A Victory for Heterodoxy in Kentucky

Image courtesy of dailypaul.comRand Paul, son of Texas Congressman, Ron Paul, is the very probable winner of the Kentucky Republican Primary Senate election, and liberals should be thrilled.  Of course, the Media has latched onto this thing and milked it for all the ratings its worth.  The imposed narrative structure is that Paul has been elevated by the "Tea Partiers" (or "Tea Baggers", depending on which party the reader hacks for.), and of course Paul has run with it:

I have a message, a message from the Tea Party, a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: we've come to take our government back.  We've come to take the government back from the special interests who think that our government is their own personal ATM...Washington is horribly broken, I think we stand on a precipice.  We are encountering a day of reckoning, and this movement, this Tea Party movement, is a message to Washington that we're unhappy, and that we want things done differently.  The Tea Party movement is huge.  The mandate of our victory tonight is huge.  What we've done, and what we are doing, can transform America.  I think America's greatness hinges on us doing something to save the country.  The Tea Party movement is about saving the country from the mountain of debt that is devouring our country and I think could lead to chaos.

Paul continues to focus on the national debt and the accumulating interest on the debt, the failures of socialism in Europe vis-a-vis Greece, the elegance of the constitution, excesses of government, a movement towards a more pure capitalism, and the universality of the Tea Party movement:

The Tea Party message is not a radical message, it's not an extreme message.  What's extreme is a 2 trillion dollar deficit.  The Tea Party message calls for things that are widely popular.  I mean, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, term limits...forcing Congress to balance the budget by law - everybody's for it but it never happens.  We can do it, and it can be popular.  Reading the bills, who is opposed to them reading the bills?  (laughter).  Is that an extreme idea, to have them read the bills?  

Rand Paul is one of many Republican politicians who claim to speak for and define the Tea Party in their own terms, and Paul's Tea Party, primarily concerned with the excesses of government and a capitalism and democracy free from special interests, seems preferable to the Tea Parties of Glenn Beck, a madman; Sarah Palin, delusional and incompetent; Rush Limbaugh, an ideological combatant; and Newt Gingrich, an ideological combatant who wants to simply fire federal judges who disagree with him.

Like his father before him (although they are not the same politically), Paul has been labeled a "crackpot" for rather unconventional policy positions: for one, he wants to abolish the Departments of Education and Agriculture.  While these positions are certainly radical when compared to the spectrum of established political authority, they are grounded in logic and measured assessment of those elements of government.  I don't necessarily agree with Paul's position, but in my experience, standardized education is a losing venture.  If control of education were left to the states, we would have more opportunities for experimentation, and thereby much more data to evaluate in determining best practices.  Curricula would conform to whatever methods local school boards felt were best for their particular constituency, and since they would be held fully accountable by only entitled parties, curricula would develop effectively and organically.  To deny this approach to education is to deny the virtues of Federalism.

As for abolishing the Department of Agriculture, the DoA has an abysmal record.  An issue which Ron Paul, Rand's father, has made central to his platform, is ending corn subsidies.  Corn is in almost everything we as Americans eat, and there is plenty of medical evidence suggesting that high-fructose corn syrup and other corn-derived products in processed food can explain some of the obesity epidemic now plaguing America, an obesity epidemic that both Pauls as a medical doctors must be familiar with. (FYI: Nice try on the “but Paul’s an ophthalmologist” tack. Medical doctors in the United States go through two undergraduate years of laboratory science, four years of general medical training, one year of residency, and two or more years of internship before receiving a specialty. So, Paul would have considerable experience evaluating, diagnosing, and treating obese patients without eye problems.)  There is also the inherent immorality of paying farmers to produce more food than we can consume, and then burning the surplus to control prices while people around the world and in our own country continue to starve.           

Rand Paul is to the left of Obama on National Defense  From Sullivan:  

I want Paul to win this seat, so we can get a fiscal conservative Republican in the Senate who can put defense spending on the table. Rand's position on this is mostly his father's:

Rand Paul has indicated that the possibility of an Iranian nuke doesn’t bother him; that he supports the shuttering of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility; and that he’s shaky on support for the surge in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq.

