Rand Paul Is Over: or, Why Conservative Libertarianism Is a Contradiction in Terms

The article: "Rachel Maddow Demolishes Rand Paul" by Joan Walsh, Salon

Yesterday, "fighting liberal" MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow interviewed Kentucky senatorial candidate and "TEA Party" favorite Rand Paul on her show after he crushed his establishment opponent, secretary of state Trey Grayson, in the Republican primary election. Joan Walsh insists Maddow won big. Ray Beckerman is not so sure. Me, I had to see for myself. So I read Walsh's article and watched the interview. When it was over, I realized that Walsh was spot on. Toward the end of the interview, I got the feeling that I was witnessing a fatal car wreck as it was happening and watching the driver die right in front of me: what I witnessed was the complete self-destruction of the New Right's rising superstar in the span of half a minute. In effect, even despite himself, Paul defended the nasty racial protectionism called Jim Crow, convicting himself of not just racism but statism. He outed himself as a conservative. He didn't sound libertarian to me: he extolled the economic freedom of corporations, pointedly including racist owners of lunch counters, while spitting on individual freedom in the form of consumer choice, which Jim Crow was designed to restrict. My verdict: Maddow crushed him, ending his political career in front of the whole world. Rand Paul is over.

Paul did defend the 1964 Civil Rights Act — except for one section, the one that was used to desegregate privately owned public places such as the lunch counters that were the site of so many of the sit-ins during the Civil Rights Revolution. He rightly said that the owner of a private company has the right to serve whoever he wants, excluding, say, blacks or women or Dallas Cowboys fans. What he should have added, but neglected to, is that in a truly free market free of such protectionist restrictions as Jim Crow forced-segregation laws, the owner of a private company also has the right to include whoever he wants. In that way, free from such restrictions, someone could open a competing lunch counter, the selling point of which is precisely that it is integrated. Since the 1950s and '60s were a time when popular culture in the form of rock & roll and rhythm & blues was a revolutionary force, an integrated diner would have a built-in cool factor, which in the capitalist age has been a surefire way to success. He never once mentioned the amazing destructive power the free market had on segregation through popular culture. No less than Karl Marx hailed the revolutionary force of capitalism in that famous passage in which he proclaimed that under capitalism, "all that is solid melts into air." Paul should have pointed out that Jim Crow laws were a protectionist scheme intended to keep out those who would upset the Southern feudal caste system through free competition, and that the Civil Rights Act should have enabled such free competition by overturning such protectionist regimes. By omitting that one very important aspect of a genuinely free market, namely its destruction of ancient moral absolutes such as racial hierarchies, he belittled the free market he claims to support and showed the limits of his libertarianism.

His namesake, the libertarian novelist and individualist philosopher Ayn Rand, upheld the morality of the trader who refuses to let petty prejudices get in the way of his pursuit of profit; indeed, she explicitly denounced racism as the lowest and most bestial form of collectivism, the collectivism of mindless subhuman brutes. By defending the right of diner owners to ban customers by mere race, and by refusing to attack Jim Crow as a statist assault on market freedom, Rand Paul showed how few of Ayn Rand's principles he actually adheres to. He also showed how little he actually understands the free-market economics of the Austrian School no matter how much of the writings of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard (his father's close associate) he knows by heart. Instead, he proved himself to be just another right-wing Southern Republican, a mere conservative rather than a true libertarian.

The fact the conservatives evade: libertarianism is the anti-statist form of radical liberalism — indeed, the very word "liberalism" itself was coined to mean what we now call libertarianism (also still known as classical liberalism). If there is an extremist form of libertarianism, it is anarchism. Indeed, it was anarchists such as Emma Goldman who coined the word "libertarian". Both words come from liber, the Latin word for "free". What most self-described libertarians don't realize is that there is nothing conservative about libertarianism. Conservatism, by its very nature, requires a strong dictatorial state designed to prevent progress; the foremost example today is the absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia. "Conservative libertarianism" is a contradiction in terms. This contradiction forced Barry Goldwater, that more famous opponent of (the very same provision of) the Civil Rights Act, to become less conservative and more libertarian over his long political career. Yesterday on Maddow, the contradiction collapsed on Rand Paul.

Libertarianism was and is the core of Ron Paul's appeal to the American masses. His son, however, is resorting to a suspiciously Confederate style of conservatism. That, in fact, is what his alleged "libertarianism" really boils down to. People have accused Rand Paul of being a "neo-Nazi". This is wrong; he is a retro-Confederate, a man of the feudal past destroyed by the Civil Rights Revolution he pays lip service to. Remember that capitalism, the free-market system he claims to support, was what allowed the North to destroy the Confederacy in that failed feudalist counterrevolution, the Civil War. The reason the neo-Confederates latch on to "capitalism" today is that American capitalism has since degenerated into corporatism — neofeudal socialism ruled by giant corporations like the ones that fund the "astroturf" TEA Party — so that now corporatism is to our decaying Imperial Republic what slave-based feudalism was to the antebellum South.

Liberals have been calling Rand Paul "crazy", "insane", a "nutball" or "wingnut" or "right-wing nutjob". This is the same juvenile name-calling that (yes) Trey Grayson and his neoconservative GOP establishment allies indulged in during the primary election campaign. Paul is not insane. But in one career-destroying instant, he revealed himself to be disturbingly reactionary. By implying his support for statist segregation laws so strongly, he put doubts in genuinely libertarian minds that he is even a libertarian at all, rather than just another FreedomWorks-owned neocon corporatist shill like Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck.

Rachel Maddow set a brilliant trap. Rand Paul fell right into it. As I saw it happen on the screen before me, I realized that Joan Walsh is absolutely right: Maddow scored a crushing victory over Paul. By taking a position so reactionary and so racist, he guaranteed that from now on he will be considered too dangerous, too close to the terrorist fringe of the TEA Party, to ever be allowed into public office. I predict the Democratic nominee, Jack Conway, will beat him handily in the general election. Face it: Rand Paul has just destroyed his political career. He is over. And he knows it. We, and he, should know the reason for his fall: conservative libertarianism is a contradiction in terms.

For more on the firestorm burning Rand Paul's campaign to ashes, here's the Google search page.

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