But if Rand Paul distrusts democracy he must've gotten it from Ayn Rand.

It's also interesting that Chait regards Rand's formulation as "militant." Let's look at it again. "I do not believe that a majority can vote a man's life, or property, or freedom away from him." Does Chait believe that a democratic majority should be able to vote a man's life or freedom away? I know that Chait (like Rand Paul) believes that the government can tax a portion of a citizen's wealth. Should a democratic majority be able to single out an individual man and vote away his property? Believing otherwise is certainly not unique to Objectivists, libertarians, or Republicans.

What Chait did is hardly unique. In the political press, it happens again and again: libertarian leaning folks are portrayed as if they're radical, extremist ideologues, even when they're expressing ideas that are widely held by Americans across the political spectrum. Here is the absurd cover The New Republic chose for the issue in which the Paul profile appears:

TNR

This would seem to imply that, relative to other politicians, the guy who went on Rachel Maddow to discuss the nuances of his take on the Civil Rights Act is the one hiding his "real" self from us. Remember the conservatives who kept saying, "Obama is hiding something -- he's not one of us"? That magazine cover is what it looks like when liberals cave to a similar pathology.

Let's peek inside the story that Julia Ioffe wrote (which, despite some flaws, is a lot fairer than the magazine cover, which it doesn't support). Here's how she characterizes Paul's philosophy:

... though he has staked out more moderate or traditionally Republican positions than his father, at his core, Rand retains the same pre-New Deal vision of hyper-minimalist government and isolationist foreign policy. In other words, Paul has managed to take the essence of his father's radical ideology -- more radical than that of any modern presidential candidate -- and turn it into a plausible campaign for the Republican nomination.

And here's a passage from later on in the article:

At a Tea Party event in Louisville, I sat down with Paul and asked him to explain his theory of government's proper role. "What the Constitution says," he told me curtly. "The Constitution has about 19 enumerated powers; that's what it should do. Primary among those, at the federal level, is national defense, and that's the primary function of what the government should be doing." As always, Paul wore a red penny on his lapel, a Tea Party invocation of the national debt. He continued: "There are other things that we've been doing for quite a while, and what I would say is that we try to make them as efficient as possible. Things like Social Security and Medicare need to be made solvent."



This seemed to be a departure from his father, who refused to accept Medicare and Medicaid in his private practice because he deemed it "stolen money."

If Paul's avowed position is that we should keep doing Social Security and Medicare as efficiently as possible, a concession his father never made, then how is it accurate to write that "at his core, Rand retains the same pre-New Deal vision of hyper-minimalist government" as his father? * The piece goes on to add nuance and contradict that "core" passage, to its credit, but that's sort of the point: Even in the face of contradictory evidence, the most extremist portrayal is asserted as if it's true. Like the cover surrounding the magazine story, everything is wrapped in paranoia.