Ron Paul has not only taken heat from conservatives for his lax defense policies, but from liberals as well.  On suggesting that the Civil War could have, and should have been avoided during the 2007 campaign, Paul met with disagreement from Bill Maher.  Paul explained his position via measured, historical comparison with various European countries, whose governments simply bought slaves from their masters in an eminent domain fashion, thereby avoiding bloodshed, animosity for years to come, and economic and infrastructural devastation.  Paul's position that the Civil War was "not fought over slavery.  The Civil War was fought over unifying and making a strong, centralized state." is, despite our national myth, the prevailing position in many history departments.   

The fact that these conservatives are taking unconventional positions and then backing those positions with reasoned argument shows that the Pauls are about anything but politics as usual.  For Obama supporters honestly hoping for a post-partisan politics, a focused and de-radicalized tea party, working together with conservatives to solve problems, and political disagreement based in difference of values instead of Orwellian arguments about facts, Rand Paul is exactly what this country needs.  For those who value heterodoxy, whether Republicans, Democrats, or Independents, Rand Paul should be a welcome addition to the U.S. Senate.

UPDATE 5/22 - So Rachel Maddow's partisan interview with Paul is now all over the internet, being quoted out of context; Twitter has become like "telephone", and everyone has checked their sanity at the door.  Libertarianism itself seems to be on trial, or should I say some dumbed-down, straw-man libertarianism is on trial.  I think in this particular case, Andrew Sullivan puts it better than I do, but, a few things:

Everyone’s missing the point of libertarianism, which goes beyond trying to force everyone to do what I or you think is right: people think politics is about getting their ideas to win, when it's actually about giving people the maximum control over their lives.  The state is an abstraction that interferes with human existence.  

For example, after the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, people stopped holding doors for people in wheelchairs, people stopped giving up their seats for the elderly in trains, because everyone can just foist responsibility onto the law.  This is a phenomenon well known to psychologists called the diffusion of responsibility.  This is what libertarianism is about: changing culturally, not legally. 

It's the same as believing in the afterlife.  If I believe that being a good person gets me a reward, am I really a good person?  Or am I just a child who does his chores for candy money?  The fundamental reason why libertarians occasionally make "outlandish" comments, and why they have no success politically, is because people don't understand libertarians, and libertarians don't understand people. 

Libertarians repeatedly make the same mistake of assuming that everybody else is as generous, kind, upright, stoic, thoughtful, honest, and intelligent as they are, and to not give people the responsibility to be moral actors is insulting and itself immoral.  The standard liberal position here seems to be that people are stupid and cruel and need to be herded and threatened with external force in order to do the right thing.  Although, since we live in a society where moral responsibility is increasingly the province of the law, perhaps we've reached a stage where liberals are right.

Throughout the interview with Maddow, Paul never actually said anything definitive at all, repeatedly stating that he was unfamiliar with the details of the Civil Rights Act, and since it was passed in 1964 and irrelevant to today's politics, he would prefer not to talk about it.  Maddow kept trying to get him to fail her litmus test simply so she could embarrass and ridicule a Republican.  

Her conclusions that because Paul does not support one clause of the Civil Rights Act related to the right of private companies to discriminate, he must support Jim Crow, is like saying that anyone who supports federalism supports slavery.  Paul wanted to discuss the philosophical issues underpinning that particular clause of the Civil Rights Act (which, by the way, the Supreme Court has upheld multiple times under the justification that individual consumer rights to access goods and services regardless of race trump the rights of private businesses to discriminate), yet Maddow made the mistake of assuming that Paul's objections must be to the immediate and direct effect of that whole piece of legislation.  

Unlike members of the typical conservative-liberal spectrum of political thought prevailing in this country and nowhere else on earth, libertarians pursue holistically consistent ideology.  The responsibility to protect vulnerable members of our society like those who are racially discriminated against and the handicapped is not the province of government; it is the responsibility of each and every American citizen.  

Comments

[tim]

Rand Paul would make a great Senator. We need more like him.

[Christopher Carr]

Or at least more that are less like the others