Ron Paul Has Won

PatrickRuffini.com ^ | November 26th, 2007 | Patrick Ruffini

[rob777]

He won’t win the nomination. He won’t win any primaries. But for Ron Paul’s quixotic bid for the White House, it’s “Mission Accomplished.”

In the past few months, Ron Paul has dramatically raised the profile of libertarianism inside the Republican Party. My small-l libertarian friends seem more comfortable describing themselves as such, even though they’ll go out of their way to disassociate themselves from Ron Paul and the big-L kind.

Libertarianism in the GOP took a big hit on 9/11, and it’s slowly coming back, with Ron Paul as the catalyst. Its underlying ideals still have appeal well beyond the cramped confines of the LP. If it’s possible to be known as a pro-life, pro-war, pro-wiretapping libertarian, then sign me up. Markos too brands himself a “libertarian Democrat,” though he’s never read Hayek and supports big government social programs.

Some campaigns can win big without ever coming close to winning an actual contest. Pat Robertson’s 1988 campaign signaled that Christian Conservatives had arrived in the GOP. Ron Paul is doing the same for libertarians. This is not a counterweight to the religious right per se, since Paul is identified as pro-life, but it does potentially open up a new army of activists on the right not primarily motivated by social/moral issues.

Not every losing single-issue candidate succeeds like this. Immigration-restrictionists still lack an outlet in the GOP, thanks to Tom Tancredo’s embarrassing tone-deafness as a candidate. Sam Brownback’s campaign had hoped to galvanize single-issue pro-lifers, but was hobbled by his dry persona. Duncan Hunter looks mostly like a campaign for Secretary of Defense.

Assuming Paul loses, where does small-l libertarianism go from here? His movement already did the smart thing by making peace with social conservatism. Libertarianism is no longer aligned with libertine stances on abortion and gay rights.

To become the ascendant ideology within the GOP, I suspect they’ll have to find a way to do the same thing on national security. The war on terror writ large is the one big thing social and economic conservatives agree on, and Ron Paul is vocally aligned against both.

Mainstream Republican libertarians might be gung-ho for Paul’s small-government idealism, they might adopt Glenn Reynoldsish skepticism of the homeland security bureaucracy, and even John McCain has lately made a thing of ripping the military-industrial complex, but there is no way — I repeat NO WAY — they will embrace Ron Paul if he continues to blame America for 9/11 and imply that America is acting illegally in defending itself around the globe. Even if they aren’t the biggest fans of the war, most people that are available for Ron Paul on the right are by temperament patriotic and will never vote for someone who sounds like Noam Chomsky.

As someone who routinely called myself a libertarian prior to 9/11, here’s how I would square the circle: Absolute freedom within our borders, for our own citizens; eternal vigilance and (when necessary) ruthlessness abroad. For libertarian ideals to survive, they must be relentlessly defended against the likes of Islamic extremists. Take a look at Andrew Sullivan’s writing right after 9/11 to see this ideal in its purest form; far from a religious crusade, ours was a war for secularism, tolerance, and free societies where gays don’t get stoned to death.

The key principle is one of reciprocity. If you behave peacefully and embrace the norms of a libertarian society, we leave you alone. If you seek to destroy a free society, we will destroy you.

If they’re serious about defending their ideals and seeing to it that libertarianism survives more than a generation in actual practice, I don’t see any reason why libertarians couldn’t embrace a more conservative positioning on national security.

[Sonora]

But, why post stuff about Paul here? It’s not like this is futile ground for his rhetoric?

I don’t see Paul moving anything and he’s been around since 1976 in Congress. He simply is not a change agent, he’s a nutcase with a nutcase following and you.

[r9etb]

The point of the article is that he’s getting rousing the libertarian subset of the Republican party - and that it’s a force to be reconed with.

I doubt it. Once Ron Paul slinks away in defeat, those folks will fall away once again, muttering darkly about being "betrayed" or something like that. They were not a force before, and they will not be a force later -- and they're not even a force now.

What they will do, is join the ranks of the "internet peripheral party," along with the Deaniacs, MoveOn types, and so on -- a rather amorphous blob of folks whose political instincts are more driven by emotion than practicality.

[andy58-in-nh]

Well, that makes more sense. There are many places around the world that I would agree we need to withdraw from either militarily (e.g., Korea, Germany, Japan) or financially (pretty much all of Africa). I don't agree that Muslims have been "radicalized" solely by our presence in their countries; they are radical by nature of their religious ideology and would hate us and our freedoms regardless. I don't know of any "tyrants or monarchs" that we are presently engaged in supporting (other than the ones in Muslim countries) though - perhaps you can enlighten me.

As for 2nd Amendment issues, I think we're in complete agreement, and the same goes for Rudy McRomney. I will not trust any candidate who is not willing to state unequivocally that firearms ownership is an individual (not a group) right, period. It's not enough to go up to Riley's and play around with the old Thompson gun on the wall for the cameras.

