Is the Ron Paul the Best Hope for Progressives?

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) is the last man standing
in the Republican presidential race besides presumptive victor Mitt
Romney, even after a strategy statement
misunderstood by many
as “dropping out.” Since that
announcement, Paul has won his second state,
Minnesota
(Maine
was the first), and is on target to end up controlling presidential
voting delegations in such states as
Iowa
,
Louisiana
, and
Missouri
. Far from fading as a cultural force, Paul continues
to
draw huge crowds
, sometimes over five thousand students, on
campuses as well.

As the presidential field has shaped up to a certain Obama vs.
Romney in the major parties, the desire for a challenger
championing either the serious right or serious progressive left
grows. And Ron Paul—though he continues to deny any third party
plans and his political machine has clearly hitched itself to the
GOP for now—is strangely a viable candidate for either role, should
he choose to accept it.

Paul is in many ways the rightest of right wingers, with his
desire to kill the income
tax
, end government interference in
medical care
, and get to
a balanced budget in three years
with no tax hikes. A third
party Paul, should he make such a radical choice, would provide a
choice for right-wingers dissatisfied with Romney’s
small-government bonafides.

Yet despite Paul’s impeccable Tea Party credentials on tax and
spending issues, he would be an even more appealing choice to
progressives dissatisfied with President Obama. Even while running
for the GOP presidential nod, Ron Paul has presented a political
vision in many respects to the left of the Democratic Party.

President Obama wants to continue
and expand
every aspect of the war on drugs, including the war
on
state-legal medical marijuana
operations. Paul thinks
government attempts to arrest people for actions that harm only
themselves are inherently
illegitimate
. Obama’s administration has
set records in deportations
. Paul
mocks border walls as un-American
in Republican candidate
debates.

Obama approves of enormous bailouts to huge financial
institutions, and his administration’s high-level economic planning
is run almost entirely by
insiders from such institutions
. Ron Paul is opposed to what he
(and leftists) calls “crony capitalism.”
Paul’s free-market policies would leave corporations with no more
power over the American people than the corporations get by selling
people things, things people choose to buy. (Unlike the products of
the hated health insurance companies, which ObamaCare mandates that
we all purchase.)

Even Paul’s stated environmental policies—certainly very far
from implementation even in a world where Paul was president—of
imposing
liability via tort
on people and corporations who harm others
through pollution, rather than allowing them to do so but
“regulating” them—seem more in line with what a progressive who
doesn’t want the fatcats getting away with harming the innocent
should want.

Paul’s belief in unfettered free markets is supposed, in the
minds of leftists, to mean unbridled corporate power. But America’s
plutocracy loves activist government—as long as it’s helping them,
as Obama’s programs of giveaways to banks and investment firms
does. Paul was thus the only GOP candidate with
kind things to say
about the Occupy movement, for recognizing
the dangers of crony capitalism, and the only candidate whose fans

proselytized among them
.

Paul’s greater appeal to an honest progressive goes even
further. Obama has expanded the president’s powers to
unilaterally imprison
and even kill
American citizens
beyond even George W. Bush’s attempts. Paul
gets thousands of students who gather to hear
him booing
any mention of the controversial yet sadly
little-known National Defense Authorization Act signed by Obama,
giving legal cover to the presidential power of unilateral
imprisonment. Obama has started new
unauthorized wars
, greatly expanded a
civilian-killing drone program
, and presided over the biggest
defense budgets
in history. Ron Paul campaigns for peace and
withdrawal of the U.S. military from the world. In doing so, he’s
done more than Noam Chomsky to normalize discussion of U.S. foreign
policy as the behavior of a
criminal empire
, not as the world’s great defender of
liberty.

President Obama loves
the Patriot Act
and
hates whistleblowers
; Paul is
opposite
on both points, including defense of
accused WikiLeaker
Bradley Manning.

On a wide range of issues involving individual autonomy and
liberty, and protecting people from oppressive concentrations of
power, Paul is clearly more progressive than Obama.

Progressives love income redistribution, though, and Paul does
not. Still, while Paul is opposed in principle to things like
government funding for NPR and even medical care,
he mocks
his fellow Republicans who act like such
programs
are the most important place to start practicing
austerity—the former because it’s cultural red meat to their base,
the latter because it feeds an ugly strain of opposition to
“welfare bums” that plays no part in how Paul campaigns.

While Paul is the loudest and most consistent voice for many
progressive goals, he rejects their choice of tool to equalize
income, which is why progressives’ disappointment with Obama hasn’t
led them to turn to Ron Paul. But Paul and the movement for peace,
civil liberties, and ending government’s explicit support for
corporate power that he leads offers progressives an alternative,
and a dilemma: Are those values more important than fealty to the
Democratic Party and hugely expensive income redistribution
programs?

Senior Editor Brian Doherty is author of
Ron Paul’s Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired

(Broadside).