A Pig Hunting Pigs

Any time a person yields to the masochistic urge to read Matthew Yglesias, she or he would do well to picture Yglesias nestling himself into a thousand dollar smoking chair with a mint and fruit flavored boat drink clutched tightly in his legacy fattened fingers, expensive tablet in lap, arching his brow. As he sits there, imagine him muttering, "How can I make sure my friends will remember that they used to say, 'Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias said'...", and failing to conjure for himself an appropriate mental rescue from the moral predicament of being both less intelligent and well respected than Klein and yet the less venal and monstrously casual with considerations of justice and human feeling, of the pair of grasping sycophants, he keys into electronic life the expensive tablet merited to himself by virtue of being born a rich man's son.

Knowing he cannot equal Klein's mercenary facility with numbers, or his friend's capacity to transform the suffering of ordinary folk into data points in defense of the status quo, he starts instead to tap his thoughts out in another direction. It's at this point that he writes something like this:

"I’ve gotten some pushback from folks who say that it’s wrong of me to focus attention on Ron Paul’s desire to make abortion illegal when there are so many others issues out there."

And this, because:

"...according to Ron Paul, [abortion] 'is the most important issue of our age'...”.

Before we take ourselves too far down Matty's gold brick road, we should settle an issue with the map: Ron Paul is a sideshow.

Let's stick a knife in Lady Probability's knotted skein, and tearing her threads to wind blown snippets, entertain the notion that Ron Paul will be elected to the Presidency in November of the year of the next and last most important election ever, a year only more noteworthy this time around for the other national sideshow - the one where idiot white paranoiacs have their spoiled interloper colonization of Mayan time spat back at them by a universe that will go on long after we've slagged the only planet we know for certain carries any life.

Let's toy with the notion for a bit: "Ron Paul is elected to the White House."

And...

Nothing will change.

Because Ron Paul is, as better sorts have already noted, incapable of altering the operation of the machine. That he even wants to run that machine, if only in donor funded theory, should quell any notion that he has a plan or the power base sufficient to substantively or even incrementally change how it's run. How it is run is changed by the refusal to obey it. And by actively damaging it. Often. At any available juncture between it and the population it rules. Until it fails to function at all.

Ron Paul isn't about that.

Yggles either doesn't know that Ron Paul would have little power to change the system, or he doesn't care. Neither do the libertarians or conservatives who have signed on to the "Love Revolution" this time around. Either from a risible naivete or a calculated ignorance, Ron Paul supporters and Ron Paul critics alike, including Mr. Matthew Yglesias, simply assume that he is both viable enough to be elected to the supreme command of the imperial expeditionary forces and empowered by his magical wisdom, and the impossibly turned blind eyes of those who actually own the country, to transform the empire into its better self by virtue of his transformational occupancy of the Oval Office. They do this, one imagines, for a host of reasons: because they still believe that the extraction and protection racket's stated raisons d'etre - welfare, safety, education, progress and the safeguarding of human goodness - are its actual ones; because they are gatekeepers who don't want voters to realize that voting is a complete waste of time; or, because they might even honestly believe that the answer to the scourge/vital right of abortion will finally be provided by the election of a singular candidate, or by the prevention of that election.

Matthew Yglesias, I think it's safe to conclude, is not worried about the actual election of Ron Paul to the Presidency. When Yglesias writes that Ron Paul has a "desire to send the world economy into a new depression with tight money policies" he is signaling his faith in the system to which he (like Ron Paul and every other candidate for elective office) has pledged his fealty, and from which he draws his salary, and the validity of his legacy education. He is letting his readers in on the fact that he, like them, knows the score. The smart people aren't going to allow a Ron Paul Presidency. Because he would be bad for their business.

So.

Ron Paul will not be elected to the Presidency.

Why, then, worry Paul's well-known and rather consistent position with regard to the state's regulation of a woman's uterus? 

Thankfully, we have Matty Yglesias. Mr. Yglesias is kind enough to tell us why, and since he is not the truly reprehensible Ezra Klein, he is even a bit forthright about it:

"I respect that a great many people are frustrated with drug policy in the United States and are doubly frustrated by the fact that President Obama hasn’t stopped DEA raids on 'medical' marijuana dispensaries in states that have used this route to create de facto decriminalization. The fact is, however, that most anti-drug laws and most drug law enforcement happens on the state level, and the President Paul won’t be able to repeal federal drug legislation without backing from Congress, which won’t happen."

