Rand Paul's rejection of the Civil Rights Act of 1964's provisions prohibiting privately owned "public accommodations" from refusing service on the basis of race etc. should come as no surprise.
Nor does such a position mean that Paul is a racist - per se, at any rate. No, the problem with Paul's position is different, subtler, and if anything more worrisome to our society and system of government.
Labelling Paul as racist is easy. Advocating for people being able to put out "No Blacks Allowed" signs on their restaurant doors is such a toxic position that he's been trying to walk his comments back ever since they became public - without, of course, completely abdicating his philisophical position
It's that philosophy that's the problem. Paul's brand of libertarianism is absolute, undiluted, pure, and immune to any form of moderation. Government is bad. Government restrictions on any form of private business or association is inevitably oppressive, and therefore must be rejected as a matter of principle. Thus, however much Paul himself may hold no animus whatsoever towards black people, or asians, or women, or gays, or the disabled, other individual citizens have the right to be, to paraphrase Paul, jerks. That, to him, is both the price and the glory of American freedom.
This devotion to individual freedom is a classic part of American history - the whole "Don't Tread on Me" concept - and is in some ways an admirable sentiment. We do regard ourselves, as Americans, as free individual agents, endowed by the Creator (if we believe in any) to engage in whatever activities we want, by God, and no one can tell us otherwise. It's bred into every American. I feel aspects of it in my life and worldview every day. Support for gay marriage, for example, is a profoundly libertarian position - the government has no right to tell someone who they may love, or enter into a lifelong legally sanctioned relationship with. In some ways, we're all libertarians.
But Paul's version of this ideal admits of no limitations, and no moderation. That's where he gets himself, and his movement, into trouble. Because there are other currents to American thought and history just as important, and just as fundamental, as the right of the individual to do as he or she pleases. One is the dedication of the entire society to the ideal of not just human freedom, but equality.
Those two terms are hardly synonymous. Achieving and enforcing equality (of opportunity, mind you, not "results," as many on the Right like to facilely claim) often inevitably means abridging some aspect of individual freedom. In an ideal "freedom" world, one would be free, to take an extreme example, to decide to sell oneself into slavery - after all, it's your life. In such a world, people would be free to associate or dis-associate themselves with whoever they liked. That's the world Rand Paul inhabits, or at least dreams of at night. His own personal morality might indeed never allow his own choices to be discriminatory, but the strictures of his libertarianism forbid him from endowing his moral sense with any authority or coercive power over anyone else's beliefs.
The implications of such a philosophy, of course, for an ordered society are disastrous. Such a belief system strikes a mortal blow to the concept of equality under the law, because to Paul the law has no right to enforce or dedicate itself to any such thing. This idea sweeps much further than the civil rights laws. As other diaries have noted (speculatively, to be sure), such a belief system must also sweep away all constraints on business, on employer exploitation of workers, on land use, on environmental issues, on safety in the food supply, the workplace, the highway, or even at home. In the final analysis, it embraces and inevitably leads to the law of the jungle, the constant atavistic grasp for the main chance, with no protection for those who might be injured by your own selfish conduct.
This is the danger of pure philosophy, and it's an issue American has historically handled better than most every other country on earth. The Founders were acutely aware of the need for limits on the very human freedom their Declaration extolled; the Constitution they wrote is full of such concerns. We live under a system of government that is in many ways deliberately antimajoritarian, and in which no philosophy or idea is allowed complete free rein, to be carried out to its logical extreme. That's because the Founders recognized that the logical extreme of any idea is also a logical absurdity, and carries with it its own inevitable form of tyranny.
The limitations on even our most cherished forms of freedom surround us every day. Freedom of religion? Go try to revive a Mayan human sacrifice cult and see how far you get (hell, the native Americans can't even smoke peyote). Freedom of speech? Go cry "fire" in a crowded theatre, or joke about bombs at the airport. The right to bear arms? leaving aside the legitimate policy issues here, I would hope even the NRA would agree that the Second Amendment doesn't allow individuals right to possess, say, an F-16, or a tank, or a hydrogen bomb. Freedom from "unreasonable" searches and seizures? Tell that to the cop at the sobriety checkpoint. The point is not to endorse or condemn any of these examples, but to note the fact of their existence, and the balance among many competing interests - freedom, public safety, equality, basic morality - that go into striking the often imperfect policy decisions that they represent.
Rand Paul strikes no balances. He's all in on freedom, at the cost of every other value. To a point, that commitment is laudable. But when the devotion is fethisized as does, it becomes destructive not just of those other equally legitimate societal interests (interests that are just as basic to the functioning of a truly free society), but of the central leavening quality that's defined American political history and made it so uniquely successful. Our system works precisely because no idea or philosophy ever gets a complete triumph. Our freedoms are constantly limited, our government's power at every turn curtailed, our businesses' ability to compete and exploit circumscribed. No one gets to to exactly everything he or she wants. as a result, almost all of us get to do more or less what we want.
Paul's is not the mind of a racist. It is rather the mind of the philosophical zealot, who sees no logical end point to the application of the philosophy he's embraced. It's that inability to see the limits to the efficacy of libertarian ideals that makes him extreme, and frrankly dangerous to this country. He and his libertarian colleagues are markedly similar to the adherents of the other great academic philosophical movmenet to arise during the nineteenth century: Communism. Devotees of both are certain that their system and theirs alone offers humanity the only way to paradise. Both believe in their utopian ideals so stringly that they admit no moderation to their views. And both systems, when or if implemented in the real world, lead to the very sort of oppression and disaster that they claim to rescue humanity from.
Paul needs to be defeated, not to stop racism per se, but to reaffirm the pragmatic nature of the American system of government and of the American soul.