Ron Paul's radical vision: Constitutional purity

Ron Paul: Ex-surgeon without a heart

He's gone from regional oddball to suddenly celebrated elder statesman. He's a 75-year-old Texas Republican from suburban Houston who's been on the short end of countless 434-to-1 votes in the U.S. House. And in today's wacky, up-is-down political climate, his rigid, reactionary ideas have placed him at the center of the national debate over the size and role of the federal government.

He is Ron Paul and if you're not acquainted with his philosophy, you owe it to yourself to read John H. Richardson's masterful profile in May's Esquire: "The Founding Father."

In stature and personality, Paul seems harmless enough -- a former Air Force flight surgeon who's small and trim and boyish as Tom Sawyer. But he is a bulldog when it comes to this idea of constitutional purity. Where most people acknowledge that politics is the art of compromise, he holds fast to the belief that principles should always trump "incrementalism." In other words, you don't compromise. As Richardson explains:

That's why he's taken more lonely stands than any other politician in American history: against the Iraq war even though he's a Republican, against the Defense of Marriage Act even though he's a conservative Christian, against farm subsidies even though he represents a rural district, against the Texas Medical Center even though he's from Texas — the list goes on and on. He refused to award congressional medals to Rosa Parks, Ronald Reagan, the Pope, and Mother Teresa. After Hurricane Katrina, he voted against sending federal help to Louisiana. 

"Once you say, 'Well, you know, we live in the real world and sometimes you have to give in a little bit,' then you're never yourself, you're never your own person, and they'll badger you to death. So it's much easier for me to follow a set of principles than fussin' and fumin' on knowing exactly when you're supposed to throw in the towel."

Paul is often called the "intellectual godfather" of the tea party movement. Any taxation is theft. Any spending of public dollars is socialism. Any attempt to help those of lesser means is redistribution of wealth.

"The implications are ruthless -- starving old people in the street, literally," Richardson writes. But Paul says that's OK, that the Founding Fathers believed that personal liberty and economic liberty were one in the same, and that Christianity emphasizes the importance of the individual.

Paul is the Christian Scientist of economics, convinced that the "medicine" of government planning is the sin of pride -- if you really trust the Lord, you don't give your children antibiotics and you don't give your grandparents Social Security. He is willing to increase social pain dramatically so the nation can be born again.

Paul's vision is as scary and Draconian as it is pure and unshakable. His libertarian-leaning ways would never fly in Oregon. It's the rest of the country, Red States America, that makes me worry.

Photograph: Brent Humphreys/Redux