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Sunday 7 September 2008

Ron Paul, new Republican

An American conservative who loves the Constitution

Christopher Caldwell on the impact of Ron Paul, the anti-war congressman running for the Republican nomination and finding unexpected support on the web

Paul is not a libertarian or a pacifist or a cyber-utopian. What he espouses is old-fashioned conservatism — so old-fashioned, in fact, that it is scarcely recognisable as conservatism. Since socialism is not in the Constitution, Paul refuses on principle to accept his congressional pension, just as he refused to accept Medicare and Medicaid payments when he was a doctor. His campaign in New Hampshire is the rump of the 1992 and 1996 Pat Buchanan campaigns, built around voters who oppose abortion and any restriction on their right to carry guns. Like the backers of the UK Independence party, he views old constitutional arrangements as unimprovable, and thinks bureaucratisation and constitutional tinkering inevitably bring a price in liberty. He is obviously right. Where he is wrong is in failing to notice that other people see this, too, and have simply judged the price affordable.

Paul’s unwillingness to do anything that doesn’t square with the Constitution has produced some spectacularly courageous votes — he was one of only three Republicans to vote against the USA Patriot Act, which broadens federal wiretapping authority — and some spectacularly eccentric ones. He is often the sole dissenter against, say, minting a medal in honour of a civil-rights hero; or meddling in the business of disreputable sovereign states. (His was the only vote against a measure to condemn Robert Mugabe’s violence against Zimbabwean farmers.) Since he views the smallest deviations from the Constitution as dangerous, his warnings often take on an apocalyptic tone. ‘The stage is set for our country eventually devolving into military dictatorship,’ he said recently.

Sallies such as these have turned this most rationally conceived campaign into catnip for the least rational elements of the American electorate: people convinced that a secret cabal of bankers runs the country, people who don’t think any plane hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, people so angry about widening inequality that they favour smashing the ‘system’, no matter how, so long as the people who got rich over the last quarter-century get what’s coming to them. And, of course, people who hate the Iraq war.

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