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a kind of irritable grasping after conclusions, the kind that made me stopped blogging regularly for a while, as I fought in myself that lonely battle of the last five or six people in America who still think that life is way too complicated for any summing up that doesn't involve math. But if someone held a gun to my head and asked me to say what I think about Congressman and — update! — 2012 presidential candidate Ron Paul, after interviewing him and following him around for my new profile in the May issue, this is what I would say:

Ron Paul is, or seems to be, a very sweet and shockingly naïve man who wants very much to do right by America. But his uncompromising vision of freedom would destroy America, really, by turbo-charging the powerful and the rich, who have shown throughout history that they have (with a few exceptions) zero social conscience and very little concern for the country. Already they've grasped most of the wealth and property in the country. Those in the top percentile are perfectly happy to throw Americans out of work and create jobs in China or Mexico if it means more profits, which they then bank overseas to avoid paying the taxes that create the relatively uncorrupted government under which they thrive. Given the nearly unlimited freedom from regulations and taxes that Republicans like Paul dream of, they'd be completely unrestrained. Eventually the desperate peasantry would realize, as they just realized throughout the Middle East, that the system was completely gamed against them. The result would be bloody revolution.

But a sound economy isn't really the goal. Conservatives like Ron Paul are practicing a kind of spiritual Leninism — they don't want birth control even though it would decrease the number of abortions because they don't want to make it any easier to sin. Their real goal is to heighten the contradictions and make you surrender to God. Ditto the social safety net: The rich who pull the strings may only care about cutting their taxes, but ordinary working-class conservatives really believe that feeding the hungry or giving shelter to the homeless weakens the moral fiber and causes a "culture of dependency." So starvation and homelessness becomes the ultimate choice architecture, forcing us to become producers instead of parasites whether we want to or not. And forget the children and old people who can't hold down jobs. Forget the cripples, the mentally ill, and most of all forget the alcoholics and drug addicts and hopeless demoralized losers who don't give a damn anymore; maybe one more punch in the face will show them how much they owe to society.

Which is ironic as hell because Paul, like most contemporary Republicans, claims to be in favor of individualism and freedom and against the "nanny state." Conservatives like Paul also love to attack the "liberal agenda" of schoolteachers who teach subjects like labor history or environmentalism or the genocide of Native Americans or even labor history — but the religious and conservative programming that so many of them prefer is even more of a nanny-state agenda, right down to the loyalty oath called the Pledge of Allegiance.

Which takes me back to Norman Mailer's great insight about the divided soul of American conservatives. I've quoted it before and I will certainly quote it again — it's long, but it's worth it:

Any man or woman who was devoutly Christian and worked for the American Corporation had been caught in an unseen vise whose pressure could split their mind from their soul. For the center of Christianity was a mystery, the son of God, and the center of the corporation was a detestation of mystery, a worship of technology. Nothing was more intrinsically opposed to technology than the bleeding heart of Christ. The average America, striving to do his duty, drove further and further each day into working for Christ, and drove further and further each day in the opposite direction — into working for the absolute computer of the Corporation. Yes and no, 1 and 0. Every day the average American drove himself further into schizophrenia; the average American believed in two opposites more profoundly apart than any previous schism in the Christian soul. Christians had been able to keep some kind of sanity for centuries while embracing love against honor, desire versus duty, even charity opposed in the same heart to the lust for power — that was difficult to balance but not impossible. The love of the Mystery of Christ, however, and the love of no Mystery whatsoever, had brought the country to a state of suppressed schizophrenia so deep that the foul brutalities of the war in Vietnam were the only temporary cure possible for the condition — since the expression of brutality offers a definite if temporary relief to the schizophrenic. So the average good Christian American secretly loved the war in Vietnam. It opened his emotions. He felt compassion for the hardships and the sufferings of the American boys in Vietnam, even the Vietnamese orphans. And his view of the war could shift a little daily as he read his paper, the war connected him to his newspaper again: connection to the outside world, and the small shift of opinions from day to day are the two nostrums of that apothecary where schizophrenia is treated. America needed the war. It would need a war so long as technology expanded on very road of communication, and the cities and corporations spread like cancer; the good Christian Americans needed the war or they would lose their Christ.

All that said, I have a lot of sympathy for Ron Paul and the whole Tea Party movement. Like many liberals and radicals on the left, they believe that the rich have gamed the system along with their bought-and-paid-for pet politicians. They believe the world is getting so complicated and the government so remote that they are basically helpless in the face of forces so much greater than themselves. All true! I believe that this is the human condition, that man is born in sin, and there ain't gonna be no shining city on any earthly hill, but the Protestants and evangelicals and old-fashioned American optimists who believe that human nature can be improved are often a force for good for the simple reason that they never stop trying. The mistake we make is fixating on whether Paul's solutions or the Tea Party solutions are valid. But why should we expect human beings in great distress to come up with rational and effective solutions? Do we judge the protestors of the 1960s by how reasonable they were? Who expects eighteen-year-olds to craft wise and comprehensive solutions to problems like war and economics?

It's the distress that matters.

So I think it's very likely that Paul's purity and extremism will end up being a force for good, if only because the man who says what he means exposes the truth beneath the pretty lies. Do we really want a nation without a strong federal government? When the Colorado River runs low, how long before Arizona and Nevada go to war over water? If New Hampshire guts its safety net, will Massachusetts close emergency rooms to the desperate citizens flooding across the border? Is small government really possible in a country as big and complicated as 21st-century America? Or is the underlying Republican vision indistinguishable from a failed state?

Or maybe they're right, and the mildest government regulations lead inevitably down the "road to serfdom." Hell if I know. I'm just another person in distress, grasping at solutions I dimly understand.

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