With a few important exceptions, that strategy has worked all too well for the GOP. Republicans have been seen by the public since the McCarthy era as the more trustable party on national security. GOP politicians have every electoral incentive to outdo each other in promising which countries they’ll bomb or sanction.

That is why Ron Paul matters. Not because, if he is elected president, he will strip America of its foreign-policy follies. He has no chance of being president, and so acting on that assumption is foolhardy. Rather, Paul’s importance lies in his providing an opening to other Republicans (and, perhaps, Democrats) to moderate their international aggression. Paul is the antidote to this persistent and pernicious notion that the key to electoral success in Republican circles is to be unfailingly supportive of foreign-policy interventions and military adventures. By finishing second in the New Hampshire primary last night despite the overwhelming opposition to the GOP establishment, Paul has shown that his views are just plain popular with voters. And after he spoke, rival Jon Huntsman came on to give a speech advocating an immediate end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a position that until recently belonged almost exclusively to the antiwar left. Whatever his many flaws, Paul has legitimized skepticism of the widespread belief that it is always and forever America’s job to police the globe.

Of course, Paul is hardly the first semi-major presidential candidate to be doubtful about some of America’s wars. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama made the case for diplomacy with Iran and exploited his opposition to the Iraq War. But he has been unable or unwilling as president to fundamentally recast American foreign policy. The primary problems with U.S. strategy since 9/11 remain intact: an urge to transform the world and an overreaction to the terrorism threat. Obama is a more effective strategist then his predecessor, but his framework — famously summarized as “leading from behind” — does not signal a change in goals.

Only Paul has offered a wholesale critique of our ultra-interventionist foreign policy that appeals to the Republican rank and file.  Last week, Sarah Palin told Sean Hannity that Paul’s success showed the wisdom of “sweep[ing] our own porch before we start intervening in other countries that we can’t afford today to be intervening in.” It was not the first time Palin has praised Paul’s narrow conception of American international interests.  In October 2011 she lionized his call for increased congressional oversight of military entanglements and his suspicion of overseas attachments. Palin is a know-nothing fraud, of course, but she knows how to appeal to a certain slice of the electorate. Paul has proven the political viability of foreign-policy alternative strategies to aggression.

“Where we are very successful,” Paul said in a speech recently, “is re-introducing some ideas the Republicans needed for a long time.” Former CIA intelligence officer Michael Scheuer agrees. Scheuer, who headed the CIA’s bin Laden unit and has written two must-read books on terrorism, made headlines for endorsing Paul recently. Paul has been particularly successful in introducing the idea of foreign-policy restraint to a younger generation, he says. “At his age — he’s 76 — this is last hurrah, so someone else has to take over,” Scheuer says.

Paul will not win, but he may open up space for someone more moderate to rise in GOP circles. Compared to Paul, Huntsman’s antiwar position does not seem so radical. as Philip Klein of the conservative Washington Examiner recently noted, “Though Paul offers a broad non-interventionist attack on the foreign policy consensus, Huntsman is making a more nuanced argument focusing on specific complaints, such as America’s presence in Afghanistan, while still asserting that America, in general, should have a forceful foreign policy.”

It should also be recalled that the best years of American foreign policy, the Roosevelt-Truman-Eisenhower years, were a time when isolationists played an important, but not supreme, role in political life. For all their many flaws, isolationists and America-firsters frequently served as an important check on Americans’ missionary impulses. Right now we have the worst of all worlds, with two parties competing to outdo each other with their so-called toughness in an era when America is extraordinarily secure yet economically troubled and restraint is called for. Our flawed approach will change one day, and when it does, no small thanks should go to Ron Paul.

To review the basic Paul profile: When it comes to government social spending and regulation, Paul is more antithetical to progressive goals than any candidate running for the White House. This is indisputable. At the same time, though, when it comes to war, surveillance, police power, bank bailouts, cutting the defense budget, eliminating corporate welfare and civil liberties, Paul is more in line with progressive goals than any candidate running in 2012 (or almost any Democrat who has held a federal office in the last 30 years). This, too, is indisputable.

