Rep. Ron Paul's supporters are not all young college-kid potheads. We conservatives make a serious mistake if we think Paul draws his support only from people who would otherwise support President Obama. While he does draw some supporters from that camp, he is a real threat to conservatives in a close primary race and a potential threat to the Republican Party if we nominate someone like Mitt Romney who has dubious conservative credentials and Paul decides to run a third-party campaign.
I have to deal with a few supporters of Ron Paul in my own local church. Also, a prominent older leader in my own denomination is an open and aggressive Ron Paul supporter. I know from direct personal experience that a fair number of politically active military personnel like Ron Paul's views on foreign policy because they believe we're fouling up the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, so they conclude (wrongly) that we shouldn't be involved in foreign military action at all.
The problems with Ron Paul are complex. His ideas are not all bad, but he's got no chance of being nominated as a Republican and could do serious damage by peeling conservative votes to a losing cause that won't give up.
The root of the problem is that Paul is a libertarian, not a conservative, but too many people on our side of the fence do not understand the difference.
On the other hand, because libertarianism is fundamentally focused on the role of Constitutional government limited to the written words of the document with an interpretation guided by the words of the Founding Fathers, he reminds us — correctly — that the conservative movement has too often forgotten the importance of adherence to the Constitution. He advocates views on foreign policy which in some ways **ARE** paleoconservative; they're the old Fortress America positions which the Republican Party held up until World War II and which some Republicans continued to hold for a long time afterward.
Furthermore, while Ron Paul has decades of contact with some of the most ultraconservative wings of Calvinist political thought dating back to the early days of theonomy, he's long since come to political positions which, as far as I can tell, hold that government has no role in promoting morality and common decency. The libertinism inherent in libertarianism is not unknown in Republican Party history, but it's largely been forgotten since the rise of the Christian conservative movement. Ron Paul is so old that he predates that rise of that movement, and he's been given a “free pass” too long by conservatives because of his longstanding personal ties with people of unquestioned convictions in the Christian conservative movement.
Much of that is theory that would be irrelevant if it weren't for the all-too-practical fact that Ron Paul is not a college professor writing for a think-tank but rather is a politician who has a track record of winning a fairly consistent minority block of votes. As a practical matter, the problem with Paul is not that he draws his votes from liberals (although he does do that to some extent) but that he represents an older set of Republican views which were wrong then and in the modern world are not just wrong but dangerous.
Ron Paul's views are in large measure views which have roots in Republican Party history but which were long ago abandoned by Republicans. We abandoned them for a reason — you simply cannot have an isolationist foreign policy, trusting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to protect us, in an ago of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Furthermore, his libertarian social views represent a type of Republican Party position which is essentially the Ford-Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party in Texan clothes. He would strongly deny that, but it's the root of why groups of college kids who don't share any sense of conservative moral values are attracted to an old guy in his seventies.
Again, Paul has no chance of winning the Republican primary. He has no chance of winning the general election. What he does have a real chance of doing is serving as a spoiler who throws the primary to Romney and the general election to Obama. In some ways, he's our Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader, and he's problematic for conservatives for the same reasons those men are problematic for Democrats.
Paul is wrong — dead wrong — about key issues, most dangerously with regard to foreign policy. He's a libertarian, not a conservative, and there are important differences between the two.
However, we as conservatives ignore his appeal at our peril. If we were doing a better job of teaching the Constitution and American history to our people — especially the reasons why Republicans jettisoned “Fortress America” and George Washington's warnings against foreign entanglements based on the threat of nuclear missiles and intercontinental ballistic missiles following World War II — we wouldn't be having the threat Ron Paul represents.
I am saddened to see younger military personnel supporting Ron Paul because they believe our foul-ups in Afghanistan and Iraq show that we shouldn't be involved in foreign wars at all. That's simply illogical; yes, we've got real problems in how we're handing those wars, and yes, Pat Buchanan was correct that America is equipped to be a Republic, not an Empire, and yes, we Americans do a bad job of trying to act like an imperial power.
But the fact is we **WERE** attacked by forces operating out of Afghanistan, and the former Afghan government refused to turn over Osama bin Laden, so we had every right in the world to invade and do what we did.
Furthermore, every intelligence service in the world, not just our own, believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (and there's a good chance Hussein himself believed he had WMDs, being lied to by his own frightened generals and scientists), so we had at least arguably good grounds to do what we did in Iraq.
Ron Paul can blame the State Department all he wants for fouling up military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He may have a point, but the correct point is not that we shouldn't have invaded but rather that we should have done a better job once we got there.
If anything, 9/11 showed us that even apart from the threat of Soviet military power, our adversaries in the War on Terror can inflict tremendous damage on the United States homeland. Prior to World War II, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans provided a real barrier to foreign aggression. Back then, the old Republican Party position of “Fortress America” may have made some sense. It no longer does in an era of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles, and that's why the Republican Party moved from an isolationist to an interventionist position on international affairs.
George Washington had a point in the 1700s about not getting involved in European wars when the American continent was mostly a howling wilderness and the governments of the emerging American states, Canadian provinces, and Spanish territories were weak at best in comparison to European military power. Washington understood from firsthand experience the dangers of the French and Indian War, and he believed in the 1700s, the best way to protect American citizens was to avoid any foreign entanglements. The world has changed, and to protect our people against attack, we simply must be involved in foreign affairs.
Ron Paul doesn't agree. Many of his supporters don't understand the issues. We need to educate our people or Ron Paul's views will continue to pose a threat long after Ron Paul's campaign is gone.