It's been said - and I've generally subscribed to this notion - that it was fine to have Rand Paul in the Senate, because he'd reliably vote for the economic-freedom position in any legislative situation, and that the question of how much daylight there is or isn't between his foreign-policy and national-security views and those of his decidedly wacko father would rarely if ever arise.
That view must be rethought. His grandstanding, resulting in the Sunday-night scramble to try to prevent the USA Freedom Act from lapsing, has presented jihadists and Chinese spies, among other parties interested in disadvantaging America, with a window of opportunity that they're surely not oblivious to.
Paul gave us reason to be hopeful he was a positive force in American politics and government. As he emerged on the scene, he stayed clear of the outrageous pronouncements of his dad. He made more of an effort to form bonds with those with whom he had common ideological ground. Talking about his faith came easy to him. His overall bearing indicated that he fit, however proximate to the parameter, into the conservative spectrum.
But then his weird preoccupations began to surface. Drones. Metadata. In a world in which one third of Syria and one-third of Iraq are controlled by sword-wielding sex-slavers, in which Iran uses post-American appeasement to maximum strategic advantage, and in which Chinese hackers burrow deep into the cyberspaces of the post-American government and the country's largest corporations as well (and in which China claims possession over international waters, to the alarm of its neighbors), Paul has settled on some abstruse and peripheral matters to concern himself with.
And so the concern about where apples fall in relation to trees is well-placed, it seems.
There was a time, early in the development of modern conservatism - and really, up through the early 1980s - when a person (such as myself) deciding to fully acquaint himself with this worldview might encounter some writings of Rothbard, Rockwell et al as he began to piece together the full scope and depth of it. But as the fully conservative (Reaganesque) approach to the Cold War reached its denouement and the Soviet empire collapsed, it became clear that, the libertarians' completely admirable devotion to free-market economics notwithstanding, they were not really brethren. They could not make the connection between the projection of power and what had just happened on the world stage.
Their willful ignoring of what history tells us about human nature borders on madness. As Victor Davis Hanson, among others, has pointed out, there may be no more constant constant in the story of our species than war. Wars arise for a variety of reason, all having their root in the fact that the human being is a fallen creature. To speak of the citizens of two countries locked in a mortal standoff trading goods and services to mutual advantage and thereby ameliorating the loggerheads at which their governments find themselves is denial of a rather desperate sort.
It's a denial that leads to the kind of adolescent pronouncements about self-perpetuating war machines that one expects of completely delusional leftists. In fact, the common cause between such leftists and the Rockwell / Rothbard / Paul Craig Roberts / Ron Paul camp requires the latter to have to swallow so hard that it winds up working against the ostensible core of its ideology: maximum freedom. Peaceniks are uniformly statists, in case the folks at the Mises Institute and Antiwar.com hadn't noticed.
And so we find ourselves at this sad juncture. Rand Paul seems like a pretty good guy, and he has his head squarely on his shoulders when it comes to economic freedom, but he's not of much value to those of us who understand that freedom is in a constant state of danger and that its true devotees must always be prepared to defend it, sometimes in ways that take into account the nastiest, messiest potentialities of the human character.
No comments:
Post a Comment