In seeing Paul’s economic views, positions on a woman’s right to choose, regulatory ideas and ties to racist newsletters as disqualifying factors for their electoral support, many self-identified liberal Obama supporters are essentially deciding that, for purposes of voting, those set of issues are simply more important to them than the issues of war, foreign policy, militarism, Wall Street bailouts, surveillance, police power and civil liberties — that is, issues in which Paul is far more progressive than the sitting president.

There’s certainly a logic to that position, and that logic fits within the conventionally accepted rubric of progressivism. But let’s not pretend here: Holding this position about what is and is not a disqualifying factor is a clear statement of priorities — more specifically, a statement that Paul’s odious economics, regulatory ideas, position on reproductive rights and ties to bigotry should be more electorally disqualifying than President Obama’s odious escalation of wars, drone killing of innocents, due-process-free assassinations, expansion of surveillance, increases in the defense budget, massive ongoing bank bailouts and continuation of the racist drug war.

By contrast, Paul’s progressive-minded supporters are simply taking the other position — they are basically saying that, for purposes of voting, President Obama’s record on militarism, civil liberties, foreign policy, defense budgets and bailouts are more disqualifying than Paul’s newsletter, economics, abortion and regulatory positions. Again, there’s an obvious logic to this position — one that also fits well within the conventional definition of progressivism. And just as Obama supporters shouldn’t pretend they aren’t expressing their preferences, Paul’s supporters shouldn’t do that either. Their support of the Republican congressman is a statement of personal priorities within the larger progressive agenda.

Hence, we reach one of those impossible questions: From a progressive perspective, which is a more legitimate camp to be in? In terms of ideological allegiance to the larger progressive agenda, I don’t really think there’s a right or wrong answer. But in terms of realpolitik, there’s a strong case to be made that Paul’s progressive-minded supporters understand something that Obama’s supporters either can’t or don’t want to: namely, that a presidential election is a vote for president, not a vote to elect the entire federal government. As such, when faced with candidates whom you agree with on some issues and totally disagree with on other issues, it’s perfectly rational — and wholly pragmatic — to consider one’s own multifaceted policy preferences in the context of what a prospective president will have the most unilateral power to actually enact.

With Paul, it just so happens that most of the ultra-progressive parts of his platform (and legislative career) correspond to the presidential powers that are most unilateral in nature. As President Obama so aptly proved when he ignored the War Powers Act during the Libya conflict and started drone wars in various other countries, a president can start and end military conflicts with the stroke of a pen — and without any congressional check on power. Likewise, as President Obama showed when he assassinated American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and then his family without so much as a single criminal charge, a president can now trample or expand civil liberties with the stroke of the same pen. The president also appoints the chairman of the Federal Reserve bank, which now unilaterally grants trillions of dollars in bailouts without intervention from Congress. And, as President Obama proved with his administration’s crackdown on California’s marijuana laws, a president has far more operational control over the drug war than the congressional committees charged with oversight.

By contrast, the policy areas where Paul is most at odds with progressives are the areas Congress has far more control over — specifically, budgets and regulatory statutes.

So, for instance, Paul’s radical proposals to eliminate major social programs are certainly objectionable, and, if he were president, those proposals would certainly have an impact on the overall political debate. But the Constitution mandates that the federal budget is the purview of Congress. That explains why the final budget so often looks so different from the budget initially proposed by the president — and why a President Paul wouldn’t be able to do to the budget what he could do unilaterally to, say, America’s war policy. Likewise, President Paul may want to get rid of civil rights and clean water regulations, and his executive power over appointments and agency rule-making could certainly do great harm to the enforcement of those important regulations. But again, unlike wars, civil liberties, bailouts and domestic police power, Congress has far more control over those regulatory statutes than any single president — and additionally, many of those statutes permit private legal action (suing, etc.) as an (albeit, imperfect) means of enforcement.

