Rand Paul Needs Someone to Disagree With
Most Real Insights pieces start with a conversation I had. This one starts with a conversation someone else had — and it’s a good one!
The hosts of The Fifth Column sat down with Senator Rand Paul, and if you haven’t listened to them before, irreverent doesn’t begin to cover it. They’re also sharp, evidence-driven, and reliably honest about what they think, even when it’s inconvenient. The full interview is available to their paying subscribers, and it’s worth your time.
“I’m lonely.”
That’s Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). By his own accounting, he’s virtually the only Republican in the Senate still advocating for free trade and constitutional limits on executive power.
What does it actually take to hold your commitments when you find yourself alone in them? And is it really just about individual willpower, or does consistency require something more structural. Something we’ve lost and could rebuild?
Sen. Paul told the hosts of The Fifth Column something more diagnostic than the usual story about political hypocrisy. When asked what his colleagues really believe behind closed doors, he said it’s a mix. Some quietly disagree with tariffs and protectionism. But others have genuinely adopted these positions. The intellectual infrastructure is so thin now that many can no longer articulate why free markets matter, why executive power should be constrained. “Have any of them ever heard of Henry Hazlitt or von Mises?” he asked. “They’ve heard of Friedman. They just have forgotten what Friedman stood for.”
Sen. Paul’s picture of his own party is bleak: tariffs, executive overreach, federal agents shooting citizens in Minneapolis — and hardly anyone can remember why that should bother them.
What Changed
What’s gutting the limited government movement, Sen. Paul said, is “fidelity to a person, not ideas.”
He remembers Ruby Ridge and Waco. Conservatives instinctively recoiled from federal agents using force against citizens. That instinct has reversed. Administration officials have now argued that citizens can’t carry a firearm at a protest. A decade ago, that position would have been unthinkable at any Tea Party rally Paul attended.
Emily Chamlee-Wright, president and CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies, calls this a permission structure: the way each side quietly builds justifications for abandoning its own rules. What’s striking about Paul’s version is that loyalty itself becomes the permission structure.
The Practice of Staying
So what keeps one person in the room when the room has changed around them?
Sen. Paul would say it starts with having decided things in advance. He built a decision-making framework early and has applied it regardless of who holds the White House. “It’s pretty easy for me to make up my mind,” he said, because his own framework is settled. When you’ve already decided that executive power should be constrained, you don’t re-decide it every time your party’s president wants more of it.
But he also draws on deep institutional memory. The Brandenburg case, where Eleanor Holmes Norton, a young African American civil rights attorney, and her Jewish co-counsel helped defend a Klansman who was saying nothing but terrible things about both their communities, because the First Amendment demanded it. When your argument connects to a tradition like that, it’s harder to walk away from.
And he stays in relationship. He votes for the nominees he can support and works his committee. He recently helped to broker a diplomatic channel between the Colombian ambassador and the White House that led to a presidential meeting, because he’d maintained the relationship while maintaining his disagreements.
Sen. Paul hasn’t just held his positions. He’s stayed in the room with colleagues he disagrees with. The principles matter, but so does the commitment to showing up with people who don’t share them and doing the work anyway.
Why is he the only senator who seems to be holding his commitments this way?
What’s Really Missing
You don’t have to agree with Sen. Rand Paul on trade or tariffs or executive power to hear what his loneliness is telling us. The disagreements aren’t grounded in principle any longer.
When “fidelity to a person” replaces “fidelity to ideas,” what’s left is positional and performative. A senator who can’t find a colleague willing to make a serious, grounded case for or against his positions, is operating in an institution that has lost the capacity for the kind of argument democracy requires.
This is something I keep coming back to in these Real Insights conversations. Greg Lukianoff talks about structured friction: the way ideas get tested against real opposition. Jonah Goldberg makes the case that democracy depends on argument, not agreement. Emily describes the four corners of liberalism as a productive tension between competing commitments. The thread is the same every time: disagreement is the engine, not the obstacle. Think tanks, universities, courts, legislatures. These all depend on genuine disagreement to function.
Where the Rebuilding Happens
The structure of the United States Senate, in principle, gives its members the standing and the time to hold positions and work through their disagreements. Six-year terms, staggered elections, individual committee authority and floor privileges all create space for that work.
That structure didn’t help much when Sen. Paul forced a vote on enforcing pay-as-you-go after the 2017 tax cuts, a principle Republicans had championed for decades. By his telling, he lost 96 to 4. Almost every Democrat and almost every Republican voted him down.
The pattern holds on trade. Sen. Paul’s colleagues from the farm states will tell you privately they oppose the administration’s tariffs. But private agreement doesn’t become collective action on its own. It needs spaces where members can deliberate and negotiate together beyond hallway conversations. R Street’s Governance Program has long argued that Congress’s dysfunction comes down to internal organization. When decision-making is centralized in party leadership, rank-and-file members lose the tools to organize and act. The infrastructure that once gave members those spaces has been stripped away: conference committees, regular committee markups, open amendment processes, and a full work week in Washington.
When Sen. Paul publicly opposes tariffs, he is making an argument that was once common with his party. In 2000, forty-six Republican senators voted for permanent normal trade relations with China. In April 2025, only four voted to challenge the president’s tariffs on Canada. Instead, he’s doing what he can do alone: making visible what many privately believe. But visibility alone doesn’t produce negotiation.
For that, Congress needs what I’ve been calling enduring deliberative publics: sustained communities, inside and outside its walls, where people practice the work of association over time. I mean “publics” deliberately here: not just the external communities that hold institutions accountable, but the internal ones — caucuses and working groups — that give members space to negotiate before they ever reach the floor.
What makes them enduring is that they negotiate continuously, internally among their own members and externally with the institutions they engage. People stay even when they lose, accept the outcome, come back, and argue again. Outside Congress, those publics live in civic organizations, local party committees, community foundations, and think tanks where people still show up to disagree.
Structures for Disagreement
If I’ve learned anything from these conversations, it’s that principled consistency requires structures. And those structures operate at every level.
Start with the individual. Sen. Paul has his settled framework, his deep memory of what the movement stood for. That’s a habit, the kind you build before you need it. But habit alone has left him isolated.
At R Street, we put out a statement condemning the attack on the Capitol in January 2021 before we knew what it would cost us. But we could only do that because we’d already built the internal culture for hard conversations, before the external pressure arrived. That’s the organizational level: making disagreement expected.
Inside Congress, it’s the deliberative infrastructure I described above. It’s largely gone, and in need of the most rebuilding.
And then there’s the level where I see renewal actually taking root: the civic level. Jonah’s macrocosm/microcosm insight keeps coming back to me here: liberal democracy was built to work from the ground up. The macrocosm provides the rules. The microcosm, the more local places where people actually know each other, is where the capacity for self-governance gets practiced.
Emily calls the norms that sustain all of this, “sacred obligations”: the sense of duty that judges, journalists, and citizens feel toward something beyond themselves. “If we lose that,” she told me, “that is toothpaste that’s going to be really hard to shove back into the tube.”
Some of it is already out. But the structures and norms that were lost were built by design. New ones can be built too.
Sen. Paul is doing his part inside the Senate. He shouldn’t have to do it alone. Wherever you stand: hold your commitments — and stay in the room with people who don’t share them. That’s the work.
The full Fifth Column conversation with Senator Paul is available to paying subscribers. Previous Real Insights referenced here: Jonah Goldberg, Emily Chamlee-Wright, and Greg Lukianoff.