Jonathan Kay, no fan of Ron Paul, points out that his campaign is forcing some otherwise unexamined bits of Republican belief to be hauled out into the light and re-examined:
None of this is particularly surprising given what we already knew about Ron Paul and his oddball views on metal coinage, Pearl Harbor, the Federal Reserve, and a dozen other subjects. The guy is basically your classic American crank. If he hadn’t gotten fixated on Austrian-School laissez-faire economics, Ron Paul probably would be spending his free time studying the Zapruder film frame by frame, or writing letters to local newspapers about water fluoridation.
Yet, for all his weirdness, Ron Paul deserves credit for at least one very real and crucial insight. Of all the Republican candidates, he alone has called out the fundamental contradiction between the GOP’s two dominant obsessions: (a) small government, and (b) American “greatness” (or, as Mitt Romney recently put it, America’s status as “the greatest nation in the history of the earth”). Critics dismiss Paul as an isolationist. But at least he understands that superpowers can’t maintain 11 carrier battle groups, win Afghanistan, protect Israel, take on Iran, out-educate China, and run a humane society, all while disemboweling government.
On many domestic issues, Paul’s views aren’t that much out of step with the his GOP rivals. Paul wants to shut down the Department of Education. So does Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. Paul wants to close down the EPA. So does Bachmann and Newt Gingrich (and Herman Cain, too, if anyone still cares). Paul, like Gingrich, wants to privatize the Post Office. Paul also opposes abortion, supports the repeal of Obamacare, rejects the idea of man-made global warming, champions English as America’s national language, and strenuously opposes illegal immigration. His only major dissents on social issues are the war on drugs (end it), and gay marriage, which he thinks should be left up to the states (as opposed to being pre-empted outright at the federal level).
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What Ron Paul is doing, for those who can ignore his crankish ramblings about the gold standard and Letters of Marque and Reprisal, is creating a debate about the fundamental meaning of American greatness. Personally, I believe that his ideas about foreign policy are unrealistic and unsettling. But at least he is doing something that neither Mitt Romney nor Newt Gingrich nor Rick Perry has the courage to do: Acknowledge that American global leadership carries a price tag that, ultimately, must be paid with higher taxes and bigger government.
