My grandfather used to meet people so up tight about right doctrine that they gave right doctrine a bad name. You know the prune-faced sort. They are right, very, very right, but that is it. They have no humanity and no ability to make their rightness work out in the real work.
My grandfather said of such people, “They are so straight, they lean a little.”
That about sums up the Ron Paul campaign for President. There is much to be said for the small government and (generally) libertarian position Mr. Paul advocates. Who would not want smaller government?
Sadly, Ron Paul is the sort that does not understand that being consistent in one area might make you bad in another. People live whole lives, even politicians. You cannot set up the ideal political system and then ignore (for example) that neighboring countries have not. I would love to get rid of the swords and make them plowshares . . . but terrorists would blow up my plowshares.
It is not enough to live in the ideal in one area if it destroys you in another . . . to give another example: if perfect “equality” between the sexes leads to no children. . . then there is a problem. The goal of life is to balance all the competing interests of church, state, family and the individual in a working whole. Paul is so concerned about getting the state to maximal “smallness” that he forgets the rest.
Second, Ron Paul does not seem to have considered how times may have changed since the Framers wrote the Constitution. Is what was adequate then, adequate now? How can what they envisioned be brought, sensibly, to the twenty-first century? One need not adopt a “flexible” reading of the Constitution to note that “defense” in 1789 was not what was needed for the common defense in 2007. Surely when Teddy Roosevelt is viewed as too expansive in his use of state power we have gone too far? I for one appreciate Yosemite.
The third problem I have (at this time) with libertarians is that they make the do-able the enemy of the perfect. I too dream of a day when the state is small . . . but my neighbors love big government. Why elect a bigger-government candidate because we insist of giving the voters what they don’t want (a libertarian candidate)?
The only value of a libertarian candidate in this state of our nation is educational. We need to teach folk that small government is good . . . and work out (non-theoretically) how small government can be in the age of the Internet and nuclear weapons.
Ron Paul takes no thought of winning or of governing once he wins. Where are the Congressional majorities going to come from to do what he wishes?
Ron Paul is also not so great a communicator. Americans (sadly) like big government for now. There is an education to be done and a happy warrior might do it, but Ron Paul does not seem happy or much of a warrior. In a television age, his look is all wrong without any teaching skills.
Being right did not make Goldwater president, nor did his abrasive style win many converts.
One devil in the details is what to do about the War and there Ron Paul and company are not thinking straight at all. Everyone agrees that the Constitution provides the right for the Federal government to defend the nation. This particular candidate, Ron Paul, just has bad ideas about how to do it. He confuses a sort of isolationism with libertarianism.
It is hard to be free when you are conquered by a revived Caliphate because your government was so worried about “big government” that it did not defend you . . .
Ron Paul looks to Bob Taft for political advice . . . now Bob Taft was a fine Senator back in the day (the 1940’s and 1950’s). It might comfort Americans to think of his solid Ohio values, if Taft had not been a uniform political loser on the national level and wrong about most foreign policy ideas while technological change and history were making him wrong about the rest.
In short, Taft, like Ron Paul, was an isolationist. We tried that and it did not work in a world before jet travel, the Internet, and mass marketing. America cannot sell Coke alone, let alone run a foreign policy behind the walls of fortress American.
Isolationism has been shown to be as wrong headed as an idea can be. Of course, the purists will argue that their form of isolationism has never been tried, that they are new models, and that . . . blah, blah, blah. If you want a short hand way of knowing whether “Fortress America” makes sense ask yourself if we will be safer when Israel is wiped off the map because we retreated from the world . . . and whether it makes more sense to fight Bin Laden in Iraq or in the USA.