Michael Kinsley has a peculiar piece in the Washington Post. It's titled "The Church Doctrines of Pope Ron Paul," and subtitled "What's wrong with libertarianism?" Those titles are intriguing -- as headlines are intended to be -- but what makes his analysis peculiar is that he answers the subtitle while leaving the principal and damn-near transcendent questions inherent in the main title mostly unaddressed.
Which is to say, in a piece purportedly about Ron Paul, he ignores what has made Ron Paul a political phenomenon.
What has elevated Paul to household-name status is not his textbook libertarianism. That ideology has been rumbling around since the classical liberalism of Adam Smith, and the congenital problems it presented for responsible national policy grew glaringly manifest almost as swiftly as its appearance in the public arena.
Smith himself would have agreed with Kinsley's characterization of modern libertarians: "Chipmunky and earnest, always pursuing logical consistency down wacky paths, they pose no real threat to the established order." No real threat, because, as most of the citizenry knows, stripping government of its power to intervene and regulate would only lead to what Smith feared and expected most -- wholly unfettered corporate cartels and monopolies that would reverse any free-market conditions that he theoretically envisioned.
Smith lived in another age; an age when a sort of Jeffersonian economic democracy was still possible, but whose regulation by government, if necessary, he would have embraced. Yet libertarians take the "logical consistency" of only part of Smith's writings and apply it to the max: government is a constant bad, not a variable, and therefore should merely deliver the mails and provide for the cheapest possible common defense.
Well, if you think the "established order" is bad now, just limit government to those two functions and see what you get.
Actually, I can tell you what you'd get, because we already had it, and in spades. You'd get the very pre-New Deal kind of society that Americans at large -- after numerous booms and busts, an anarchic banking system, accelerating impoverishment and increasing concentrations of wealth -- had finally had enough of.
The New Deal and its postwar-government contours were democratic inventions. And they led to the greatest explosion of a middle-class America in our history. Did things get out of whack? You bet your downscale butt they did. But the only effective means of righting our ship of state is through more official watchdog-ism, not less. Remove the visible hand of government and you invite -- indeed, you guarantee -- the very unfettered corporate gorilla that most Americans, including libertarians, view as so repellent.
Kinsley concludes by writing, "But nothing like this is obvious to libertarians." On the other hand, "they force us to think it all through from scratch," and therefore as a proponent of free and lively debate I agree with his final three words: "Good for them."
But, to return to my opening, he leaves untouched the one "church doctrine of Pope Ron Paul" that has launched the congressman to political stardom. And that doctrine has very little to do with economic libertarianism and everything to do with fundamentalist constitutionalism -- which, by the way, makes clear its support for an activist government. That alone prompted the creation of the partially anti-Constitution Anti-Federalists, the early political faction that Paul almost certainly would have joined and thereby makes his present emphasis on pure constitutionalism somewhat problematic, if not profoundly contradictory.
But, putting that aside, there's little question that the Founders, by and large, would have been intellectually palsied by today's growth of executive power, the shrinking of congressional pushback, and the spread of an imperial United States.
On this, Ron Paul is profoundly correct, and even many Americans unschooled in the finer points of original constitutional intent recognize this simple reality for the Bushian bastardization it is. We have not merely veered from a noble course; we have done left the tracks and careened smack into an intensely unAmerican bulwark of international arrogance.
That's the critical message that Paul delivers and more than a minority of Americans rightly accept. But those same Americans are also committed to social equity, and, since we no longer live in some pre-industrial semblance of a Jeffersonian economic democracy, they look to the government as watchdog. Paul does not, and that's why he, or anyone like him, can never close the sale.