A reminder to friends of liberty: Others don’t understand our beliefs

Some of my friends think I’m cynical when I say we’re never going to convince the majority to vote for individual freedom. Most people who are steeped in the current left/right divide are honestly confused by what we believe. Let me show you two brief examples from the same newspaper story.

This is an Associated Press article that ran Sunday about Ron Paul in the lead-up to today’s Iowa caucuses. I want to look at two points, one which shows the reporter’s confusion and another which shows a voter’s confusion.

The article is just one of those feature stories with colorful details about a candidate leading up to an election. The sub-text of the piece is that Paul is sort of like a crazy uncle who acts in ways that nobody can predict.

In the fourth paragraph of the story, the reporter refers to Paul as “the mercurial congressman.” When I first saw that adjective, I wondered briefly whether the reporter misunderstands what it means to be mercurial. But then it hit me that he does know what the word means. He simply doesn’t know what Paul means.

To be mercurial is to be “subject to sudden or unpredictable changes of mood or mind,” according to my dictionary. Those of us who admire Paul realize that he’s anything but that. It’s his principled consistency that makes us admire him. But for those who spend all of their time with other politicians — those who see the Republican and Democratic versions of Big Government as opposites — his views are truly confusing.

That’s because the public consciousness is infused with the left/right paradigm — understood as being Red vs. Blue, Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal. The idea that there’s another lens through which to view things isn’t just dismissed. People simply don’t believe another paradigm exists. They’re not being difficult or prejudiced or trying to stop our ideas. There’s not a conspiracy against us. They simply don’t understand what we believe or why we believe it. They aren’t interested in what we believe. So people who are consistent — as we understand it — are going to confuse them.

But it’s not just reporters who don’t understand. Take a look at what a voter said — and keep in mind that this voter is a Ron Paul supporter:

“His ideas are wonderful, but you wonder if you can really run the United States in 2012 with strictly those ideas,” said John Grotte, a Paul supporter and retired engineer. “He really hasn’t changed that much with the flow of the times. So you wish you could take about 60 percent of him, take another 20 percent of something, just a pure politician and stick them together, and you’d have a pretty jim-dandy guy.”

From our point of view, that makes about as much sense as saying, “I really like a lot of the things that Jesus has to say, but I just can’t agree with Him about loving your neighbor and such.”

Most people pick and choose from the things that politicians say — as though they’re picking things to eat in a buffet line. They don’t question their core beliefs and they don’t try to make those beliefs consistent with one another. They don’t believe they’re out of step. They believe we’re out of step. They’re not suddenly going to change the way they believe. It’s just not going to happen.

I hope Paul does well in Iowa today. This will probably be the high point of his campaign. It won’t surprise you to know that I see things as downhill from here for Paul, because I’ve said repeatedly that he can’t win. (I’ve also explained why I decline to vote for anybody.) Regardless of what happens today, though, people aren’t suddenly going to wake up and understand what we understand.

Remember, they think we’re the ones who are wrong. When you look at them and are confused by what they “don’t get,” remember that they’re looking at us and thinking the same thing. For the most part, we confuse them just as much as they confuse us. And that’s not going to change.