When you compromise principles, you soon won’t recognize yourself

By David McElroy · August 17, 2012

What does Rand Paul believe? Does he really know anymore? Or have his efforts at pragmatic compromise left him just as confused as the rest of us about who he really is?

For a long time, many people have believed that Rand Paul can’t be too much different from his uncompromising father. Ron Paul has preached a purist message for decades, as a Republican congressman, a Libertarian Party presidential candidate and then as a Republican presidential candidate. No matter how politically unpopular it was, Ron Paul could be counted on to be consistent — every single time.

How much different could his son be? He called himself a libertarian and he’s said many of the right things about reducing the size of government and about the virtues of making governance as close to local as possible. But ever since he entered GOP politics, he’s been ever more willing to say and do things to court the Republican mainstream and the party powers. Libertarians are now looking at him and wondering whether the man they saw as the heir to his father’s movement is one of them or if he’s really one of the people they’ve spent decades fighting.

Rand Paul has had foreign policy views much more in line with those of the GOP establishment than his father’s. Whereas Ron Paul is willing to point out ugly truths that have mainstream Republican audiences booing him, Rand Paul has been much more careful not to stray too far from the GOP party line. He still supported his father, though, so nobody was accusing him of really “selling out” to The Establishment.

Now, Paul is acting like someone who’s caught between two worlds, not really a part of either and not really trusted by either side.

In June, Paul angered libertarians when he endorsed Mitt Romney for president. Everyone who’s ever been part of party politics understands what was going on. Romney was the obvious winner — even if some in the Ron Paul camp were delusional enough to claim the race wasn’t over — so Rand Paul was offering token support to his party’s nominee. That’s just what you do in party politics.

But Ron Paul’s supporters had the bizarre notion that they could play party politics and not be subject to the rules that apply to everyone else. That’s the way Ron Paul has played it, and it doesn’t seem to have occurred to many of his fans that it hasn’t gotten him very far. They’ll argue about all the people who Paul’s campaigns have brought into “the movement,” but they have nothing practical to show for it. They always point to some vague future where “the People” are going suddenly agree and they’re all going to vote for a libertarian candidate.

There’s a name for that genre of literature. We call it fantasy.

Rand Paul has apparently decided to play a very different game than the one his father played. His father was the outsider who told the truth as he saw it. That role didn’t change anything, so Rand Paul has decided to be “the libertarian insider.” As a career move, it might actually work.

Within a fairly narrow range, parties don’t care too much if some of their elected officials have some eccentric rhetoric at times, but they want those people voting the party line — and they mostly want those people lining up to beat “the enemy” in national elections. Ron Paul didn’t play those games. Rand Paul is playing them.

Once you endorse Mitt Romney, how much credibility can you have as a libertarian? How many of your principles are you forced to throw out the window to support someone who is so much a part of the problem as Romney is?

Now that Paul Ryan has been named the GOP vice presidential nominee, Rand Paul is dutifully continuing the play the party game. If this were any other politician, it wouldn’t be noteworthy. From the son of Ron Paul, it’s been considered noteworthy that he tepidly praises the Ryan choice, even though Ryan doesn’t believe much of what the Paul family has fought for.

Rand Paul has clearly made a decision to make himself acceptable to the Republican establishment. He’s playing their games, even if he still nods to the libertarian “barbarians” outside the system. If he plays this game long enough — and if he keeps making one compromise after another — Rand Paul has a chance to gain some power in the GOP. He could even be a presidential contender himself.

But what’s he really going to stand for after all those compromises? Is anybody going to know? Is he even going to recognize himself?

You can’t play with fire without getting burned. You can’t compromise with the coercive state’s political system without becoming more and more like it. You can’t fight evil by becoming evil yourself. For his sake, I hope Rand Paul eventually figures that out.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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