Ron Paul: Anti-libertarian

Liberty. Here is a word whose definition is paramount to human happiness. It seems we have come to a cultural consensus that whether you subscribe to socialism, anarchism, or the republican party, the word "liberty" is of special importance.

Defining such a word as is quite a bit harder, I like the later Wittgenstein belief that the meaning of words can be found in the way they are used. We look outside ourselves instead of in to understand a word's meaning. Ron' Paul's popularity is a case of misunderstood meaning.

Paul himself speaks with such gusto it becomes easy to forget how his actual policies, if brought to fruition, would create a society that in many ways is deeply totalitarian. After all, not all uses of the word liberty, nor users of it, are in service of and result in libertarian ends. For instance the sentence: The king has the liberty to rule over his subjects.

It is understandable that people are worried about things like SOPA and foreign wars. The encroachment of our civil rights by the government is something that takes constant vigilance to prevent. When Paul voices his objection to these things support for him makes more sense. One needs only to dig just a bit deeper to see that in many other ways, however, he is a staunch enemy of liberty. A value that Americans should and often do hold dear is a healthy distrust for government. It is, however, too simplistic for one to see the government as the only source of totalitarianism as well as seeing "government" as an island outside of influence.

The most totalitarian organization of the modern world is left absent from Paul's analysis, this Institution is the corporation. Paul wants to replace one Big Brother with his Bigger Brother who already calls the shots on the former. Let’s not forget that oppressive government measures like SOPA were encouraged by entertainment corporations. It is also understood within the Left in the United States that militarism and capitalism are tied, and it hardly needs reiterating here.

One place where totalitarianism is pervasive is the workplace. Ron Paul is against the institutions that protects the liberties and rights of workers everywhere: Unions. The absolute monarchy of employer over every aspect of employees life while at work is something Paul has no problem with.

All of this even before scratching the surface of something we have only hinted at thus far: liberty's relation to equality. Enlightenment Ideas of liberty developed from an upcoming mercantile class and their need to describe whose property was whose and who had the right to it. Since then the Idea of liberty has expanded and it was realized that a free society cannot be had if only some are free. What, in the French Revolution, was called liberty and fraternity can now be seen in Ron Paul's idea of liberty. His idea is on the basis of what he claims are individuals only, and not white People, or women, or African Americans, misses the very deeply ingrained oppressive mechanisms that go beyond capitalism, for example Cis gender privilege. This I think regardless of the new information about his ties to White Power groups makes Ron Paul anti-libertarian.

Occupy Wall st in New York was a pluralistic horizontal movement. Although you didn't see them much every once in a while you would run into a Ron Paul supporter during the days when there was a park. I only speak for myself on Occupy, in my personal point of view it was alright that they where there because Aesthetically there is an image portrayed (though, as I have laid out pretty clearly, not followed up by his real beliefs) of Paul which seems like he is against a common enemy. Within an open experiment like Occupy whose strength came from avoiding limiting narratives, different beliefs intersect and influence each other and this is a good thing.

Although Paul when you listen to him would blame government regulators and not the banks (and its true obviously the government played a role bailing banks out.) Paul misunderstood the root, but the Occupy movement didn't, simply by picking its target of Wall St. Occupy caught on because people around the world understood. Paul's target of "government regulators" would have never gained so much popular support because it is understood that Wall Street is at root, not regulators.

In John Dewey’s Freedom and Culture written in 1939. Dewey lays out the complex relationship that industrialism has helped develop between government, corporations, and Unions. He delves deep into how when considering liberty you must consider liberty in a mass society as of necessity related to collective organizations and human relations, on to considering all these complex more micro relationships. Freedom must exude in different ways culturally, politically, from within our social ties. At this point we are even farther advanced from the world painted by Dewey in 1939. Paul's analysis sets us back hundreds of years and it being draped over postmodernity leads, to deep oppressive and totalitarian overtones.