Ron Paul

Why shouldn’t he? Frauds win, whether they are in finance or politics. Bernie Madoff proved that, and so did Ronald Reagan. The success of the Ron Paul campaign with young voters, which David Sirota pointed out in Salon Monday, is but the latest example of how Americans can be persuaded to support the most reactionary politicians in America when they’re suitably manipulated, even if they aren’t reactionary and, sometimes, even when they identify themselves as progressive.

There’s little doubt that aspects of his message are both appealing and sincere. There is a definite “yay factor” in some of his oratory, and his denunciations of Dick Cheney are the kind of thing that gets yays on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.”

Paul has been consistent in opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in opposing American military adventures in general. He has staked out a lonely position as the only presidential candidate to oppose aid to Israel (until Rick Perry more or less aped him on that), and his distinctly non-aggressive posture on Iran is indistinguishable from that of dovish Democrats like Dennis Kucinich.

So there’s no question that there’s a lot to like in Paul’s foreign policy positions, if you’re leaning to the left. The problem is that Paul is less of a 21st century dove than he is a throwback to the isolationism of the early to mid-20th century, in which fear of foreign entanglements was embraced by the hard right — with all that came with it. Paul emerges from that mold as about as far right as they come, further right than Ronald Reagan ever was, more of an enemy of the poor and middle class, and an even warmer friend of the ultra-wealthy. A Ron Paul America would make the Reagan Revolution look like the New Deal.

Paul’s own oratory tends to deemphasize his reactionary stance on social issues, or to sugarcoat it. But his program is now laid out in black-and-white. Last month, the Paul campaign set forth the details of what it grandiloquently called a “Plan to Restore America.”  It has received surprisingly little attention, given Paul’s surging popularity.

This is not a plan for the 99 percent. It is about as much of a 1 percent-oriented ideological meat cleaver as you can find anywhere in the annals of politics. Paul would take an ax to the federal budget, hacking off $1 trillion in the first year alone, ripping and cutting and deenacting and deregulating so as to ostensibly return America to “its former constitutionally limited, smaller-government and less-burdensome place.”

“Return” implies that America would be taken back to a starting place, though it’s not clear where that would be. What I do know is that there is definitely an undercurrent to his slash-and-burn philosophy, a strong whiff of Ayn Rand — the Russian-born philosopher-novelist, atheist and advocate of individuality, rational self-interest and selfishness. Paul is, in fact, the closest of all the GOP candidates to carrying out the anti-government policies Rand advocated.

To be sure, there are aspects of this budget plan that hardcore Randers would not like. It leaves in far too many nonessential government functions, such as allowing the continued existence of the Department of Health and Human Services. But, from the Randian perspective, Paul is definitely moving in the right direction. His “restore” plan embraces the kind of deprivation that Rand’s Objectivist philosophy would impose on America, and would enact a fundamental change in the role of government that the radical right cherishes.

After spelling out the good stuff from the leftist perspective — a 15 percent Defense Department spending cut ending all funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the hard charge backward commences:

• No more aid to education. Goodbye, Department of Education.

• No more government-subsidized housing. Goodbye, Department of Housing and Urban Development.

• No more energy programs. Goodbye, Department of Energy.

• No more programs to promote commerce and technology. Goodbye, Department of Commerce.

• *No more national parks. Goodbye, Department of the Interior.

His opposition to the very existence of the Federal Reserve — he wrote a book titled “End the Fed” — is straight out of Rand, as is his promotion of the gold standard.

Paul would not reform the abysmally flawed and underfunded Securities and Exchange Commission, he would eliminate it. The only agency of the federal government that stands between the public and greedy bankers and crooked corporations would be gone. He is philosophically opposed to it, as he is to Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank, the reform measures enacted after Enron and the 2008 financial crisis, respectively. His Reformed America would no longer discomfit Wall Street with the latter’s restrictions on banks or annoy corporate executives with Sarb-Ox’s ethics and fair-disclosure rules.

