Dan Calabrese

I’m not thrilled about defending Rand Paul, and I’m only going to go so far in doing it. But worse than Paul’s purist libertarian thinking is one of the media’s cheapest ploys in the service of opinion writing disguised as news.

Twisted in libertarian knots, but not racist

This morning, Yahoo! News deploys this tactic against Paul with a piece titled “How Rand Paul’s civil-rights views escaped media scrutiny”. The piece by media writer Michael Calderone, referencing Paul’s recent comments about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, pretends to be a critique of journalists for not having done their jobs, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out this is not the piece’s true agenda.

The real agenda is to aggressively imply that Paul is a racist. Otherwise, why would “media scrutiny” of his civil rights views even be necessary? This is how the media indicts people with plausible deniability.

They did the same thing with the Iraq War – writing endless pieces of self-flagellation about how they had not been critical enough of the argument for war (which was not true at all), all of which implied without saying so that the decision to go to war had been some sort of horrible mistake (which was also not true).

And as these stories about Paul go on day after day after day, you will get the simplified spin – that Paul thinks the federal government should allow restaurants to discriminate against black people – without getting the full explanation of why he said that.

Paul’s position (which I do not agree with, by the way) is a very defensible application of the idea that, in a nation with limited government, it’s sometimes necessary to tolerate abhorrent attitudes and abhorrent behavior. It’s the same thinking that leads us to grant parade permits to the Ku Klux Klan. They’re racist douchebags, but that’s not against the law, and it’s not against the law for them to assemble in the public square and say so.

Paul believes the same thinking requires us to respect the property rights of private establishment operators who would run their businesses in an abhorrent manner, and he seems to think that if any authority can make laws (which I gather would not be his preference), it would be the states.

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I have problems with this view, but it’s not because I think it is racist, or that Rand Paul is racist. My problem with it concerns what happens when you take “principle” to ridiculous extremes in politics and governance. I guess this is why, although I prefer a much smaller government than we have now, I could never qualify as a “true conservative” in the eyes of most purists, and certainly not a libertarian.

I believe in limited government. I don’t believe in no government. The people who support the likes of Rand Paul and his even-more-absolutist father get so tied up in knots with their anti-government principles, they can’t see their way clear to get behind anything that might need to be done at the federal level.

For me, federal action to correct a social wrong should be a last resort, but it’s not hard to see why, in the case of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we had arrived at the point of last resort. If you left discrimination laws to the states, you had a bunch of states in the Deep South who would never have passed them. That left us, as a nation, with a choice between tolerating institutionalized racism in a certain part of the country or eliminating it altogether.

I am not so hung up on the principle of limited government that I’m willing to let that regional discrimination stand, and I think it’s a situation where the nation could take action at the federal level without risking the descent into tyranny. The followers of Rand Paul and his father don’t – so hung up are they on “consistency” that they will oppose anything government endeavors to do, just because it’s government doing it.

Of course, this is the very reason Paul’s father considers Abraham Lincoln one of our worst presidents – because Lincoln used the power of the federal government to prevent states from asserting the right to maintain a slavery-based economic system by way of secession. To this day, many Ron Paul followers yammer on about secession, rooting openly for some state to try it for whatever reason just because they think secession is cool. It’s the ultimate finger in the eye to those who are in love with the power of the federal government.

This is why I seem to be resigning myself to a squirming acceptance of Rand Paul as a prospective U.S. senator. The most important thing America needs right now is to rein in federal spending and reform entitlements. Rand Paul will be on board with that, big time, because it’s consistent with his libertarian philosophy.

I hate to think of the positions he might take on foreign affairs, particularly Israel, although I have to admit I’m basing that more on his father’s thinking than on anything I’ve heard him say. It’s simply been my experience that most Ron Paul followers believe everything their hero says, without exception, so it seems reasonable to expect the guy’s own son would do the same thing.

There’s a lot that bothers me about Rand Paul, but his statement about the Civil Rights Act is in no way an indication that he’s a racist. I have no reason to think he is. And if he helps get America’s fiscal house in order, it’s probably an acceptable bargain to put up with the worst of his libertarian instincts.

When you’ve got problems as big as we do, you can’t be too picky about who you allow to help solve them.

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