Following a recent letter to the editor and its feedback, it may be appropriate to remind everybody that Ron Paul will never be president. This is not up for debate.
But maybe this contributes to his appeal with the new brand of political hipster — those so determined to be “anti-establishment” that they’ll even support the candidate with the ideology that most shamelessly nourishes the very injustices these people believe they’re cognizant of. Forgive them, they know not what they do.
I think it’s a mistake to call Ron Paul a libertarian, especially where his identity as a libertarian is a point of pride for his supporters. I would call him firstly a wannabe anti-federalist, a label I use as a polite euphemism for “his constitutional interpretation is dangerously regressive for anyone who isn’t a white, property owning, well-to-do male.” Paul’s brand of anti-federalism envisions the federal government more or less as it was before the 1930s, while a libertarian is more concerned with libertarian ends than with strict constitutionalist means.
I draw the distinction because it doesn’t particularly matter if you THINK you’re a libertarian if you’re also an anti-federalist. Making it easier for the People to dictate social policy more locally and capriciously is terrifying because the People are awful. Controversies regarding the rights of oppressed and minority groups belong in the courts at best. The popular majority’s mistreatment of these groups only proves that the majority doesn’t deserve and would only abuse the power to legislate for the oppressed more than they already do.
Ron Paul believes that you deserve much less recourse in the federal court system than you currently enjoy, and he’s written legislation to that effect. Though it thankfully never passed, Paul’s We The People Act would have outright eliminated your federal recourse involving any subnational law on the establishment or free expression of religion, the right to privacy in general and specifically as it pertains to sexual acts, sexual orientation and reproduction and any claim pursuing equal protection of the law for those who wish to marry regardless of sex and gender. And all existing legal precedent regarding those issues would have been effectively cremated.
This would enable anything from state churches, religion codified in legal statutes and the return of sodomy laws to the unquestionable and permanent prohibition of women’s reproductive rights and marriage equality. But as long as this happens at the state level or below, Paul isn’t losing any sleep over it. This is his version of “liberty.” How sad is it that the rights of citizens are less important to Ron Paul than the piece of paper that outright fails to protect them? If this is the true face of the Constitution, then we need to throw it away and start over.
What sane conception of “freedom” gives a state more authority over your womb than you have but condemns any federal effort to prevent that invasion from happening in the first place? Paul’s vision on these issues is truly vile. Thank God for the incorporation of the Bill of Rights to the states that prevents so much of this garbage. Thank God for the implicit right to privacy. Ron Paul is either no better than any common Republican patriarch, or he’s an entire epoch of civil rights progress below them.
Some have floated the proposal that we put all of Ron Paul’s social baggage aside and vote for him based on economics. Not only does this imply that Paul’s deifying vision of the free market is desirable, which is not the case, but it also asserts that his social policy beliefs are actually forgivable. They most certainly are not. There’s more to protect in this country than money.