And this is but the beginning of the shower of blessings that would rain down upon the very richest Americans. He would end the income tax, thereby making the United States the ultimate onshore tax haven. The message to both the Street and corporate America would be a kind of hyper-Reaganesque “Go to town, guys.” With income, estate and gift taxes eliminated and the top corporate tax rate lowered to 15 percent (and not a word about cutting corporate tax loopholes), a kind of perma-plutonomy would come to exist in the land — to the extent that there isn’t one already.

The guts of Paul’s grand scheme, where its rubber hits the road, is in the all-important theme of cutting programs that benefit the poor and middle class. Despite all its window-dressing and spin, the heart of every libertarian plan for this country is a kind of mammoth subtraction: making deep cuts in programs benefiting millions of Americans, out of a belief that such programs are morally wrong. Restoring America is a moral statement, an enshrinement of the Randian belief that aid to one facet of the population (the poor) is really “looting” of resources from other facets of the population (the wealthy).

So when you see in this plan a $645 billion cut in Medicaid over four years, what you are seeing is an expression of the philosophy that Medicaid itself is wrong, that it should not exist because it is not the function of society to provide healthcare for the poor. If they get sick, tough. While Paul does not go the full Randian route by entirely eliminating this program, he goes a long way to establish the principle that as a general proposition, as a moral question, we simply should not have this program.

Ayn Rand believed that there is no such thing as a “public,” and that the public was a collection of individuals, each having no obligation to the other.  So when you read through this budget, and see the deep cuts in food stamps and child nutrition, what you are seeing is an expression of a philosophy that is at odds with the Judeo-Christian system of morality embraced by most Americans.

That, fundamentally, is what the deficit debate is all about, from the perspective of Ron Paul and the radical right. It’s not about getting the red ink out of the government but using the government’s fiscal travails as a pretext to change the very purpose of government. So yes, he opposed the Wall Street bailouts, as Rand no doubt would have, and that also is “yay”-worthy to many people. But if you buy that, if you buy Ron Paul, you have to buy the rest of his belief system: his opposition to securities regulation, his opposition to consumer protection, his belief that the markets can defend Americans from the depredations of big business.

What I’ve just described is many things, but it is the very antithesis of the values of Occupy Wall Street, which is based on opposition to the prerogatives of the top 1 percent at the expense of the 99 percent. Yet rather than forthrightly oppose OWS, which would at least be intellectually honest, Paul has sought instead to co-opt it, con it, calling it a “healthy movement” at one appearance, and seeking to link it with his “end the Fed” agenda. In Keene he went one step further by declaring himself as being in league with the 99 percent and against the 1 percent.

That’s about as far from the truth as it possibly could be. The only question is, how long is Paul going to be allowed to get away with his faux-populist con job? I agree with his backers in this sense: He is less of a fringe candidate than he is sometimes portrayed in the media. His positions are increasingly infecting mainstream Republican politics, and it’s scary.

No, strike that. His positions are scary only if you know what they actually are, and not how he spins them.

But that doesn’t mean that those of us who aren’t won over by Paul should just dismiss the guy as a nut, which seems to be a popular practice in news organizations. I don’t think he’s been terribly forthcoming, especially on those newsletters, but you can’t deny that Paul has a number of positive qualities that moderates and liberals need to understand and appreciate, in order to effectively counter his views:

1.  He has integrity. I grimace as I write this, but it’s true. Perhaps not compared to Mother Teresa, but certainly he does when stacked up against pretty much any other politician I know, including more than a few Democrats. (He obviously has more integrity than Mitt Romney, but that’s not saying much.) His consistent dedication to the same ideals, the same causes — obsessions, actually — cannot be seriously disputed. A perusal of his books, House of Representatives floor speeches and miscellaneous bloviating over the years shows that the man has been hammering away at the same isolationist/monetary/no-government/”Constitution” themes for decades. He has opposed the war on drugs for decades, just as for years he has opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Mind you, he’s not always internally consistent, in the sense that he takes positions that stray from the libertarian ideal: taking earmarks for his district and stridently opposing abortion. But on most issues you can expect that his rigidity on matters of ideology will shine through, no matter how politically inexpedient.

