My liberal conscience is clear, thank you, Glenn, thank you, Andrew

Recently, Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald have each made the case that the reason Ron Paul sends liberals into conniptions is that he presents us with a serious challenge to our conscience.

I don’t know where Sullivan and Greenwald get off thinking they get to tell us what we think and how we ought to think, since neither one is a liberal.  Sullivan thinks he’s a conservative, Greenwald is under the impression he’s a liberal and more liberal than thou at that, but both really belong to different wings of the same party of self-righteous self-regard. Actually, Sullivan is more of a liberal than he knows, just a liberal who can’t get over a schoolboy crush on Margaret Thatcher.  Greenwald doesn’t have a political philosophy these days so much as a religion.  At any rate, both think they know what should be bothering my conscience with regard to Ron Paul.

Guys, my conscience is fine.  In fact, my conscience would have an easier time of it if I voted for Newt Gingrich than for Ron Paul.  At least Gingrich understands that it is part of the job of government to make life better for people.  It’s just low down on his list of things he believes government should do, below making Newt Gingrich rich and paying off the people who helped Newt Gingrich get rich, which itself is below the first job of making Newt rich.  But even though I don’t want a lot of the kind of “help” a Newt-run government would offer, he still appears to believe that we’re all in this together, even if some of us are meant to get more out of it than others.  Paul believes that the very idea that we’re all in this together is an evil.  That we all owe something more than facile moral support to each other is what Ron Paul exists to deny.

Remember, Paul wants to get rid of FEMA for reasons that pretty much add up to his thinking that people in Galveston, Texas in 1900 were better off drowning and dying under the collapsing roofs of their blown down houses than they would have been having to suffer the tyranny of a government that would have provided them with a hurricane warning system, an evacuation plan, and money to rebuild.  He’d rather see the contemporary city of Galveston wiped out by another hurricane than pay the taxes to support a government that would help save it because that government, besides taking his money, would have the power to make him treat black people at his medical practice and let them move into his neighborhood.

Ron Paul believes we’re each in this for ourself.

Greenwald and Sullivan argue that Paul forces us to choose between our supposed principles.  But he doesn’t since he stands firmly against our first principle, the one from which all our other principles arise, which is that we are all in this together and the reason we have a government is to help us help each other make things better.

Of course, there’s a How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? aspect to this argument.  Ron Paul is not going to win the Republican nomination.  He’s not going to be President.  I don’t know what a third-party run would do, except not put him in the White House.  If it had any effect at all on the outcome of the election that effect would be either negative or negligible.  Either he would help elect President Romney, something this liberal does not want, in which case what Paul forces me to choose is which of two ways I could vote to bring about what I would regard as a bad day for liberalism.  Or he helps Obama get re-elected, which I believe would happen anyway without Paul on the ballot, the outcome I want and which I can better help bring about by voting for Obama directly.

So, no, Andrew, no, Glenn, Paul doesn’t force me to examine my conscience any more than any other intellectual gameplaying does.  It might be illuminating and even useful in the An examined life is the only life worth living department, but it’s not going to keep me up nights any more than knowing that if I could go back in time to prevent the birth of Bud Selig I would do it.

But, what the heck, let’s play the game for a bit.

Ron Paul doesn’t present me with a choice because he doesn’t offer the choice.

Presidential candidates don’t run on platforms that are like Chinese menus.  You don’t get to pick one issue from column A and one from column B.  You take a candidate for all in all.  And all in all Ron Paul’s brand of libertarianism---Liberty for me but not for thee if thou are somebody who in taking advantage of your liberty would get in the way of me doing whatever the hell I want---is or ought to be repulsive all in all to every good liberal, no matter that a few of the things he would like to see happen are also on a liberal wish list.

But then there’s this.  Once elected, Presidents don’t get to be their own all in all.  They only get to do what Congress lets them do.  And no Congress, Democratic or Republican, is going to let President Paul rein in the National Security State or dismantle the military-industrial complex.  It’s not likely that even a generally liberal Congress would let him end the war (on some people who use) drugs and even if it was so inclined he’d still need the cooperation of fifty state legislatures.  BUT…it’s easy to imagine what a Right Wing Congress, like the half of one we have now and which we’d be likely to get in full if liberals abandoned the Democrats to vote for Ron Paul (or not vote at all) would let President Paul do.

No good liberals should have any trouble from their consciences in rejecting the idea of a Ron Paul presidency out of hand.  It’s a very simple proposition.

Under President Paul, one way or another, Galveston drowns.

__________________

Kevin Drum says Paul is pretty much the dictionary definition of crank.

Over at Cogitamus, Sir Charles does a thorough job of explaining why Paul’s views, the seemingly acceptable and the utterly awful, are all of a piece and how Paul’s “liberatarianism” is viciously anti-liberal.

(And a thank you to nancy for the shout out.)

Comments

[Rana]

All I have to do is look at his views on women's right to bodily autonomy - that is, they have no such right in his eyes, it being up to the discretion of the state whether they must reproduce against their will - to know that his views are full of shit. His record on the environment is equally crap. Since it's these issues that drive my political voting decisions, I'm not conflicted at all, either. His defense of the individual stops when the individual is someone like me (a woman of reproductive age) and I'm not about to vote against my interests that way. That he chooses a weird political philosophy to justify his actions rather than the Bible doesn't matter.