Of course, an Obama supporter might argue that the set of issues they can agree with Paul on are less monumental than the set of issues they agree with Obama on. But don’t mistake such a conversation-ending declaration as fact. On the contrary, it’s merely a subjective opinion — and a debatable one at that. Indeed, Paul supporters would make a compelling case that it’s exactly the opposite — that the progressive side of Paul’s program relates to more pressing issues than Obama’s progressive positions in this, the age of multitrillion-dollar bailouts, deficit-exploding defense budgets, assaults on the most basic tenets of the Bill of Rights and what the Pentagon now calls “the era of persistent conflict” (read: Permanent War). And they have a strong case to make that by virtue of the modern presidency Paul would be guaranteed to actually enact the progressive parts of his program, whereas the progressive parts of President Obama’s program are more a question of congressional politics (a good example of that truism was the healthcare bill, which went from a mildly progressive White House proposal to a public-option-free boondoggle for the insurance and drug industries by the time Obama and his lobbyist friends finished massaging it through Congress).

In holding this pragmatic view, it doesn’t mean Paul’s progressive-minded supporters believe in the reactionary tenets of Paul’s agenda (eliminating major social programs, opposing civil rights laws, ending all taxes, having a history associated with racist newsletters, etc.) any more than it means Obama’s progressive-minded supporters are thrilled with all of the president’s ultra-conservative actions (wars, mass killing of civilians, trampling of civil liberties, bank bailouts, a racist drug war, etc.). It only means that there’s a calculation at work — one that takes into account the realities of presidential power.

Is this calculation reasonable, or at least defensible within the progressive coalition? I’d say yes (even though, again, I’m not endorsing Paul). To paraphrase the most standard apologia Democratic partisans use to defend President Obama (one overused with regard to Obama, IMHO), a president is not a Superman or a savior — on the issues in which he doesn’t have unilateral control, he has to work with Congress and therefore isn’t always the sole “decider” of policy outcomes. That’s especially the case at a moment when Washington is more gridlocked than ever.

Faced with that reality, and sick of a political system that is paralyzed by the Manichaean blood sport of red-versus-blue, many voters of all stripes are focusing primarily on the issues that the president has total control over. These issues, after all, are hardly insignificant — and they are the ones a presidential election can instantly change.

Paul’s progressive supporters seem to understand that truism, while many Obama supporters find it too inconvenient to acknowledge. That’s fine. In fact, that’s what democracy is all about — the freedom to make your own choice. But don’t think the choice being made by Paul’s supporters is so obvious a progressive litmus test when the same reductionism used to tar and feather those supporters (“they’re racist because of his newsletters!”) could be used against Obama backers (“they’re baby killers because of the president’s wars!”).

Despite media hype and activists’ glib talking points, such election choices between imperfect candidates are not so simple, nor should they be when a truly informed vote means factoring in the unspoken nuances of presidential power.

A number of commentators I respect greatly are finding aspects of Paul’s platform to be compelling. Among them are Glenn Greenwald on this site and Matt Stoller at Naked Capitalism. Greenwald points out that “Ron Paul is the only major candidate from either party advocating crucial views on vital issues that need to be heard, and so his candidacy generates important benefits” [his emphasis]. He goes on to provide a long list of Obama’s shortcomings that, he points out, are not shared by Ron Paul. Stoller argues that “the anger [Paul] inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.”

I couldn’t disagree more. What I find objectionable about Ron Paul is very much related to his positions, which I view as an organic whole, divergent from progressive values on every single vital issue, including the foreign policy views that are the main attraction he holds for some liberals. Unlike Greenwald and Stoller, I don’t find any solace in his positions on foreign policy, or his desire to disentangle the U.S. from Afghanistan. I can’t quite so comfortably carve out Paul’s views on defense and foreign policy. To me, that’s like trying to scrape peanut butter off the business end of a mousetrap.

