just too sick of not even getting lip service from "our" party anymore, even as we have to defend all the true kooks we find ourselves uncomfortably allied with. I don't think a third party is feasible, not because I'm concerned with a spoiler effect but because most libertarians kind of recoil at that level of organization and involvement (thankfully, the occasional Ron Paul is willing to devote himself to public service). Can we migrate to the Democrats? I don't know - they will howl at the presence of pro-business, pro-free-trade, anti-regulation gun nuts in their midst. But sooner or later something's gotta give. It is gradually becoming clear that the new Republican party has little use for us except our votes. They'll might have to lose a few elections before they realize they need us - we're, like, half their voting base!
Right now, I believe that Ron Paul is single-handedly keeping the GOP a viable party. As long as he is (barely) tolerated on a Republican stage, libertarians feel they have some presence in the party. Young people who are still wondering where they stand politically may make a decades-long commitment to the GOP because of their current attraction to this one candidate. I find it annoying, though predictable, that Ron Paul isn't enthusiastically embraced by the party establishment as evidence of our "big tent" and as a proven fund-raiser. I find it offensive that McCain, during the last debate, told Paul that his foreign policy attitude was the sort of thing that caused World War II (excuse me?!? Which of the two of them has ever had a hand in actually *starting* a war?). Anyway, if we ever see a revitalization of the small-government, pro-liberty ethos that drew so many of us to the Republicans to start with, it will start here, with Ron Paul and his supporters.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
