Continuing discussion of Rand Paul

Copied from a private email with MC.


Well, I'm not all the way into the Paul thing, but I think he did a poor job of getting himself out of a difficult sitch with the Maddow interview. As a Libertarian, one would be just as appalled by institutionalized Jim Crow Laws as laws meant to counteract them. Why not just pull the laws and let the culture deal with the problem on the culture's terms rather than having cultural preferences (for blacks, whites, or anybody else) institutionalized and dictated by government. I think that's a fairly easy case to make.
But because the body politic views issues in a binary way - left vs. right - if you pose any position that is not squarely in one camp or the other, you are dumped into the 'other' and labeled a "racist" or a "pinko" or whatever else for the sin of having a nuanced (and, to my mind, forward thinking and useful) point of view.
It won't be easy to argue the libertarian position before a polarized nation (if that is indeed what Rand is trying to do), as I have experienced many a time. The point of the position is that it resolves the conflicts and puts the onus on society and culture to deal with its problems creatively, and that's too much for most people to trust in. Do I sound like a victim of my own idealism yet? I think the best one can do is hold the idealism where it belongs - in the intellectual stratosphere - and hew to it wherever possible and as much as possible while acknowledging that as one descends nearer and nearer to the less rarified ether of reality that compromises and imperfections must be swallowed gracefully with the view that they will eventually be digested into something that comes closer to the idealistic vision.
This is, in any event, the alchemical path. And paradoxically, the more willing one is to embrace the prima materia of realistic imperfections, the sooner one can get on with the business of perfecting them. Because in their elegant embrace we can be free enough not to lose site of the vision while we work on the denser matter. But by letting the necessary compromises pile up under the rug by ignoring them in favor of easy idealism, we make the day of reckoning, when it comes, that much more painful.
But in a 100 member body, having one or two guys fiercely locked into the abstract idealism might actually strike the right balance between gross politics and pristine intellectual purity. Time will tell, and so will the Uranus ingress. Looking forward to both, if we're not eaten alive by man-made bacteria in the interim. . .D