No Escape Might Help to Smooth the Unattractive Truth
By 
Anybody remember Rand Paul? He is said to have been a candidate for the Republican nomination for president, although I can’t say I recall it. I was leafing through an old issue of Rolling Stone while waiting for my wife this weekend, and was amused to see one of Paul’s heroes, Rush lyricist/drummer Neil Peart, fail to reciprocate the affection in the grand tradition of Bruce Springsteen and Chris Christie:
Peart outgrew his Ayn Rand phase years ago, and now describes himself as a “bleeding-heart libertarian,” citing his trips to Africa as transformative. He claims to stand by the message of “The Trees,” but other than that, his bleeding-heart side seems dominant. Peart just became a U.S. citizen, and he is unlikely to vote for Rand Paul, or any Republican. Peart says that it’s “very obvious” that Paul “hates women and brown people” — and Rush sent a cease-and-desist order to get Paul to stop quoting “The Trees” in his speeches.
“For a person of my sensibility, you’re only left with the Democratic party,” says Peart, who also calls George W. Bush “an instrument of evil.” “If you’re a compassionate person at all. The whole health-care thing — denying mercy to suffering people? What? This is Christian?”
Part of this, I assume, is about growing beyond the dumb shit you believed when you were in your 20s. But this also about what a ridiculous comparative outlier the Republican Party is. Other liberal democracies have brokerage parties of the right whose elites are by and large, to ironically paraphrase Antonin Scalia, conservatives but not nuts. Tories and Christian Democrats and Gaullists don’t sneer at the idea that the government should guarantee access to basic health care or provide for the poor or the idea that carbon emissions cause climate change. The idea that the faction that currently controls both houses of the American national legislature views the Affordable Care Act — still a less statist approach to health care than any other comparable nation — as such a grave threat to American freedom that they don’t merely oppose it but spent years developing increasingly ridiculous theories trying to destroy it in the courts and got these theories taken seriously by hacks in the federal judiciary is really quite astounding when you step back. And it’s obviously closely related to the politics of the American south being an outlier.