Last week a poll was conducted which found that, if an election for President was currently held, Rep. Ron Paul would finish w/ 41% of the vote with Barry Hussein Sotero garnering 42% of the vote. It was a bit of a shocker to the political class (Both Republicrats and Demoicans) in America as the political class continues to seek to do all they can to marginalize the ideas of Ron Paul.
However, Ron Paul’s problems are not primarily the political class. Ron Paul’s primary problem, as was alluded to in a conversation I had this past weekend w/ Chad Degenhart, is that Paul’s coalition is fragile and one would think that a smart opposition to Paul could easily divide his movement.
After Chad made the passing observation about the fragility of Paul’s coalition I began to think about that reality. From where I sit you have Ron Paul building a coalition between people who support ordered liberty and people who support disordered liberty sharing only the common ground of opposing those who favor ordered Statist tyranny. This is not a coalition that can survive somebody coming along and pointing out that people who support ordered liberty (Jeffersonian Constitutionalism) and people who support disordered liberty (Randian libertinism) despise one another.
Allow me to give just one example. Ron Paul reveals his Randian Libertinism by supporting the idea that abortion should be an issue that the individual states decide. A Jeffersonian Constitutionalist is abhorred by such reasoning since they believe that the “Due Process clause” of the Constitution and the promise of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness requires the Federal Government to universally prohibit abortion in the nation.
Ron Paul is living the charmed life right now because people w/ very opposite convictions are coming to him and are reading him through their worldview lenses. Those who hate Statist tyranny and love ordered freedom listen to Ron Paul and hear him as a champion of their ideas. At the same time however, others who hate Statist tyranny and love disordered liberty hear him through their worldview and they think they hear somebody who favors, even if he personally does not, legalization of drugs, the legalization of prostitution, the legalization of homosexual marriages, and the legalization of every kind of disordered dysfunction that can be imagined. These two types of people should find the other type to be repulsive and yet in the Ron Paul campaign you find them working cheek by jowl in order to get Paul elected. It is quite surreal.
The odd thing about Libertarian thinking is that it can only really work in a culture where it doesn’t need to work. That is to say that Libertarian thinking, in order to be successful, requires people to be self governing according to a particular standard. If there is no shared standard as to what self governing means or looks like Objectivist Libertarianism can only lead to anarchy and chaos. However, where there exists a shared standard as to what self-governing means and looks like then a Libertarian like political philosophy can be easily embraced since there is not a need for heavy institutional controls upon a people. There is no need for the heavy institutional controls because the shared standard means that self-governing does all the controlling work.
Those who desire ordered liberty (and I am one of them) must realize that there is some heavy spade work to do before the kind of political government that Ron Paul is offering can work on a national scale. Offering people liberty only works if people are self governing. The incarceration rate, the out of wedlock pregnancies and births, the abortion rate, the billions of dollars made in the pornography industry, and a host of other indicators reveals that it has been a very long time since the citizenry of America could be fairly characterized as a self-governing people. Giving Americans Randian Libertinism at this point would be like giving a 3 year old a box full of grenades and telling them to go be free.
In order for Ron Paul’s political philosophy to work there is first a need for Reformation and awakening in the Church and in the country. And the kind of Reformation we are talking about here is not the slushy emotional experiential feelings oriented Reformation. The kind of Reformation I am talking about is the kind of Reformation that creates in people a commitment to the shared standard of God’s Law Word as the definition by which self-governing will be assessed. Until that kind of Reformation and awakening comes about all the talk about “real change” that Rep. Paul would bring is illusory.
Only a return to a Biblical Christianity that preaches Christ crucified, risen and ascended as King can provide the fertile ground out of which Jeffersonian Constitutionalism can work. Only a return to Biblical Christianity where individuals who were once dead to sin, but, by the power of God, are resurrected to walk in newness of life, can provide the backdrop against which political structures that provide real liberty make sense. Only by a apostate Western Church and lapsed Western Christians rejuvenated to embrace Biblical (pro God’s Law-Word in its third use in the public square) Christianity can the West avoid the humanist night that is currently falling upon the West. Until that kind of Christianity — the kind of Christianity that gave America her ordered liberty — is once again characteristic of us as a people, no political philosophy or candidate is going to save the day.
I agree with your observations. I do, however, think that a toothless state gives the Church a better chance of reasserting itself, regardless of how much anarchy may reign around us. It could even be a GOOD thing to have local parishes available as “cities of refuge,” of sorts, for like-minded Christians to begin to re-establish small pockets of Christendom by turning away from the libertinism around them.
J
Given our current situation, what is the best use of our political energies?
Given our current situation, what is the best use of our political energies?
Answer —
Politically speaking, We should try to get as many good people in key position at the local level (County Sheriff, Mayor, Local Council members, etc.). We should do this because when the FED finally falls (and it will) we will have good people in local venues to build the islands of sanity that Jay talks about above.
Jay,
Anarchy always creates totalitarianism … however I do agree w/ your observations about a toothless state giving the Church an opportunity to reassert itself.
I do agree w/ your observations about a toothless state giving the Church an opportunity to reassert itself.
