Ross:
And it shouldn’t come as a shock that [Ron Paul's] son found himself publicly undone, in what should have been his moment of triumph, because he was too proud to acknowledge the limits of ideology, and to admit that a principle can be pushed too far.
When I first read Ross’ column, it seemed to be a reasonably fair and effective critique of “paleo” flaws, but something about it kept bothering me. Some of this has to do with Ross’ references to ideology. Most conservatives sympathetic to Rand Paul abhor ideology as such and not only recognize its limits, but are acutely aware of its distorting powers and flaws. Indeed, it has been the “paleo” right that has been relentless in criticizing the ideological mentality that dominates so much of conservative thought today. It has been one of our main themes for the last decade. If anyone has been aware of the limits of ideology, it has been people like Rand Paul. If anyone has been oblivious to those limits, it has been the people on the right who acknowledge Paul and his supporters only by way of belittling and dismissing them.
Something else that has not been discussed very much in response to Rand Paul’s controversial remarks is that Paul’s main error derives mostly from an overconfidence in the rationality and morality of both markets and democracy. This is arguably the product of an unduly optimistic assessment of human behavior. No one would normally accuse paleoconservatives of any of these things, since we are normally considered excessively pessimistic and skeptical of both the market and mass democracy. Put another other way, Paul has been subjected to particularly intense scrutiny because he has expressed confidence in markets and democracy in a way similar to, but less naive than, the ideologues who championed the inevitable triumph of democratic capitalism and promoted the ideas of Near Eastern regional transformation by force and the failed “freedom agenda.” The rather obvious difference is that Paul’s remarks had and will have no effect on policy whatever, but he could very well be politically punished more than all the people who helped wreck entire countries and provided the justification for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
For the most part, when “paleos” err we err because we are very concerned to prevent abuses of government power and because we want to keep the government from using its coercive powers unnecessarily and arbitrarily. Given their deference to the national security and warfare state, our critics on the right cannot say the same. This may lead us to go to extremes or to take the wrong position in a particular debate on occasion. Nonetheless, the alternative to this is a conservative movement that has obviously “sold out to both big government and the military-industrial complex.” We are all well-acquainted with what this means for our country, and generally speaking it has been a disaster. Rand Paul’s success so far offers the possibility of something different and better. It is simply foolish to try to destroy that.
Update: I’m afraid that Max Fisher has misunderstood my second paragraph. The point I was trying to make, and which I apparently did not make very clearly, was that Paul is being raked over the coals for being overly confident in the rationality and morality of markets and democracy in a way that resembles democratist ideologues, but the latter are never held accountable for being even more hubristic and unreasonable in their ideological convictions that have had disastrous consequences in the real world. Paul made some controversial remarks on a cable news show that he has since clarified. Democratist ideologues helped destroy whole countries in the name of democratic capitalist triumph. If we believed Ross, they were well-intentioned do-gooders who just made a few mistakes, and Rand Paul is a proud ideologue blind to complexities of the real world. I was criticizing the dramatic difference in how Paul is being treated and the way that ideologues who are actually responsible for enabling mass destruction and death have been treated.
David Tomlin 
beej 
Jim Dooley 
Charlie 
Young Geezer 
MattSwartz 
PainfullyAware 
conradg 
rbc 
Of course, in practice, one man’s ideology is another man’s principle, and I see little reason for confidence in Rand Paul’s principles given his willingness to trim so far on what should be the most fundamental principles.
Put simply, the overriding issue of the day for an informed westerner who takes morality seriously has to be preventing a US attack on Iran, as in 2002-3 it was trying to prevent the attack on Iraq. The evil of another such attack, and our personal responsibility for it, involving as it does our own governments slaughtering and causing the deaths of innocents in huge numbers using the proceeds of our tax payments and in our names, must put all other issues of domestic politics into the shade.
Paul has already shown willingness to trim on that overriding issue. Who knows, even worse he may actually believe the comments he has made in sympathy with the whipped up US war hysteria against Iran. If so, he is one of the warmongers, and loses any entitlement to sympathy or respect whatsoever as far as I’m concerned. That’s the line that cannot be crossed and remain worthy of respect. You can disagree about state provision of healthcare, or subsidies for big businesses, even about drugs prohibition, and remain basically within the bounds of respectable political dispute, but once you are prepared to countenance blowing innocent women and children to pieces for essentially political reasons, you have gone beyond the pale.
His trimming and backtracking for political gain so far doesn’t inspire any confidence in me, at least, that he will resist the blandishments and corruption of office to anything like the extent his father seems to have done, but he may grow into the job, as his father seems to have done. More worryingly, he has already shown disturbing signs of a willingness, at the least, to collaborate with the warmongers.