Ron Paul is not afraid to think in abstractions -- if we can be grateful to him for anything, it should be that we won't hear him bullsh&tting us about how when he met Mr. & Mrs. Such-and-Such on the campaign trail, he was moved to rethink his social outlook, etc. He brings real principles to the discussion, an admirable quality in an elected figure. Principles can also be bulldozers, to both good and bad effect: what allows Paul to attack a destructive and fruitless war in Iraq also leads him to attack the safety net preventing the aged from sinking into abject poverty.

Many admirers see this as a mark of Ron Paul's toughness or willing to make sacrifices in the name of his principles, but they tend to overlook the fact that perhaps the problem is that his principles are not very complex or well thought-through. The lack of coherence is the case with Ron Paul's principles, and with libertarian principles generally, though it is not unique to this brand of thought.

I should have noticed this incoherence before, but it became blatantly obvious during yesterday's news frenzy over Ron Paul's old newsletters, which contained some offensive language about race. I was astonished to see Paul respond to the controversy like every other unprincipled politician, trying to lie his way out of it, asserting that he didn't write and in fact hadn't even read the mailings that went out under the title of The Ron Paul Newsletter -- a preposterous assertion for a small-time candidate who likely had few staff and was appealing to a mostly local constituency. The real story here, though, wasn't the assertions contained in the newsletters, which weren't all that shockingly horrible; they reflect what many Republicans think and continue to think, and would not be out of place coming from the mouth of a Newt Gingrich. The real story wasn't the lies Paul used to deny the facts. The real story was that Paul demonstrated that he was an intellectual lightweight in talking about racism. In his CNN interview, Paul got into a feverishly ungrammatical state of agitation, making such claims as "Libertarians are incapable of being a a racist [sic] because racism is a collectivist idea: you see people in groups. A civil libertarian like myself see everybody as important individual ... " The idea that Paul is "the anti-racist," as he dubbed himself, because libertarians allegedly don't "see" race is the biggest crock I've heard from a political figure in years.

In order to be anti-racist, your first step obviously has to be to admit that you see race. To assert otherwise is to substitute a shallow principle for the human fact. Paul was not just lying about his past, but deceiving himself. Not only that, he demonstrated how hollow the philosophy of libertarianism is.

Now, Ron Paul isn't all bad. He did say the most true and meaningful thing in this presidential campaign yet: his observation that Mike Huckabee is an example of how, quoting Sinclair Lewis, "when fascism comes to this country, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross." But Paul still needs to admit that libertarianism isn't innocent of evangelism itself. It's a faith, too -- a blind one.