Matty respects that people don't like drug policy. He respects their opinions so much he places the medical in medical marijuana in scare quotes. He respects them so much he's going to prevaricate a bit, and pretend that most drug policy comes from the States. He's going to do this, of course, by ignoring federal guidelines, federal funding, federal prosecution, and in case we forget for ourselves, the fact that nearly half of all enforcement dollars are spent directly by the Feds, even if the enforcement happens "on the state level."*

But, he doesn't want them to lose sight of the broader picture, here. That's why, tablet in hand and despite the fact that he's no Ezra Klein, Yglesias needs to remind liberals and progressives - especially those voters who rightly wonder at the grotesque failures of the Drug War - about Ron Paul's abortion problem.

And what it comes down to, for liberals like Yglesias, but also for any number of party endorsed conservatives, is legitimacy.

The problem with Ron Paul isn't that he will ever win the Presidency. With the exception of a half dozen paleo-conservatives, Ann Coulter when she is three sheets to the wind, Pat Buchanan when he's not working hard to convince the executives at MSNBC to void his contract, or that stoner dude who forgot to the clean the opium out of his bong before he packed in some kind bud, there are few people who actually believe Ron Paul will ever be President.

Ron Paul's appeal doesn't come from viability.

Ron Paul's appeal comes from his willingness to address the State's legitimacy problem. Ron Paul's appeal owes itself to a growing doubt about the state's legitimacy.

It's not that he thinks the project of government is a waste of time. He's right at home with the minarchists and lean government conservatives who haven't thought their core convictions through to their logical conclusions. Like Congressman Paul, they fail to make the connection between an efficient state reduced to policing, war and arbitration functions and the fortunes of the class which actually manages that state as a shared ownership venture. As long as the federal State, and the several States, are obligated by public discontent and unrest to dispense a portion of the Commons back towards the people who actually produce not only wealth but the Commons, the State is prevented from triaging whole segments of the population, in anticipation of the twin and rapidly approaching disasters, for the ruling class, which have been produced by the capitalist distribution of labor, goods and resources: pollution and food supply collapse, and Peak Oil. Furthermore, a state which has some recognized obligation to provide for its captive population is a state which will degrade and ultimately collapse under the weight of the emerging  feedback loop between food supply collapse, and Peak Oil - the surplus oil population.

Ron Paul is not going to address these problems. He has neither the worldview nor the understanding of the crisis of capitalism which would equip him to use an imaginary Presidency to prevent the disastrous culmination of capitalist production and distribution. Assuming his election to the actual Presidency, the office he will have won will give him tremendous power to assassinate, bomb, invade and appoint to positions of power those men and women who will execute his authority to assassinate, bomb and invade. He will have no power, no coalition and no effective authority to reduce spending of any note, to prevent Congress from forcing his budgetary hand, or to restore the gold standard.**

And for Matty Yglesias, and the rest of the bumper crop of warbling progressives and professional liberals, this is the real problem.

Ron Paul, on the point of the power of the office he would assume, is saying as loudly and as often as he can that he would not use it.

Ron Paul's problem is that by assuming the mantle of the Presidency and thereupon refusing the exercise of its one set of actual powers, Ron Paul would threaten the legitimacy of their use, altogether. It would actually be better, for critics of Paul, if he were an anarchist. Nobody listens to those raving dreamers. Alas, for our progressive friends, Ron Paul believes in government, just like them. And that makes him far more dangerous.

He's sharing their stall and he's drawing away customers.

That's what he does every time he turns fairly run of the mill paleo-conservative protectionist and isolationist platitudes into modern idiom. Whether he is addressing the abuses, failures and consequences of the drug war, or drawing attention to the catastrophes wrought by seventy years of ceaseless intervention in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Russia, Southeast Asia, Southwest Asia, the Caribbean and wherever the US has projected its martial might, he gives credence to the simplest of ideas: the use of power is almost invariably worse than the refusal to use it.

And if Ron Paul, just by being Ron Paul on a permanent and quixotic campaign for an office he cannot and will never win, can call into question the legitimacy of power itself, well, then it's up to people with large audiences to remind those stupid pot-smokers and youth voters tempted by his siren song that Ron Paul is lacking in...

...legitimacy. You know, because for all his rhetoric about meddling and power, he's just one more wealthy white dude who wants to get all up in a woman's uterus.

So, Matty Yglesias can't be Ezra Klein. He doesn't have the chops to quite manage the banality of Ezra's numerical evil. But he can, at least, keep a gate with the best of them, and like a good master's little pig, go out hunting one of the other pigs who went off the master's private enclosure.



* - I'm sure a competent researcher might be able to help confirm what percentage of the states' combined budgets is actually federal grant, block and contribution monies...

** - no modern capitalist state will allow this because those who own the state don't want a money supply constrained by gold, or silver, or platinum, or anything but the fiat power of the creditor's state...and besides, Yglesias has an actual point buried within his gate keeping effort: tightening the money supply, right now, would trigger a depression that would actually hurt the ruling class