Rep. Ron Paul’s defense of Iran’s nuclear weapons program should surprise no one. The same resentment motivates Ron Paul and the Iranian leadership — a paranoid hostility toward a world that is swiftly changing and has little mercy, and a Millenarian desire to return to a mythical, untroubled past. Get rid of the Federal Reserve, scourge the bankers, return to a gold standard and erect a wall around the United States — and we will return to when? To 1957, when the Russians launched the first space satellite, alerting the United States to the danger that it might lose the Cold War? Then, as always, we prevailed, but by the skin of our teeth. Ron Paul’s program is an American version of the Iranian desire to return to a world of Islamic purity that never existed, any more than did a golden age of American isolationism.
[...]
Of course, the mullahs would have nothing without the global economy; after oil, Iran exports nothing but pistachios and carpets. Without foreign oil companies, the mullahs could not drill, pump, or ship their hydrocarbons. The whole apparatus of Iranian Islam is a theme park, an Shi’ite Disneyland funded by oil revenues, perpetuating a barbaric society that could not feed itself without global demand for the natural resources that, by unlucky accident, happen to be located in Iranian territory.
Mullah Paul voices the same fear and resentment in its milder American form. He has in common with the Iranians a desire to make the world go away, and a fixed idea that an evil conspiracy brought about all the problems. Ron Paul isn’t an Iranian, to be sure; he’s just the closest an American can come to thinking like an Iranian without actually moving there.
[...]
Americans have the mother of all hangovers. Only five years ago, a community college dropout could get a real estate or mortgage broker’s license and make reasonably good money, and buy a McMansion with a liar’s loan. Now the Boomers are facing retirement on a fraction of the home equity that used to form their nest eggs. Ron Paul speaks not to the highways and the hedges, but to the subdivisions and shopping malls, the spawn of Chinese savings and cheap Chinese consumer goods, monuments to America’s dependence on the world economy — and he preaches isolationism.
America has the capacity to come back, and the proof is that the sector of the American economy that is most engaged with the world — the S&P 500 corporations — is showing strong gains in employment, sales, productivity and profits. Cutting taxes and rolling back regulation will restore economic growth, although the benefits may not be as broadly felt as during past recoveries. Meanwhile the rate of innovation redoubles, and brings us into uncharted territory. A friend called my attention to this video prepared by Sony for its 2009 shareholders’ meeting, which is worth viewing as a reminder.
We have to roll up our sleeves and compete in the world economy. If we try to wall the world off, we will be poor, miserable, and ultimately insecure, as nuclear weapons work their way into terrorist hands. And we will deserve what we get.