[mvpel]

I don't agree that Muslims have been "radicalized" solely by our presence in their countries; they are radical by nature of their religious ideology and would hate us and our freedoms regardless. I don't know of any "tyrants or monarchs" that we are presently engaged in supporting (other than the ones in Muslim countries) though - perhaps you can enlighten me.

While orthodox Islam is inherently violent and radical, not all Muslims are orthodox. Many Jews eat bacon and work on Saturdays; many Catholics use birth control; likewise, many Muslims eschew violence and are friendly to non-Muslims.

The US provided satellite intelligence data to Saddam so that his army could plan chemical weapons strikes against the Iranians more effectively. When something similar happened to us, we marshaled all the military might at our disposal and overthrew the government that supported and sheltered the people who did it.

We have sent $1.3 billion a year to Egypt's military and $815 million a year in economic aid, and yet five of the 9/11 hijackers were Egyptian. Egypt is one of the biggest recipients of US foreign aid, and the money allows Mubarak to stifle democratic reform of the government and silence or disappear his critics.

On Aug. 8, the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights reported that it had confirmed more than 500 cases of police abuse since 1993, including 167 deaths -- three of which took place this year -- that the group "strongly suspects were the result of torture and mistreatment."

We send hundreds of millions in military and economic support to the monarchy of Jordan every year, a nation where political parties were only legalized in 1992.

For a time, the killing at police hands of Mahmoud Khalifeh was one of the great non-events in modern Jordanian history. Khalifeh, "an outspoken critic of Jordan's rulers," was gunned down, and his brother Bashar critically wounded, in a dawn raid on 2 June 1995. The assault, in a wealthy suburb of Amman, "sent a chill through a population not used to seeing dissidents dying in a blaze of gunfire. But officials never publicly acknowledged anything happened, local media ignored it and a detachment of police stood at the building for more than a week after the shooting."

And of course, there's the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, font of the violence-preaching Wahabbi sect of Islam, which is spending our oil dollars on establishing mosques across the western world to spread the message of militant jihad.

Human rights violations in Saudi Arabia are widespread and cloaked in secrecy. Political and religious opponents routinely face arbitrary detention and brutal treatment. Over the past two decades, more than 1,000 people have been put to death or have suffered judicial corporal punishments such as amputation of limbs. Flogging is routine and torture has become institutionalized.

So really, is it any surprise that American slogans like "Operation Freedom" ring a bit hollow across the Middle East?

[AuntB]

You didn’t read all my post.

” Some campaigns can win big without ever coming close to winning an actual contest. Pat Robertson’s 1988 campaign signaled that Christian Conservatives had arrived in the GOP. Ron Paul is doing the same for libertarians. This is not a counterweight to the religious right per se, since Paul is identified as pro-life, but it does potentially open up a new army of activists on the right not primarily motivated by social/moral issues.”

I repeat: And that is not entirely a bad thing, either. Competition of ideas can’t hurt the process.

[roses of sharon]

It could be a good start to more Libertarians running and winning in our State Houses, which is exactly where to begin.

Campaigning, informing, teaching and swaying the grassroots to smaller government is the key to national elections, imo.

[Jim Scott]

Actually it's having the opposite effect. Paul has exposed the Democrats' anti-war hypocrisy, and in turn most of the independents who voted for the Democrats in the mid-terms are angry and disappointed. They're now backing Paul.

I fail to see how joining the Democrats defeatism and calls for 'withdrawal' (of U.S. military forces) from Iraq in any way 'exposes' the Democrats hypocrisy. It simply gives the anti-war left the opportunity to say: "See! Even a Republican presidential aspirant wants the U.S. out of Iraq!" I've seen this posted on other boards by the anti-war loons.

Unfortunately, the nuances of Ron Paul's libertarianism are lost in the din and his standard libertarian isolationism can and is spun by the left as 'proof' that 'everyone' opposes our involvement in Iraq.

The extreme left - the Code Pinkers, etc. are still behind Hillary & Obama. They support things like using our military for "peaceful" purposes, such as intervening in Darfur. Paul opposes this, and whatever amount of leftists that are supporting Paul are going to be in for a rude awakening when they find out he's not a pacifist.

That may well be the case but most reasonable observers realize that between Paul's near-fractional polling numbers and his less-than-charismatic personality he is not going to win the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, so his non-pacifist views will be irrelevant to the dynamics of the actual race. However, the congressman's ability to draw away potential voters from the GOP candidate that wins the nomination could well sink Republican chances for victory in what is expected to be a very close contest. I do not see that as any kind of 'victory' for conservatism - or libertarianism.

The Republican Party is fractured because it gave the middle finger to fiscal conservatives & right-leaning populists for six years. It is already weak because people believe in fighting wars and getting them over with rather than trying to spread "democracy" to a bunch of heathens. Democrats had nothing to do with it.

I agree with most of your premise but it ignores the fact that the Democrats and the leftmedia have been fighting against the Bush administration for 6 long years with phony scandals (that always come to nothing) and in the 2006 election, the perfectly-timed release of the Mark Foley e-mails, which did what it was intended to do: give the election to the Democrats. Granted, voter impatience with the Iraq war was a major factor but to say 'the Democrats had nothing to do with it' is disingenuous, in my view.

