He’s called for major, across-the-board cuts to federal spending, pushed back against the Great American War Machine, and punked the D.C. establishment’s love of drone attacks and secret surveillance in a kidney-busting, 13-hour filibuster that set Twitter afire like a Miley Cyrus twerkathon.OK, forget what I said about being able to talk to kids. But Gillespie and his posse think Rand can, because he's down with their values:
“The younger generation is probably the most libertarian and sort of tolerant, and has more libertarian values, I'd say, than any generation in American history," [Joe] Trippi recently told my Reason colleague Todd Krainin. Paul and others like him are engaging issues – drone strikes, drug legalization - that terrify old-line establishmentarians but energize disaffected voters that might include everyone from Glenn Beck to Occupy Wall Streeters.Glenn Beck to Occupy Wall Streeters! Consider this about Paul:
- He had to be frog-marched back from asserting that the Civil Rights Act is anti-freedom, and followed up on this outrage with a transparently self-promotional speech at Howard University.
- Not that he's totally insensitive to African-American-related issues: He has compared food stamps to slavery. (Universal health care, too!)
- He introduced in the Senate a "fetal personhood" bill to ban abortion (but, you know, reproductive rights just aren't a big libertarian issue).
- Currently Paul is shoring up his youth cred by raising an alarm about Bill Clinton's decades-old blowjob.
For libertarians, selected social issues are the come-on, but what's really important is getting rid of the safety nets to create a neo-feudal future where moochers must sweat or starve. Just because we occasionally share a platform with Paul doesn't mean we identify with what's currently called libertarianism but remains, like I've been saying all along, merely conservatism for people with status anxieties.