I wonder. The church has always prospered under persecution, when it actually offered an alternative to oppression. Certainly a toothless state gives greater freedom for the church to operate, but then it is under the blessings of incredible freedom that we’ve gotten where we are today.
“It could even be a GOOD thing to have local parishes available as “cities of refuge,” of sorts, for like-minded Christians to begin to re-establish small pockets of Christendom by turning away from the libertinism around them.”
Is there any such coordinated effort underway at this time?
Bret, a few thoughts.
I don’t think hardcore Ayn Rand objectivists/libertarians make up even a small percentage of Ron Paul followers. It’s true, her books are still bestsellers, but people seem to like them for their simple-minded, us-against-them rah-rahhing for a world where all capitalists are heroes. Ultimately most people these days are statists at heart, even when they think they are not. Most people want their Medicare, something for nothing, etc. My example is Neil Peart, lyricist for the rock band Rush, who was/is a Randian but couldn’t help echoing mainstream liberal sentiments in most of his social critiques.
But it is true that Paul’s followers are really a weird coalition of a lot of philosophies. Yet this is true of any major political party/movement, any of which can be divided by their underlying contradictions. Dems have been doing this to Repub. coalitions for a long time. We will probably see the Repubs do this to the Dems in November. Ultimately in these coalitions, all of the groups contained within are not allies, but simply co-combatants.
I have interpreted Paul’s libertarianism as not a systematic political philosophy, but as a historically specific attack on the current U.S. federal government. I haven’t heard Paul try to apply anything he says to lesser governments, like states, counties, or cities. If he did that, I would be off his bandwagon quickly. I do not like libertarian philosophy, as it is clearly contrary to God’s Word and to human nature (e.g., we are obviously social beings, not individuals, etc.). As applied strictly and solely to the U.S. federal government circa 1865-2010, I am okay with libertarian philosophy.
But I also think it’s going to utterly fail, for the good reasons you give in this post, so it seems best to not give to much effort to change the total disaster that is U.S. federal politics. You are dead right in your last paragraph.
You state: “Ron Paul reveals his Randian Libertinism by supporting the idea that abortion should be an issue that the individual states decide. A Jeffersonian Constitutionalist is abhorred by such reasoning since they believe that the “Due Process clause” of the Constitution and the promise of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness requires the Federal Government to universally prohibit abortion in the nation.”
This isn’t quite correct. Actually, Paul’s view that abortion should be regulated by the states rather than the federal government is a not evidence of libertinism or libertarianism. Rather, it is shows his paleo-constitutionalism.
This view insists that the constitution grants the federal government only limited powers and jurisdiction. In the same way that states, and not the federal government, properly pass criminal codes that outlaw and punish crimes like homicide and rape, so too, it is the states and not the federal government that are properly entrusted under our system of government with the authority to outlaw and punish the murder of the unborn.
So Paul’s view gives away nothing on the issue of abortion to a libertarian view of anarchic or individualist freedom. He is simply protecting the authority of the states from an encroaching federal government with a chronic case of power-creep.
Sorry Steve … that dog won’t hunt.
The US Constitution does not allow individual states to decide that murder is acceptable. When the Federal Government requires the States to protect the life of their citizens they are only following the requirement of the Constitution to provide citizens w/ due process. Ron Paul is wrong in seeking to make Abortion a states rights issue. Abortion is not a states rights issue. Abortion is murder and in following the US Constitution it needs to be prohibited throughout the all the states.
I think we are coming at this from different starting points. I know this is not the prevailing view nowadays, but I believe the US Constitution does not require or allow anything with regard to the individual states. The US Constitution sets out the limited powers of the national government and then limits those powers further by amendment. Of course the prevailing incorporation doctrine which interprets the 14th Amendment as applying the US Constitution to the governments of the states has banished this view from mainstream legal and political discussion (the only remnants being the recent decisions exempting the state government from federal statutes by application of the 11th Amendment).
So I would say that God does not allow the states to decide that murder is acceptable, just as he does not allow the federal government to so decide, but the US Constitution has no jurisdiction with regard to state law on murder. And that is why abortion should be outlawed by the individual states within their borders, and by the federal government in all federal property and territories.
Steve,
The Constitution is a negative (limiting) document. It empowers the Federal government to do only those things that are enumerated and delegated. So we agree there.
However, I believe the due process clause enumerated and delegates to the Federal government to make sure that capital punishment is not visited upon those (the unborn) who have not been given due process.
With you, I do not buy the incorporation doctrine. I do not even hold that the 14th amendment is binding since it was not passed Constitutionally.
Ron Paul supporters follow Rev.22-11 better than anyone. When it is established by man that the law of God supersedes all law, (after his arrival) desolation will smite the people with the rod and everyone will have the thorn that was in Paul, not knowing that God looks upon sin no more in the blood of Jesus Christ. No one can stand in Gods perfection! Rev 22:11 teaches us to let be, and let God judge so it is not wise to write his perfection into our government laws for the reason that we must hand out punishment for those who break them. And if so, what would anyone here say is the correct punishment for those who do? By their guilt shall they be punished. This is the coming wrath of God.
~Sign of Jonah – Matthew
Matthew,
Let me guess … you’re Ron Paul’s campaign manager in some out of the way county in North Dakota.
Anyway … w/ your comment I rest my case.