Via Kevin D. Williamson, NRO roving correspondent,
critiquing Robert Draper's recent NYT Magazine piece on Rand Paul and the
Libertarian Movement:
* * *
* * *
Robert Draper’s New York Times magazine piece, “Has the ‘Libertarian Moment’ Finally Arrived?” dutifully if rotely runs through the
greatest hits... [including] "Rand Paul is not the ideologue his father
is."
* HMM... I DON'T BELIEVE RAND'S FATHER RON IS AN
IDEOLOGUE. (OH, WELL... WE'RE TALKING WHAT DRAPER BELIEVES; NEVER MIND!)
Draper describes Glenn Beck as a “partisan gunslinger”
when he is if anything the opposite, a man who believes that “the Republicans
have betrayed their own values” and who pronounces himself “done with them.”
* YEP. (AGAIN... DRAPER'S REALITY IS... er... USUALLY...
er... SKEWED - TO SAY THE LEAST.)
Glenn Beck no longer looms so large in the liberal mind
as he did when he was on Fox News, but Rand Paul does.
* OK... (*SHRUG*)... WHATEVER...
Senator Paul gets the full Jane-Goodall-among-the-chimpanzees
treatment, with Mr. Draper puzzled by his beliefs - and affect - both:
“Last month,” he writes, “I dropped by the Russell Senate
Office Building to talk to Paul about his libertarian-Republican tightrope
walk. Paul, 51 and a native Texan, possesses a supple mind and is a
preternaturally confident speaker for someone who has held office for only four
years. At the same time, Paul is not particularly enthusiastic about the
glad-handing niceties that come with the job. ‘Good to see you,’ he mumbled,
then flopped down into a chair in his office’s conference room and fixed me
with an impatient stare.” Perhaps Senator Paul was pondering a question that
often has puzzled me: What possible good can come from a Republican sitting
down with the New York Times?
The emergence of Rand Paul as one of the most popular, if
not the most popular, figures in the Republican party, the current disaffection
of Millennials who have been well and truly hosed by the Obama economy, abrupt
shifts in public opinion on things like gay rights and marijuana legalization,
the restiveness of the tea-party tendency — all of this has Mr. Draper of the
Times wondering, and not without some apparent anxiety: “Would libertarians be
willing to meet the GOP somewhere in the middle?”
The middle of what? The middle of a room packed with
dopey old men nattering about “legitimate rape” and the lavender menace, or the
middle of a party committed to sober and careful reform, with a platform
organized around the rule of law, stability, and — yes — liberty? The party of
Reagan and Goldwater, true, but also the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower and
Taft.
* HEAR, HEAR!
* DIE BOEHNER! DIE MCCONNELL! HAIL REAGAN! HAIL
GOLDWATER!
Senator Paul’s popularity suggests that where they might
in fact meet is in the middle of a political movement that is, unlike the sentimental
tendency that brought us Barack Obama and threatens us with Hillary Clinton,
intellectually alive.
* IF ONLY...
(*FALLING TO MY KNEES TO BESEECH GOD*)
Senators Paul and Cruz, and House insurgents such as
Justin Amash, are compelling figures to many not so much because of the content
of their ideas but simply because they have ideas and seem to be guided by
them.
* AMEN!
After enduring these long years of sterile empathy
rhetoric, perhaps we are, at long last, ready to think rather than to merely
experience sensation.
* PLEASE, GOD...! OH, PLEASE, GOD!
What that means politically is unknowable. We could save
ourselves some time and argument by noting that the American electorate gives
relatively little indication that it is on the verge of a “libertarian moment,”
or any other sort of philosophical moment. Psephological experience and current
polling data both very strongly reiterate what any sentient person knows: The
American people are incoherent and inconsistent when it comes to public policy,
and they seem to have long been driven, in the main, by wishful thinking.
* TO MY BUDDY "HE WHOSE NAME DARE NOT BE
MENTIONED": HOWARD DEAN...? JOHN MCCAIN...? BARACK OBAMA...?
(*SIGH*)
* WISHFUL THINKING DOESN'T MAKE ONE "BAD" OR
"WRONG." HOWEVER... IT SIMPLY CAN'T BE RELIED UPON. WHEN PEOPLE ARE
WILLING TO LIE ABOUT WHO THEY ARE AND THE MSJ PROVIDES COVER...
(*SHRUG*)
You do not have to be a genius to figure out how to get
in front of that parade, which was a lucky thing for Barack Obama and his
modest gifts. As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama twice ran on a platform
that combined the worst leftovers of discredited mid-century progressivism with
an economic theory that is absurd on its face. None of that mattered: His
messianic pretensions soared, celebrities literally sang hymns to him,
columnists wondered aloud whether he was a divine messenger and bought deeply
into all that hope-and-changiness:
“Many spiritually advanced people I know . .
. identify Obama as a 'Lightworker,'” wrote Mark Moford of the San Francisco
Chronicle, “that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not
merely to new foreign policies or health-care plans or whatnot, but who can
actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and
connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment.”
(*SHRUGGING ONCE AGAIN*)
All of which looks silly in retrospect. But the power of
celebrity is not to be underestimated: Though both would be horrified by the
comparison, the political figure whom Barack Obama most closely resembles is
Sarah Palin, albeit one who began his presidency with considerably less
administrative experience.
"HE WHOSE NAME DARE NOT BE MENTIONED" HATES
SARAH PALIN. (*GIGGLING*) BOTTOM LINE, THOUGH, HE HAS FAR MORE IN COMMON WITH
PALIN THAN WITH OBAMA WHEN IT COMES DOWN TO BRASS TACKS!
Senator Paul has in common with Barack Obama that his
presidential ambitions began to stir quite early in his Senate career. But the
two have very little else in common. Senator Paul’s rhetoric is not soaring,
but cautious. Cautious about military adventuring, cautious about the role of
narrow financial interests in driving Washington’s agenda, cautious about the
power of the state, even cautious about his own ideological orientation: not
libertarian, but “libertarian-ish.”
* I ALWAYS REFER TO MYSELF AS
"LIBERTARIAN-LEANING."
(*SHRUG*)
He is notably cautious about what he thinks he can manage
through legislation and, implicitly, as president.
(*NOD*)
* FOLKS... HE'S HONEST! HE'S FRIGGIN' HONEST!
It is impossible to imagine him telling his supporters:
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
* LIKE OBAMA... AND CLINTON BEFORE HIM...
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
Likewise, it is difficult to imagine him unilaterally
arrogating power to the Oval Office simply because Congress is not behaving to
his liking or the Supreme Court is standing in his way.
(*NOD*)
(*STANDING UP TO SHOUT, "HEAR, HEAR!"*)
Mr. Draper’s questions about libertarianism are directed
toward the question of consistency: Ayn Rand believed that a fetus had no moral
stature, but Ron Paul is deeply pro-life, as is his son. Mollie Hemingway has
different views on marriage than does Cathy Reisenwitz. (Never mind that Barack
Obama cannot even manage to agree with Barack Obama on gay marriage, say, or
the Export-Import Bank, or foreign policy, or domestic surveillance.)
Barack Obama was never about ideas - Rand Paul "libertarian-ish-ism"
is.
But what is truly radical about Senator Paul is not his
philosophy per se, but his relatively modest conception of what government can
and should be. Barack Obama’s very large conception of the presidency seems to
be tied up in his very large conception of himself. That should be off-putting,
but it isn’t: We are drawn to largeness and to drama. The heart loves a hero.
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