A felicitous by-product of Rand Paul’s unlikely run for a United States Senate seat came to light in the last meeting between Paul and his Democratic opponent, on KET, Kentucky’s statewide PBS network: the libertarian label is back in vogue, even with Paul’s opponent.
The debate format included viewer questions. Viewer Mary Hatfield of rural Harrison County called in to stick up for the Democratic nominee, Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway. Miss Hatfield had seen a Rand Paul commercial that she thought questioned Conway’s anti-abortion credentials.
Conway confirmed his Christian faith and assured her that does favor tough restrictions on the procedure, but averred it should ultimately be “safe and legal, so, I think at the end of the day, I probably come down on the libertarian view on this, that government ought not to be telling women what to do.”
Back in the late 1980’s the word “libertarian” was verboten in the movement’s respectable quarters. It rarely popped up in the pages of reason magazine, the journal of “Free Minds and Free Markets.” The CATO Institute tried to rebrand the the “freedom philosophy” as “Market Liberalism,” a phrase the think tank’s strategists deemed more palatable for American mass political consumption. In similar book issued at the end of Ronald Reagan’s run, “An American Vision” outlining CATO’s wishlist of “Policies for the ‘90’s,” the word “libertarian” isn’t invoked even once in the entire book.
Only a few years before, the libertarian label was considered cutting edge, a badge of honor. Flattering profiles of the 1980 Libertarian Party ticket ran in mainstream magazines. New York magazine pinpointed the Ed Clark/David Koch ticket as the first splash of an trend sure to increase in influence as the decade progressed.
By the time of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection landslide, movement leaders who sought to inject libertarian ideas into the mainstream political conversation were disassociating themselves from the label. Scarred by their purge from the Libertarian Party by the sometimes kooky absolutists and spooked by the electoral ascendancy of the Reagan Democrats – economic populists hostile to social libertarianism – magazine editors and think thank honchos were convinced that the brand name they embraced a few years before would scare off an America that had demonstrated that it remained wary of their creed.
Rand Paul shares his father’s – U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) – more idiosyncratic strain of paleo-libertarianism. Paul’s Republican primary opponent tried to make hay out of some of his unorthodox pronouncements with a now-defunct website named randpaulstrangeideas.com. Conway hasn’t shied away from continuing that line of attack.
Like many of the core of more philosophically-committed libertarians, Rand Paul opposes abortion. In the debate he noted he supports a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution. But among the roughly 15% percent of the general electorate that David Boaz and David Kirby identified in a CATO Institute paper, “The Libertarian Vote,” the majority is supportive of abortion rights. Conway wanted to highlight this disconnect.
As the Reagan landslide slid back into the history books, the term “libertarian” has crept back into favor. Rand Paul may be economical in invoking the term, but when even his opponent – a socially conservative economic populist who eagerly mocks Paul’s more philosophically rigid positions – wants to wrap himself in the label, it’s a sign that libertarian ideas are likely on the rise.
