Lots of tongue and finger wagging going on about the TNR/Ron Paul kerfluffle. Obviously some folks at FreedomandShit[dot]org are justifiably unhappy with the good doctor, and rightly so, but I have a bit of a different take on the whole episode, one that our very own Spartakiss hinted at in the comments on this post:

To some extent all of the candidates operate on irrational judgments and flawed logic. The difference is that Paul, as far as I can tell, doesn’t want to translate the despicable opinions detailed in his newsletter into law. That’s worth something.

It’s actually worth quite a bit. That’s an important point that’s lost, certainly on the staff of TNR, and, more unfortunately, on 99.9% of the American people. All politicians are fucking crazy, all politicians ignore the concerns of people it’s convenient to ignore, and all politicians say or do despicable things–Obama quit smoking, for Chrissake! They have to do those things in order to be successful politicians, and they have to be utterly unhinged to want to be politicians in the first place.

So, yeah, Ron Paul may be sort of a crank and he almost certainly has a lot of personal beliefs that are distasteful to the “urbane libertarians who staff the Cato Institute or the libertines at Reason magazine.” But he’s pretty up front about it and, most importantly, he alone is the only crank among all of the candidates in either party who isn’t trying to inflict his crazy on the rest of us. You can totally hate him and all of his personal beliefs about race, gender, fuel efficiency, incest, and the definition of “art,” “marriage,” “science,” or any other noun government tries to define. You can spend your life opposing all of his personal beliefs but still think he’d be a great president, because he has no interest in codifying those beliefs.

People who believe repugnant things should be free to organize their lives, businesses, and Auburn-based name-hijacking hate-tanks as they see fit, and so should you. One of those systems of organization will thrive and flourish in the marketplace of ideas, and it will be the longer lasting. The other will wither and die, and good riddance to it.

Yes, it’s dispiriting to see it so starkly in black and white: there’s a really ugly side to freedom, in that free people are free to be dicks, free to be wrong, and free to speak their ignorant minds. But the freedom that allows them to be so woefully backwards is the same freedom that allows the rest of us to point out what a bunch of backwards kooks they are and develop and disseminate better ideas. There isn’t a government policy that is going to help in that fight: it’s a war of ideas, and it’s a war that I–and Ron Paul–want waged in the private sphere.

Filed under: Politics is Personal, Freedom Meets Darwin