What Glenn Greenwald said:

So there is at least something in Paul’s worldview for most people to strongly dislike, even hate, if they are so inclined. Yet that apparent political liability is really what accounts for the passion his campaign is generating: it is a campaign that defies and despises conventional and deeply entrenched Beltway assumptions about our political discourse and about what kind of country this is supposed to be.

While Barack Obama toys with the rhetoric of challenging conventional wisdom, Paul’s campaign — for better or worse — actually does so, and does so in an extremely serious, thoughtful and coherent way. And there are a lot of people who, more than any specific policy positions, are hungry for a political movement which operates outside of our rotted political establishment and which fearlessly rejects its pieties, even if they disagree with some or even many of its particulars.

I would say this is absolutely the reason I have liked Ron Paul, even though, as Greenwald notes, there’s a tremendous gap between what Paul thinks about abortion and immigration and what I might think. But for me, foreign policy - the bipartisan consensus that the United States not only should but possesses a moral right to run the world via military force as necessary - is paramount, the thing that angers and engages me more than anything else. I think and have thought this consensus sows the wind, to reap accordingly down the line. And so in that respect - Paul basically is the only candidate. Everyone else would just carry the biparsitan ball further down the field; whereas Paul says the game itself is corrupt.

The thing that gives me pause about Paul is that he has a significant fringe-right constituency. A few weeks ago, on that white nationalist board looking for info about the Warwick incident, the place was filled with Ron Paul supporters. Dave and Sara over at Orcinus have written about this pretty consistently. He was big among survivalists/militia types in the early to mid 1990s. So that’s a pretty big grain of salt to swallow.

And as to where all this goes, I’ve no idea. It’s pretty clear that Paul won’t win the Republican nomination. Republicans hate him, and rightly so - his support, the money he’s raising, is pretty much a repudiation of what’s happened to the Republican Party itself these past 20 years or so. Ross Perot-type independent candidacy? I doubt it. But even though it may not ultimately come to much, Paul’s candidacy is telling us something about the mood of the country, and the degree to which people want it back from those who run it.