Ron Paul

Profound ambivalence is my reaction to the Ronvolution. What has always struck me about Paul is something that's not quite intellectual honesty, but intellectual earnestness. I am convinced this man wants to have justice done. When he's in one of his finance committee hearings with Greenspan or Bernanke, you can hear in his voice a plea to be understood -- sound money, not government paper, it's so simple.

And yet Paul also holds that 9/11 is in some important measure our fault, or at least the fault of our government, which has maintained military installations in Saudi Arabia and friendly relations with Israel. These are the canards that Osama bin Laden proffers as grievances when attempting to confuse and divide Western enemies.

Paul has bought into this as a way to reduce the problem of global jihad back to the previous problem. For big-L Libertarians like Ron Paul, the previous problem is always the U.S. government. It is an understandable mistake when your intellectual foundation goes only as far down as politics (the non-initiation of force principle). If the most basic good for man is freedom to pursue his own values, then the most basic evil is force directed against those values. And in terms of dollars expropriated, the U.S. government is the greatest transgressor in human history.

But when you realize that political ideas ultimately derive from a view of man's nature, in particular the nature and role of his reasoning mind, a more basic alternative can be perceived. The jihadis are not motivated by a desire for liberation from American interference, they seek a global Islamic revolution to enforce world-wide spiritual submission. Their current stance is mostly defensive only of necessity. But the existence of transportable nuclear weapons transforms the long-term strategic equation. The anti-intellectual straitjacket of Libertarianism makes it difficult to grasp the jihadi's actual goal and how serious he is about finding a means capable of achieving it.