[Ralph H.]

Meanwhile, President Santorum would keep busy establishing new federal agencies to enforce his vision of "how things ought to be" -- i.e., controlling people's sexual behavior. No homosexuality (of course!), no abortion under any circumstances, no contraception, no sex outside the bounds of heterosexual marriage, & within those bounds strictly for the purpose of procreation. There's probably more, but I'd have to check with the College of Cardinals.

[Sherri]

What Rana said. As long as Ron Paul doesn't think I have just as much autonomy as he does, the only challenge he presents is to his own conscience, since that stance seems to conflict with the rest of his philosophy.

[actor212]

Ron Paul:Liberalism::Bull Connor:Civil Rights

Ron Paul:Libertarianism::Clifford Irving:Facts

[Morzer]

Is there really any discernible difference between Paulism and scientology? I mean, both are pernicious cults, to which vulnerable and greedy people subscribe. Both have world-class kooks as founders, both have texts written by the founder that embarrass even their useful idiots, both are obsessed with money, both appear to be populated by people with a particular look of pop-eyed lunacy, and both really would prefer not to deal with African Americans. Oddly enough, Tom Cruise recently slithered forth to praise Ron Paul's witlessly antediluvian views on mental health issues. Coincidence? I think not.

[weboy]

Without seeing the Greenwald and Sullivan posts, I have to agree, I'm mystified; as a liberal, Ron Paul doesn't particularly upset me in any way. He won't be President, and libertarianism, with or without him, makes for entertaining philosophical debates, but little more.

I did ask my mom, who does seem to get a little more perturbed about him, and she said it's mainly his comments on race and stuff... but again, nothing that would cause some crisis of her liberal ideals or principles.

The idea that "Ron Paul makes us nervous" is amusing, almost as amusing as the rest of Ron Paul's derailing of the GOP nominating process... but beyond that, why bother?

[Clay X]

The President can't change the laws without Congress or the judicial branch, true. But a President can stop enforcing the laws any time he wants. Obama did the same thing this just this year with DOMA. President Paul could, for instance, stop the DEA raids on medical marijuana facilities overnight. And I think he would.

Do you know anything about how the federal government works?

[Jane Ignatowski]

Obama has most certainly NOT "stopped enforcing DOMA". Under his administration, the Department of Justice is not presently arguing in favor of DOMA in court challenges, but that's a very different thing. The law itself remains in full effect. Perhaps Clay is confusing DOMA with DADT, but DADT was repealed by an act of Congress in December 2010, it remained in effect until September 2011, and while President Obama had the option to use an executive order to stop enforcing it, he never implemented any such order.

As to the thread topic, Ron Paul also has a nasty little habit of including a clause in much of his proposed legislation that restricts/removes filing a challenge in federal court when states pass discriminatory and otherwise blatantly unconstitutional laws. See, for example, the odious We The People Act. That and his beloved Sanctity of Life Act would both bring the hammer down on the rights and freedoms of women and GLBTQ folks in a major way.

[KLG]

Greenwald is a civil libertarian. And a very good one at that. All Americans, liberal and conservative, should be good civil libertarians. His point is not that "liberals" should vote for Ron Paul, but that we are presented with a sad state of affairs when the only candidate addressing issues such as permanent war, unbridled executive power indistinguishable from that of Bush the Lesser, indefinite detention, unthinking and unblinking support for Israel is one Ron Paul. And only Ron Paul. That's all.

As for Andrew Sullivan, he loosed Charles Murray and his bell curve on the world while serving as Marty Peretz's puppet. Nothing he has said or done since then has come close to atoning for that. Much like Hitchens, the only reason anyone pays him the slightest attention is his accent. Would that he take his Anglo-Catholic schtick back where it started. Or did it start at the New Republic?

[loretta]

You make some excellent points, here, and anyone who has been paying attention to Ron Paul for the past decade (or longer), knows that he has some conflicting issues with someone like Glenn Greenwald, especially the fact that Dr. Paul is a conspiracy theorist of the first order. Now, I love me a good conspiracy, but Dr. Paul is promoted by deluxe tin-foil-hatters like Alex Jones. Paul's underground newspaper (back in the day) encouraged food hoarding, guns and ammo collecting, fear mongering of non-white races, and other tactics that conform with the view that his isolationism is more than a pragmatic way to take care of one's country - it's an extreme lifestyle that says - I got mine, I'm gonna keep mine, and I'm gonna shoot ya if you try to take mine!

I wish Greenwald, whom I admire a lot and support, would look back at Paul and his followers of the 90s and early 2000s, because those folks are not fresh-faced idealistic kids. They're like Timothy McVeigh.

[scott]

Totally missing the point. GG has prefaced his discussion of this issue ad nauseam with caveats that he ain't asking anyone to vote for Ron Paul, he's just glad that someone, anyone is talking about issues involving civil liberties and war that no one else on the national level (including Obama) want to talk about. I'm not voting for him either, but I'm also glad these things get talked about. I agree that he's awful on an impressive number of diferent levels, but I also think it's a sad place we've come to when it's a wingnut who rightly calls our attention to things that good "progressives" (psst: liberals embarrassed to be called that) would rather ignore.