One of my newest bookmarks is the Lew Rockwell blog, Rockwell being founder and president of the Mises Institute in Auburn, Ala., a libertarian think tank, and vice president of the Center for Libertarian Studies in Burlingame, Calif. He is “an opponent of the central state, its wars and its socialism.” And in one respect I wouldn’t think there’d be much common ground there. But that’s the interesting thing about the past few years - liberals, libertarians and paleoconservatives have sort of come around the back of the predominant discourse to meet, to oppose what’s been going on.
I came to Rockwell’s blog specifically because I had been Googling Ron Paul - like a few million other Americans. I knew virtually nothing of Paul prior to his performance in the first Republican debate; and some of the things I’ve learned about his past are, to say the least, rather disconcerting.
At the same time, only he - and to a lesser extent, McCain - are daring to challenge what has become the Republican orthodoxy in this presidential campaign: That we need a bigger state, maybe more wars, double the size of Gitmo, more torture, more surveillance. That the failures of the past half-decade have not come about because of our unthinking militarism and willingness to shred the Constitution, but that we haven’t engaged in enough of it - and that upping this particular ante will somehow solve the problem.
Paul, as you know by now, rejects all of that. Indeed, I find more to agree with in what Ron Paul has said so far in this campaign than I have found in any of the Democratic candidates.
And Paul really seems to be scaring Republicans. He keeps winning these online polls - to the extent that CNN (and, briefly, ABC News and the rightward-leaning Pajamas Media) excluded him. There’s little doubt his supporters have swamped these polls - but at the same time, one analyst has predicted that Paul will have one million online supporters by 2008.
What’s happening here is obvious. With the debacle in Iraq, there’s a growing contingent of people who have come to believe that interventionism is a fools game - a tremendous waste of lives, a tremendous waste of money. The Republican Party - and to a lesser but still culpable extent, the Democratic Party - still insists that we have to go fight them there so we won’t have to fight them here, but anyone who looks at the situation with a legitimate, critical eye realizes this war hasn’t made us safer.
Those are the people, I think, who find Paul’s message appealing. I’m most certainly one of them. Indeed, the Democratic Party’s failure to specifically and loudly repiduate the policies that got us into Iraq makes the party increasingly irrelevant to me. This is the single most important issue facing the nation, I believe. And if the Democrats merely stand for a softer, gentler Iraq - why in the world would I vote for them, particularly if there’s a legitimate alternative?
Well, Paul and whatever we might call this confluence of liberalism, libertarianism and paleoconservatism that deeply mistrusts foreign military intervention and globalism, that wants government out of private lives may not yet be an electorally viable alternative. But it’s moving in that direction. Because even though I think Paul is far too hardcore on the immigration issue, even though I’m destined to disagree with aspects of libertarian social policy and government spending, on the things that now matter most, Paul is the only candidate speaking any kind of sense.
More and more people, I suspect, are beginning to feel that way. And that’s how a viable third way is born.