In a sense, Paul is emerging as a protest vote for two separate and usually irreconcilable constituencies: traditional conservatives who want to slash the size of government to the bone, and young people and progressives who are opposed to the war. I don’t have much to say to the former. Paul is their man. But voters who want to protest the endless war in Afghanistan should realize that a protest vote for Paul is also a protest vote against the very role of government in society. Do they really want to cast such a vote? Is a protest vote quite so important?  Are their better ways of opposing the war? Greenwald, to his credit, does not advocate voting for Paul, but that is one logical implication of his position.

Those considering a protest vote for Paul need to weigh its cost and implications. The more one digs into the weeds of Paul’s record, the more one is overwhelmed by the stench.

My feelings on that point were reinforced when I used a database to reach back to 1997, when Paul returned to Congress after a lengthy hiatus, and examined every floor speech that Paul made in his first term back on the Hill.

I didn’t catch him in any racist riffs. What I found, instead, was much worse than casual bigotry.  It was the mindset of a doctrinaire follower of Austrian economics and Ayn Rand—a fervent advocate of laissez-faire economics, the primacy of “market forces,” and a philosophy of government that allows for only the most limited government. While his views are never expressed in brutal, screw-the-poor terms, you have to ask yourself: Are such positions ever expressed in brutal, screw-the-poor terms? You also have to wonder, as you read the following, whether his record on foreign policy is worth endorsing this kind of baggage.

This is a politician who is, as advertised, consistent, but consistent in a kind of moral myopia. I’m not cherry-picking. I’m talking about amoral views comprising his entire program, and by that I would include foreign affairs, in which he opposes not only the war in Iraq and intervention in Afghanistan, but any kind of foreign involvement by the U.S., including humanitarian intervention against overseas genocide.

What I also found was the phenomenon that Thomas Frank identified in his 2004 book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”: positions that would intentionally screw the people supporting him, and his supporters either not knowing or not caring.

I wonder how many of Paul’s progressive supporters are aware that Paul is so virulently anti-abortion that on March 19, 1997 he said on the House floor that “ I am convinced that abortion is the most important issue of the 20th century”?

I wonder how many of his young liberal fans are aware of his views on scholarships and low-interest loans for college students—that there shouldn’t be any?  In a speech inserted in the Congressional Record of April 22, 1998 entitled “Education in America is Facing a Crisis,” Paul talked up his rather innocuous (and sensible) idea to exempt from taxation income earned by farm kids at 4-H and Future Farmers of America fairs.  “We say the only way a youngster could ever go to college is if we give them a grant, if we give them a scholarship, if we give them a student loan. And what is the record on payment on student loans? Not very good. A lot of them walk away.”

OK, that’s a fair statement. But then Paul displayed his rigid ideological agenda: “

There is also the principle of it. Why should the Federal Government be involved in this educational process? And besides, the other question is, if we give scholarships and low-interest loans to people who go to college, what we are doing is making the people who do not get to go to college pay for that education, which to me does not seem fair. It seems like that the advantage goes to the individual who gets to go to college, and the people who do not get to go to college should not have to subsidize them.” [My emphasis]

That’s straight out of Ayn Rand—the view that aid to one segment of society “loots” other segments of society. Thus government-sponsored low-interest loans and scholarships are a form of theft.

Paul again channeled Rand on July 20, 1998. Explaining his opposition to a child nutrition and WIC plan reauthorization bill, he attacked the “flawed redistributionist, welfare state model that lies behind this bill.” Then he launched into another monologue:

“Providing for the care of the poor is a moral responsibility of every citizen,” he said. “However, it is not a proper function of the Federal Government to plunder”—that’s straight out of Rand—“one group of citizens and redistribute those funds to another group of citizens. Nowhere in the United States Constitution is the Federal Government authorized to provide welfare services. If any government must provide welfare services, it should be State and local governments. However, the most humane and efficient way to provide charitable services are through private efforts. “

Humane and efficient for whom, I wonder? Certainly not the poor, who would be transported back in time to the 19th Century. Note the ideological consistency. He’s often praised for that, and I’ve never understood why. What we see here is a rigid worldview, a person unwilling to adapt to reality, no matter how much his ideology might hurt people less fortunate than himself.