Dr. Paul has outlined his policies on dozens of other issues. The Iraq war is prominent because of the spending on it. Perhaps you should visit his online library, rather than getting the spin from the establishment who highlights his foreign policy views to make him seem like a kook.

All of the candidates have stated policy positions on a variety of issues but Representative Paul's contrary position on Iraq make that position a source of interest. Conservatives disagree with him and liberals agree (for the wrong reasons) so his apparent anti-war position becomes paramount to each camp and ultimately dwarfs his other positions.

He never "suggested" or implied any such thing.

Ron Paul has said there is 'no evidence' of a government-instigated conspiracy regarding the 9/11 attack. However, he has said that he would favor another investigation of '9/11'. He flirts with the idea that the government (the Bush administration) is guilty of not knowing what should have been known, a fact already stipulated by the Bush administration in the past. Dr. Paul uses Clintonian language to dance around the issue. Not saying he actually believes there was a 'government conspiracy' but not flatly ruling it out, either, giving the conspiracy nuts a little tease and in the process, alienating most sane Americans, while offering his supporters the ability to claim "he never said there was a government conspiracy'. Sorry, but few conservatives are naive enough to not note Paul's weasel words and hints at 'something' worth investigating, when 9/11 has already been investigated many times by panels not necessarily favorable to the Bush administration, such as the '9/11 Commission'.

I think Ron Paul's candidacy is like of leftist Democrat Christoper Dodd: an ego trip - a chance to gain some publicity for a politician that is unknown to most Americans. I believe that as soon as the first few primary contests have ended, so will Ron Paul's quixotic attempt to be the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, along with his failed attempt to bring political values and positions based on libertarianism to what his supporters seem to think are the GOP 'heathen'. That kind of condescension will get Ron Paul and his supporters notice on the internet by frequent postings on political message boards and clogging online polls, but it will not get Dr. Paul the GOP presidential nomination. No loss.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

Optimism is understandable, delusion is Ron Paul.

Thousands of grassroots volunteers and his fundraising says otherwise.

[yield 2 the right]

At least he not as bad as Fred Thompson would as POTUS!
***Hides away***

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

The problem with ron paul is he already stated that he’s going to refuse to endorse whoever wins the nomination

The GOP wasn't going to invite Paul to the convention or reach out to him anyway, so BFD if he doesn't kiss their rears.

[rideharddiefast]

The article lost credibility when it falsely claimed that Paul thinks that Americans are to blame for 911

How so? That came straight from the cowards mouth.

[rideharddiefast]

Thousands of grassroots volunteers and his fundraising says otherwise.

But is having thousands of anti-Americans trying to get another anti-American elected a good thing?

[rideharddiefast]

The GOP wasn't going to invite Paul to the convention or reach out to him anyway, so BFD if he doesn't kiss their rears.

Why would it be any surprise that an anti-American is not invited to the Republican Convention? When have they ever invited an anti-American to the convention?

[mvpel]

I assume you haven’t read the 9/11 Commission report, just like Guiliani, right?

[mvpel]

Why would it be any surprise that an anti-American is not invited to the Republican Convention?

I find it kind of bizarre that you consider eagerly squandering our military might in 130 nations around the world at the behest of a corrupt United Nations is somehow "pro-America" or "pro-military."

[rideharddiefast]

Any coward who votes against the equipment our troops need to survive and win the WOT is anti-American. Anybody who says America is responsible for 9/11 because we did not appease his terrorist buddies enough is anti-American. Cut and run is an anti-American large C Coward.

[mvpel]

There’s a big difference between “not appeasing” and supporting brutal tyrants and monarchs like King Fahd, King Hussein, and Saddam Hussein, or orchestrating the overthrow of elected governments and installing sock-puppet dictators like the Shah.

Why are American troops stationed in Djibouti, pray tell?

[Hemingway's Ghost]

However, I believe that the majority of conservatives will bind together to support and vote for the Republican candidate that is selected via primary to run against the putative Democrat nominee, Marxist Hillary Clinton

And this is the funny part, because the Republican candidate you'll rally behind will be either Mitt or Rudy---two people who are treated as communist scum around here. So, in effect, who the GOP will be pitting against a confirmed liberal POS, Hillary Clinton, will be a person FR has been trashing since 2006 for being a confirmed liberal POS.

[Hemingway's Ghost]

you'll have to get back to me on that because I'm too busy right now trying to figure out how to keep the Muslims from murdering my family for the unpardonable sin of being both Jewish and American

Not for nothing, but has the state of New Hampshire become the new front for the War on Terror? Or are you just being a tad hyperbolic?

[andy58-in-nh]

Yes, I was being hyperbolic, and I ought to have moderated my words. I was trying to make a point about Ron Paul’s focus on fiscal issues (which represent a serious problem) as opposed to Islamic terrorism (which is an existential threat). Many people in this country have convinced themselves that the threat is overblown and remote. I’m not one of them.