The only serious criticism of Ron Paul at this juncture is this – he is too much of an ideologue.
Principles are fine. But knowing how to apply them takes more than theory. We all know not to tell lies and we admire people who don’t. But when a burglar demands your wallet, a fine talent for prevaricating is a very good thing.
A man who condemns an aggressor’s blow and a victim’s retaliation equally is not being principled, but cruel. Someone who applies the law even handedly to an eighteen year old first-time offender and a hardened recidivist of middle years is not just, but unjust.
Israel Matzav, an orthodox Jewish blogger, says that that’s what’s holding back many Republicans with Ron Paul.
“Whether or not Paul is an anti-Semite, I cannot support anyone who would govern based on an absolute, hard and fast philosophy like Paul’s.”
Another conservative blog, articulating a variation of the same criticism, writes
“Ideologues don’t have a history of fixing systems, they have a history of breaking them in a different way. For all his talk of the Founders, they were men who weren’t rooted to a single way of doing things. Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison had their fundamental differences, but none of them were so rooted in their way of thinking that they were unable to deal with reality.”
That, I think, is a legitimate criticism. The only one, in the dire circumstances we face today.
At a time when the boundaries of the state are porous, when war is low-level insurgency, when the “battle field is everywhere,” the libertarian position that only defensive wars in the traditional sense are permissible needs more clarification and specifics to be defensible politically (Lila: I added the word politically here to clarify what I mean), even if it is the morally correct position.
That is more than many libertarians actually give.
Most of them like to shrug at that point and say, “the market.” or human action will take care of things.
To this, the conservative replies, yes, if there are human beings around. But in the gaping wounds torn by the state, what if the only thing that can survive in the gangrene is maggot life, then what?
That is what Ron Paul needs to articulate more sharply.
“the… position that only defensive wars in the traditional sense are permissible needs more clarification and specifics to be defensible”
That clarification is required, means … all is lost. IMHO.
No. I mean clarification of how it would work.
For eg. US withdraws from Iraq, place collapses into even more confusion.
Is it moral to withdraw unilaterally, without even a statement that what happened was mistaken and wrong? But if such a statement were made, wouldn’t it encourage violent reaction against maybe some innocent American bystanders in other countries, requiring the government to then defend them in some way?
So it’s not clear to me that just withdrawing works without some trade-offs.
The state is not an individual actor.
And unlike an individual actor, the consequences of its actions are invariably borne by innocent people.
Libertarians just shrug like its none of their business what happens next…let each man look out for himself and the devil take the hindmost. But that is only morally defensible if that was the way all along. If you have now set up a whole bunch of other people to be victims because of your wrong doing…then when you walk away, those people can be added to the list of people you have victimized, even if you’re done with fighting..
This is what I mean by blind ideology.
There’s no sense of any complexity or gray areas, or trade-offs when you read some of the Paulbots.
Yes, moral life is simple for the most part.
But the state is not a moral entity in the first place. It’s a juridical creation, established post facto out of brute power relations, modified over time.
Anyone who tries to reduce that to analogies with singular human action is working with a flawed model to begin with. Gandhi failed, just because of that.
(He succeeded in a way I’m not sure any more was a success. I’m convinced that a lot of things would have been better in India without Gandhi).