It goes on and on like that—the opposition to social programs to benefit the poor on “constitutional” grounds; the monotonous references to “fiat money” as causing the Asian financial crisis of 1998. Paul was rightly critical of that year’s Fed-sponsored bailout of Long-Term Financial Management, the hedge fund whose reckless bets almost brought down the entire financial system, in a precursor to the 2008-2009 financial crisis. But Paul is not concerned in the least about the regulatory neglect that allowed LTCM (and later would allow the major banks) to spin out of control. His sole focus is the Federal Reserve, which he would like to end, and the gold standard, which he would like to reinstate.

Although his backers—including some progressives—contend that Paul is an opponent of the “big banks” and former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, in fact no member of Congress, and no Wall Street executive, was and is more virulent in his opposition to financial regulation than Ron Paul. Yes, Paul was critical of Greenspan—because of his approach to monetary policy. On deregulation, they were soul mates.

In a floor speech on April 16, 1997, opposing pro-consumer legislation concerning private mortgage insurance, Paul said: “Just this past weekend, Alan Greenspan explained why consumers are often better served by private market regulations rather than government intervention. He said that, quote: Government regulation can undermine the effectiveness of private market regulation and can itself be ineffective in protecting the public interest.”

“With this, I concur,” Paul said. By the way, what Paul calls “private market regulation” is shorthand for “no regulation.”

Paul’s views are rooted in the narrow, Randian view of liberty as extending only to the person, not to groups of people. That sounds elegant until you realize what it means: no consumer legislation, no civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and, as was a hot topic in 1998, no hate-crime legislation.

His foreign policy views don’t salvage him. Some on the left conflate his 1930s-style, right-wing isolationism with their opposition to the “American empire.” Pretty much everything that Paul has to say about America’s role in the world could have, and did, come from Charles Lindbergh at America First rallies. Or Robert Taft, the New Deal foe and leading isolationist of the pre-war era, whom Paul cited by name in a speech to his supporters Tuesday night. Paul’s isolationism is the isolationism of Ayn Rand, who, like Lindbergh and Taft—and Paul—opposed U.S. participation in World War II. Like Paul, she was opposed to the United Nations—and yes, also opposed the Vietnam War, the military draft, and the war on drugs.

Those positions—also consistent, also heartfelt, also at variance with the Republican Party of her time—made Rand popular among many young people in the 1960s and 1970s. But her other views, which included opposition to the Civil Right Act of 1964 for the identical reasons articulated by Paul, made her toxic, isolated, marginalized—very much as was Ron Paul, until his recent surge in popularity.

Would the anti-interventionist, anti-draft, anti-anti-drug-war Rand be attractive to progressives if she were alive today?  I think she might, and that’s why I think it’s important to be aware of the principles your political bedfellow truly stands for. You might not feel so great when the beer goggles wear off.

So don’t tell me about Paul’s political courage. It’s easy to be a fearless iconoclast when nothing’s at stake. That said, it was heartening to hear the Texas congressman, during a Fox News-sponsored Iowa debate of all places, stress the similarities between the current “bomb Iran” chorus and the 2003 propaganda campaign that led the U.S. to invade Iraq. Paul dismissed as “absurd” Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann’s assertions that the Iranian government’s “theology” would lead it to start a nuclear war for the sake of national martyrdom.

“To declare war on 1.2 billion Muslims and say all Muslims are the same, this is dangerous talk,” Paul added. “Yeah, there are some radicals. But they don’t come here to kill us because we’re free and prosperous. Do they go to Switzerland and Sweden? I mean, that’s absurd … The CIA has explained it to us. They said they come here and want to do us harm because we’re bombing them.”

Actually, Iran and al-Qaida are bitter enemies. Otherwise, Paul’s on target. He also pointed out that the U.S. and Iran haven’t been at war since 1979, as Santorum asserted, but since 1953, when a CIA-sponsored coup overthrew Iran’s elected government and installed the corrupt, dictatorial Shah. For all the current regime’s brutality, that historical grievance is why attacking Iran would only strengthen the Ayatollahs.

