Ron Paul shows his colors

Daniel S. writes:

Last night on the Tonight Show Ron Paul said that Michele Bachmann “hates Muslims” and that Rick Santorum is anti-homosexual and anti-Muslim. Paul may buck the elites on certain issues, but when it comes to traditional principles and preserving our unique ethnic and cultural identity he is on the side of the organized left, perpetually crying about (non-existent) Islamophobia and homophobia. He is, like those Republican money men in New York who pushed homosexual “marriage,” an enabler of the cultural left.

LA replies:

It should never be forgotten: a libertarian is a type of liberal, he is not a conservative. A libertarian doesn’t believe in a cultural or moral order; he believes in equal freedom. And the consistent pursuit of equal freedom requires the destruction of all cultural and moral order, which is done by calling the defenders of any cultural or moral order “haters.”

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LA continues:

And, like those Republican money men in New York that Daniel mentioned, Paul supports the right of states to adopt homosexual “marriage.”

Max P. writes:

I thought libertarians were closest ideologically to classical liberals. You wrote, “It should never be forgotten: a libertarian is a type of liberal, he is not a conservative.” Does this mean conservatives should be at odds with, or wary of classical liberals? And if so, how does this square with our (conservative) desire to preserve the founding ideals those classical liberals created?

LA replies:

This is an issue I’ve discussed many times. For the moment, a brief answer. The Founders were not strictly classical liberals or Lockeans; they combined classical liberalism with a distinct American identity and belief system. Lockeanism was a major part of the Founding; it was not the whole of the Founding. The Lockean part was mixed with the idea of a distinct country and culture. “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands that have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them … ”

So Lockeanism was combined with the idea of a distinct people and country and also their religious, moral, and local traditions and collective identity and identities. But over time, the individualist-universalist principles deriving from classical liberalism were asserted more and more consistently, and the elements of concrete particularity were pushed more and more to the side, until we ended up with pure liberalism, pure equal freedom, pure non-discrimination, which are incompatible with the existence of any concrete particular society.

I’ll try to say more about this later in the weekend.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 17, 2011 01:09 PM | Send