Let me be clear: I am not a libertarian. It’s very unlikely I will cast a vote for Paul or any other Republican in 2016. I anticipate supporting Clinton in the general election.
But I nonetheless believe that American democracy would benefit from a contest that forces the establishment candidate (Clinton) to defend herself and her positions against a challenger who presents a genuine alternative — and one that confounds at least some of the pieties that have gripped the GOP through the last several election cycles.
The biggest contrast would be felt on foreign policy. Paul’s expressions of support for a military response to ISIS have obscured just how skeptical he is of the GOP’s reflexive, unmodulated hawkishness, which inspires nearly all of its leading figures — as well as a good many Democrats, very much including Hillary Clinton — to propose military force as an all-purpose solution to nearly every problem in the world. Paul appears eager to break from this consensus in favor of a stricter calculation of America’s national interests, and with those interests defined more narrowly than neocons and liberal interventionists tend to do…
When it comes to taxes and entitlements, Paul is closer to being a mainstream Republican — though his libertarian commitments give us reason to think he may be slightly more willing than other members of his party to match tax cuts with real reductions in spending. I don’t support slashing either taxes or spending, but if we’re going to have the first, it’s far better to combine it with the second than to pay for the tax cuts by increasing levels of public debt.
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