Ron Paul is not Progressive, not even about wars or drugs

Ron Paul is a nasty, old, bigoted, angry white man. This much, I think, the majority of left-wingers will readily grant, at this point in history anyway. Between the newsletters and the opposition to anything the federal government ever wants to do that's, you know, good, and the failing to be pro-choice and the monetary crankery and the opposition to anything resembling civil rights laws, it's a pretty clear picture. But some of them, even while admitting that in general he's not a very nice guy, will nonetheless insist on spending a fairly large amount of time and effort talking up his supposedly progressive views on foreign and drug policy. The basic argument is that we should like Ron Paul's foreign and drug policies because he is opposed to the Wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and on Drugs. He deserves some amount of credit, these people say, for having the right position on some issues, even if he's very very wrong on most issues.

And I suppose he does, in a way. After all, his fellow-competitors in the Republican primary are as wrong as he is on most issues, give or take, and much more wrong on these two. But I think it's worth emphasizing that Ron Paul does not have a progressive foreign policy. Nor is his anti-War on Drugs stance the result of some latent liberaltarianist streak. In both cases what we see is the result of his universal opposition to anything the federal government ever does. I've always thought he's not so much a libertarian as he is an antifederalist. As best I can tell, his own personal preferences for proper public policy would criminalize abortion (and embryonic stem cell research on embryos that would be discarded anyway), have government schools teaching children religious doctrines, and would subsidize private religious schools. He may or may not be in favor of criminalizing most common currently-illegal drugs and establishing a system of ID cards. His big point is that he doesn't want the federal government doing any of these things. He's basically an anti-federalist, plus some lack-of-understanding on economics and some bigotry.



That's not a very left-wing thing to be. But, of course, it leads him to oppose the War on Drugs. He opposes the War on Drugs for all the same reasons he opposes Social Security, and says the same things about how it's an economically destructive violation of liberty, in approximately the same tone of voice. Likewise paper money. That the crazy stuff he says about how any time the federal government does something it's being a tyrant happens to align reasonably well with an accurate description of the truly awful drug war is a mere coincidence; he's right for an emphatically wrong reason, to the extent that he's right at all. Likewise on foreign policy, he just doesn't like it when the federal government does stuff. All foreign policy is conducted federally (if it weren't, we'd really not be a nation), so he's against it. But while that does make him a non-interventionist, that's not enough to identify him with left-wing foreign policy. He's an isolationist. Liberal foreign policy is internationalist. I think he dislikes internationalism about as fervently as he dislikes interventionism, if not more so; it's just that interventionism has been riding high during his period of prominence. Once again, right (in opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) for extremely wrong reasons.

Now of course, that he is "right" in this sense on these two fairly large issues leads him to say a lot of things that sound incredibly sensible. That's because there's a lot of bits of factual information extremely embarrassing to these Wars, which people who support the Wars naturally never bring up. Not favoring the wars, Ron Paul has every reason to bring those facts up again and again, which makes him sound refreshingly candid and sensible to left-wing ears. But his values are still the wrong ones: anti-federalism and isolationism, as opposed to internationalism and any one of cultural anarchism, civil libertarianism, anti-discriminationism, or a number of other solid left-wing principles that lead one to oppose the federal war on drugs. Ron Paul may be right about a few things, which is a few things more than the rest of the Republican field, but we shouldn't forget that even when he's right, he's right for the wrong reasons. Ron Paul is not a progressive, not in general and not on any specific issues.