Rand Paul is an Idiot
The political rant I was gonna do yesterday, before I got sidetracked by professional cycling wank, was about Rand Paul. I had just listened to Rachel Maddow's interview with him, in which she asked him if he supported the part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibits private businesses from discriminating on the basis of race. You know, the interview in which he spent TWENTY MINUTES refusing to answer the question, and thus tacitly answering that no, he does not support it. (I know, he's since been trying to walk that back. That's not because he's changed his mind; it's because he's a politician who finally realised being against the 1964 Civil Rights Act is a surefire way to not get elected.)
Plenty of other people have talked about this interview at length. I'm sure we'll keep talking about it, because while Rand Paul failed to answer the question he was actually asked, he did manage to bring into focus what libertarianism is all about. Libertarians live in Magical Unicorn Hypothetical Fantasy Land, where everyone does what's in their own best interests, the Invisible Hand of the Free Market fixes everything, everyone gets along without a government to make them, and everyone gets a pony. They can only manage to do this by ignoring historical reality. Rand Paul told Rachel Maddow several times that questions about desegrating lunch counters and similar were all hypothetical. He's wrong. The battle for desegregation was (and is) not hypothetical to a lot of people, people who had to fight for their right to patronize private businesses, to sit at those lunch counters, to use gas station restrooms. Calling it hypothetical is a huge insult to people who still live with de facto segregation. To them, this is not a fascinating hypothetical discussion about something that happened a long time ago. It's their reality. They live it everyday. Rand Paul is just buried so deep in his libertarian philosophy, and in his privilege as a white Anglo-Saxon male, that he can't see how other people's lives are very different from his. His privilege isn't just showing; it can be seen from outer space.
Plenty of other people have talked about this interview at length. I'm sure we'll keep talking about it, because while Rand Paul failed to answer the question he was actually asked, he did manage to bring into focus what libertarianism is all about. Libertarians live in Magical Unicorn Hypothetical Fantasy Land, where everyone does what's in their own best interests, the Invisible Hand of the Free Market fixes everything, everyone gets along without a government to make them, and everyone gets a pony. They can only manage to do this by ignoring historical reality. Rand Paul told Rachel Maddow several times that questions about desegrating lunch counters and similar were all hypothetical. He's wrong. The battle for desegregation was (and is) not hypothetical to a lot of people, people who had to fight for their right to patronize private businesses, to sit at those lunch counters, to use gas station restrooms. Calling it hypothetical is a huge insult to people who still live with de facto segregation. To them, this is not a fascinating hypothetical discussion about something that happened a long time ago. It's their reality. They live it everyday. Rand Paul is just buried so deep in his libertarian philosophy, and in his privilege as a white Anglo-Saxon male, that he can't see how other people's lives are very different from his. His privilege isn't just showing; it can be seen from outer space.