2. He’s likable. Paul doesn’t give off mean-S.O.B. vibes like Newt Gingrich. He’s rumpled, and walks with the head-forward bad posture of a slightly distracted junior college professor, shuffling along, late for his next class. He doesn’t make a big show of bullying debate moderators as Gingrich has been doing (though he has walked out on an interview). Though his positions are even more uncompassionately conservative than Romney’s, he comes across with considerably more warmth (again, not saying much). His delivery on the stump is folksy, not fanatical. He talks about cutting $1 trillion out of the federal budget like your family doctor telling you he’s got to take out a gallstone. It’s good for you. It won’t hurt for long. Paul is often compared to the old man in the neighborhood who shoos the kids off his lawn, but he reminds me a lot more of Sen. Eugene McCarthy, the antiwar Democrat of the 1968 campaign. He doesn’t have McCarthy’s urbane wit, but that’s asking a bit much.

3. He’s smart, and in a nice way, unlike Gingrich or Romney. He doesn’t lecture; he doesn’t talk down to people. I think this explains a great deal of his appeal to the young. He’s this generation’s Mr. Wizard, the affable TV science teacher who taught baby boomers how refrigerators operate and how to get electricity out of a spool of wire and a magnet. Ron Paul’s Mr. Wizard character similarly reduces complex issues that people don’t understand into simple concepts amenable to simple solutions, such as abolishing a good part of the federal government and getting rid of the income tax. Yet he is able to embrace these off-the-charts positions in a manner that doesn’t make them seem extreme. It takes a genius to do that, and I don’t mean that in a nice way.

4. He knows the American people are fed up. He’s struck a chord with a lot of people I respect. His talk about American “empire” makes many a progressive feel warm and fuzzy. More than any other candidate — including President Obama — he understands how tired Americans are of being underemployed, exploited by the big banks and sent to engage in nation-building overseas. Sure, his policies would entirely wipe out regulation of banks, but he gets away with it from sheer force of personality. (And yes, I can already see the comments — the hedge fund managers and bankers support Romney. Sure they do: because he’s going to get the nomination.)

Paul’s views on foreign policy hearken back to the Republican isolationists of the 1930s, the Robert Tafts and Gerald Nyes, and he similarly taps into the latent Heartland “fortress America” mentality. He cannily exploits the paranoia that has long characterized American politics, and the deep-rooted dislike of foreign entanglements that has been dormant for decades. There’s an aroma of the old America First movement to much of what he says about foreign policy, and that’s scary to people who’ve read a lot about the 1930s, and know that we’d all be speaking German today if the Firsters had gained power. But they didn’t. Most people don’t give a hoot about what happened five years ago, much less 70.

5. He talks some sense. That’s what Paul haters have had a lot of trouble digesting: He’s an extremist on most issues who makes a lot of sense on foreign policy. He’s the only antiwar candidate in 2012. Even people who don’t agree with him totally on foreign policy have to admit that his opposition to the U.S. getting involved in Libya is looking smarter as every day passes, as do his views on staying out of the maelstrom in Syria. Sure, it’s insane for progressives to support a candidate who wants to turn back the clock on the New Deal and Great Society, as I pointed out a few weeks ago. But Paul has outsmarted us. He knows that dismay about Iraq and Afghanistan is strong enough to overcome any lingering doubts about his foreign policy views among a staggering number of people who’d otherwise find him repugnant.

The solution, I think, is the same one that applies to the spreading influence of another extremist who has gone mainstream, Ayn Rand. What’s needed is not shunning but debate, and an understanding that his positions need to be viewed as part of an organic whole. Anyone who reads “Atlas Shrugged”  knows that laissez-faire capitalism is just part of the Randian package. So are atheism and a lot of other concepts that people in the Tea Party don’t always recognize when they brandish those “Who is John Galt?” posters.

It’s the same with Ron Paul. If you swallow his foreign policy, you guzzle down laissez-faire capitalism as well, whether you like it or not. So, sure, he makes sense on Syria, but he has one of the worst records on the environment and global warming of any member of Congress. That’s just one part of the price tag. It’s a long list.

Politics is compromise, and so do the choices that voters have to make. Those of us who oppose Ron Paul believe that his positions are too extreme to warrant compromise. But we need to understand why so many reasonable people feel differently.