Rand Paul: 2Libertarian 2Be Electable?

Kevin Williamson–who also
wrote about the Ron Paul campaign for National
Review—throws
some cold water at
Politico on those excited that Rand Paul seems to be
rising in reputation and attention so quickly that it’s a safe bet
he could actually become president.

Williamson points out:

Paul’s libertarianism is intended to offer a little something
for everybody, on the left and right—spending cuts for the
Republican base, legal relief for potheads, a presidential pat on
the head for gay people. But if he gets serious about substantive
reform along these lines, his libertarianism is instead going to
offer something to outrage everybody…..

We spend almost all of the federal budget on a handful of
programs: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and defense. So any
plausible, politically sustainable campaign to impose some sanity
on America’s national finances is going to mean reforming—i.e.,
cutting—all of those.

How unpopular is that? Solid
majorities of Americans oppose cutting Social Security and
Medicare benefits and raising taxes to pay for
them, even though a larger majority also believes that the cost of
those programs will create economic problems. The number of people
who think we spend
too much on the military hasn’t topped the 50-percent mark
since the Vietnam War. Think about George W. Bush’s attempt at
Social Security reform, which left him the loneliest man in
Washington. Or consider that in 2012, fiscal conservative
wonk-emperor Paul Ryan ran for the vice presidency on a campaign
that blasted the Obama administration for making Medicare cuts.
Which is to say, even the man in Washington most associated with
the words “fiscal conservative” knows better than to run as
one. 

I think Williamson is right on the big points: American
dedication to libertarian principles writ large—life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness is great; people should mostly be left
alone to manage their own lives as long as they are not hurting
others; government is too big and spends too much–tends to shatter
when it runs up against any actual shrinking in any government
function that they think affects them in any way.

Rand Paul has alternately evaded and embraced the term
“libertarian” and can certainly not be expected to enthusiastically
advocate every idea about politics anyone in the larger libertarian
movement has ever advocated as he runs for president–especially
not the anarcho-Rothbardian end, which his father has few problems
with although he never self-identifies as anarchist
himself. 

Last time I talked to him, Rand Paul was openly pretty weary of
being pinned down on extreme questions of applying libertarian
principal to specific political questions. Rachel Maddow taught
him back in 2010 when it came to free association and private
property and civil rights law that that’s a losing
game. As Slate notes,
Rand has announced he no longer
wants to answer questions about what his father Ron
says, does, or believes. 

But as I wrote
in the New York Times 14 months ago, before
the current Rand Paul wave began cresting, what he has going for
him, if what libertarians believe about the manifest dangers of
overreaching and overspending and overborrowing and overinvading
government is true, is reality, and the hope that someday,
somewhere soon, Americans will realize that merely lowering yearly
deficits is not sufficient to quash the dangers of government debt
threatening our future.

So it’s ultimately too soon to say how big a deal Rand Paul will
get to be nationally in a presidential context. But plenty of
people seem to be able to
consider voting for him for president now, as he polls near the
top of the prospective GOP field for 2016. I can imagine, though,
that it is easier for media and voters to admire him more as a
fresh-air senatorial maverick than to gird up for the sort of
wrenching (however necessary) changes in national politics a
President Rand Paul would imply.

I have no doubt that right now serious libertarianism will be a
hard national sell, even to a Republican Party that in theory
should be able to embrace the small-government part. It also seems
likely that any liberal/progressive affection for the anti-security
state, pro-civil liberties Rand Paul will lcrash and burn against
the wall of his opposition to abortion and government income
transfer programs. Paul told me in my New York
Times piece of the need for more social tolerance and
minority outreach for the GOP, but I think no amount of that will
overcome the abortion and income transfer stuff when it comes to
winning over Democrat-leaning independents.

That said, a Santorum-like focus on being “socially
conservative” is unlikely to be a national winner for the Party at
any time moving forward into the 21st century, so there’s another
good reason–besides reality itself–for some major Party to suck
it up and offer something close to real libertarianism.

Then there’s foreign policy. Recently, Paul’s attempts in the
face of an actual old fashioned Cold War era crisis to balance
between the strongly noninterventionist, America can be seen as an
evil empire itself, wing of his father’s fan base and a more
jingoistic Republican base attitude, Paul has
managed to both link himself to Reagan, not advocate military
action, and still talk vaguely tough against Russia and do no
America-blaming.

This hasn’t been good enough to keep Rick Santorum–whatever you
think or don’t think about that guy, he did rack up the
second highest number of primary votes for the 2012 GOP race and
thus is presumptively “next in line”–from
saying Paulite foreign policy is basically a weak,
Obamaite disgrace no Republican can countenance, indeed “a very
serious threat to our own security.”

I think it will be best for Paul’s presidential ambitions if the
American people are not feeling themselves, America’s interests, or
even America’s vague and overweening sense of international
amour propre threatened in 2015-16. Americans don’t like
war, to be sure–until government and media start telling them it’s
necessary and they aren’t going to have themselves or their sons
and daughters drafted to fight in. 

No doubt, how libertarian Rand Paul can get away with being will
be a continuous topic of pundit and voter concern between now and
the end of next year.

What
Paul told me back in January might be worth revisiting in
thinking about these issues:

“I’ve got half the libertarians on the Internet beating up on me
for not being pure enough,” Paul says, “and the rest of the
mainstream beating up on me for being too libertarian. It’s a box
they put me in.”

“But I’m in the business of trying to advance a philosophy and
advance an economic program that’s better for the country. And I’m
also in the business of winning elections and trying to convince
people to come in the direction of smaller government and more
individual liberty,” Paul says. “I sometimes wish for a little more
forbearance among the purists, but I’m trying to do the best I can
to advance a philosophy and program that is more individual liberty
for everyone and is pulling in the direction of what some of the
purists might want” even if they “might not see it as pure as
they’d like.”