It’s precisely such interludes that have led luminaries like Bachmann, Rush Limbaugh and the New Hampshire Union-Leader to declare Paul a dangerous heretic. A bit more surprising is his fan base on the left. “I have big problems w/ Ron Paul on many issues,” tweeted the Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel. “But on ending preemptive wars & on challenging bipartisan elite consensus on FP, good he’s in.”

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald went much further. Paul’s “nomination,” he wrote, “would mean that it is the Republican candidate — not the Democrat — who would be the anti-war, pro-due-process, pro-transparency, anti-Fed, anti-Wall-Street-bailout, anti-Drug-War advocate (which is why some neocons are expressly arguing they’d vote for Obama over Paul). Is it really hard to see why Democrats hate his candidacy and anyone who touts its benefits?”

Oh please. In as much as Paul’s nomination would also be preceded by signs, portents, graveyards yielding up their dead and lions whelping in the streets, hating him would be rather a waste of energy.

In the meantime, Talking Points Memo overheard candidate Paul warning the citizens of Sioux Center, Iowa, that land use regulations could lead to dictatorship.

“I’m fearful,” he said “because some people would like us to go all the way to the U.N. and have the U.N. controlling our lands, too.”

Black helicopters, anyone? Exactly who these “some people” might be, Paul didn’t say. Of course, some people think space aliens monitor their thoughts through fillings in their teeth. Some people even believe that the U.S. government has installed chemical tracking agents in $100 bills.

Oops, actually that was Dr. Paul himself. A 1993 promotional letter for the militia-friendly “Ron Paul Newsletter,” published the last time a Democratic president provoked apocalyptic fears among Moron-Americans, helpfully explained: “The totalitarian bills were tinted pink and blue and brown, and blighted with holograms, diffraction gratings, metal and plastic threads, and chemical alarms. It was a portable inquisition, a paper ‘third degree,’ to allow the feds to keep track of American cash, and American citizens.”

Send that tainted cash straight to Ron Paul. He’d know what to do with it. Today, of course, the candidate says he neither wrote nor read any of the crackpot ravings in the Ron Paul Newsletter. Not the stuff about how Martin Luther King was a pedophile, how Israeli agents bombed the World Trade Center, about the coming American race-war, or the “federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS,” none of it.

Even “The Original Famous Ron Paul Survival Kit,” an official World War II U.S. Army ammo holder filled “with highly liquid, small-denomination silver and gold coins for hand-to-hand use,” was supposedly news to Ron Paul.

Sure it was. How could anybody doubt him?

Look, this guy’s no more a Libertarian than I’m a Rastafarian. Even when he’s right, as on bombing Iran, he’s wrong. (Hint: It’s about the Jews.) What he’s got against the federal government is the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Anyway, call me old-fashioned, but sanity matters.

 By equating the Civil Rights Act, which expanded American civil liberty, with the Patriot Act, which reduced it, on the grounds that both are federal laws with sanctions, Ron Paul displays the moral idiocy of someone who declares that a person who pushes a little old lady out of the path of a bus is just as bad as a person who pushes a little old lady into the path of a bus, because both are equally guilty of pushing little old ladies around.

Like other libertarians, Ron Paul does not understand American values.  The American experiment is an experiment in creating and maintaining a democratic republic, not a minimal state.  American political culture is founded not on the theories of Ayn Rand or Ludwig von Mises but on the reasoning of natural rights theorists like John Locke, for whom coercion in the service of communal self-defense is perfectly legitimate.  In Lockean social contract theory, in order to protect themselves from human predators, people form a community and then transfer the pooled power of self-defense to the community’s trustee, the state, the better to resist invasion and crime.  While abuses of military and police power are to be guarded against, the idea that the military and police and government as such are inherently tyrannical, a familiar theme in libertarian and anarchist thought, is utterly alien to America’s Lockean republican tradition.

Libertarians typically argue that only government, backed by military and police power, can be tyrannical.  Lockean republicans in contrast believe that private power located in the for-profit or non-profit sectors can be tyrannical, as well.  By means of their agent, the state, the sovereign people legitimately can protect themselves from predation by private sector tyrants as well as public sector tyrants.

Libertarians are not the brightest lights in the candelabra, a fact that is evident from the alternatives they tend to offer to public prevention of private abuses.  For example:  if you don’t like working a hundred hours a week for twenty-five cents a day, then find another employer!  It is obvious to intelligent people, if not libertarians, that more generous employers will price themselves out of a market whose standards are set by the most rapacious.

The other popular libertarian remedy for exploitation is to move somewhere else where you will be treated better.  But what if you can’t emigrate?  Well, it seems, you must suffer your exploitation in silence, rather than enlist the aid of the law in restraining your thuggish employer, your predatory landlord, your exploitative banker or the vendors who sell you toxic food and dangerous products.

Some libertarians concede the legitimacy of government coercion in protecting property rights.  But in doing so, these libertarians, like Ron Paul, give up any principled objection to government coercion.  They simply want government coercion to be used for some purposes—protecting property rights—and not others—enforcing civil rights.

The Civil Rights Act did not mark an intrusion of government into a realm previously governed purely by what Paul calls “private choices.”  Until the federal Civil Rights Act was passed, the coercive power of state and local governments was routinely used to enforce the “private choices” and “property rights” of racists.  If a diner owner banned blacks from his diner, and blacks sat down at the counter and insisted on being served, then the diner owner could call the police, who, protecting the property rights of the owner, would drag the would-be black patrons of the restaurant off to jail.

The straightforward way to interpret Paul’s remarks on CNN is to read him as saying that bigoted property owners, like owners of restaurants, should to this day have the right to call on the coercive power of the police department to enforce their decisions to refuse to serve certain categories of customers on their property.  Anti-semitic store owners, for example, should have the right not merely to put up a “No Jews” sign, but also to summon the police, at the taxpayer’s expense, to arrest any Jew who insisted on entering the store.

Perhaps I am misreading Paul.  Perhaps he does not think that business owners should have retained the right, abolished by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to have the government, in the form of the police, use coercion to enforce their racist “private choices” to exclude certain classes of clients.  Perhaps he thinks that the police should not be involved in the effort to expel the Jew from the Judenrein store.  Perhaps true libertarianism means that the anti-semitic store owner should try to persuade the unwanted Jew in the store to leave by noncoercive means—“Shoo, Jew!”  Or perhaps authentic libertarianism would sanction private not public coercion, so the Jew-hating store owner should be allowed to hire Slow-Eye Pete and Philadelphia Jack to enforce the store’s No-Jew policy.

But I don’t think this is what Paul meant to say.  From his statement that the Civil Rights act “destroyed the principle of private property and private choices,” I think his meaning is quite clear:  civil rights legislation at any level—federal, state or local—should never have been passed.  To this day, store owners should be free to call on the public police at public expense to drag blacks, Jews, or members of other groups that the owners do not like from their business establishments, in the name of property rights.

Should we be impressed if Paul says that as a personal matter he would oppose such things, while defending their legality?  It is hard to see any daylight between an overt racist and someone who claims to oppose racism or anti-semitism, but also denounces the only effective ways to put a stop to them—that is, civil rights laws.  If you argue that private racism is bad but anti-racist laws are worse, and if you have no problem with the state’s coercive power when it enforces racism but object to coercive state power only in the service of anti-racism, then you cannot complain when others draw their own conclusions about your motives (even if, unlike Ron Paul, you did not publish white supremacist newsletters for years under your own name).

Abraham Lincoln dissected the sophistical rhetoric of people like Ron Paul, long before the noble word “liberty” was tortured into “libertarianism.”  In 1864, during the Civil War, he told an audience:

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name———liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names———liberty and tyranny.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty…