Regarding Ron Paul

Is it me, or is anyone else getting tired of all the Ron Paul articles on Lew Rockwell.com?

It seems as if everyday, when I pop over to LRC, every other article is about Ron Paul – his candidacy, his presidency, why he can win, why he should win, what a wonderful world it would be if he did win, and so forth. Don’t get me wrong, I’m interested in Ron Paul’s candidacy as much as the next guy, and I know that he’s had a long-standing relationship with Lew Rockwell, contributing his own writings (which I always enjoy) to that site from time to time. But c’mon! I’m beginning to wonder if LRC should rename itself Ron Paul.com.

Which brings me to a larger issue. Many people ask me if I like Ron Paul as a candidate, if I’d vote for him, if I’ll be working to promote him or volunteer for his campaign. Many people ask me – since apparently I am “the libertarian” that they know – how many libertarians feel about his candidacy for President. I’ve thought about it for quite some time, and here’s my take.

First, I think Ron Paul seeking the Republican nomination for President spells complete irrelevancy for the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate – and perhaps the LP in general – for the 2008 election cycle. To look at this strictly from a political point of view, Ron Paul is a Republican. Sure, he is very libertarian oriented in his views, he’s spoken at LP conventions, and he was the LP’s candidate for President back in 1988. Suffice it to say, no one can argue his credentials as an advocate for Constitutionally limited government, free-markets, individual liberty, and personal responsibility.

But the fact is, whoever ends up with the LP’s nomination for 2008 isn’t going to have one-tenth the credibility of Ron Paul. In 2008, the best libertarian candidate for president won’t even be a member of the Libertarian Party. Paul is a Republican – a libertarian Republican, sure, but a Republican, nonetheless. His candidacy and impact on the political dialogue will reinforce a couple of anti-LP, anti-third party arguments that many libertarian party activists have fought hard to refute.

The first is that, since we have a de facto two-party system, libertarians should give up the hope of creating a third-party that can compete with the Big Two, and instead join one of the big two and work to change the party from within. The fact is, Ron Paul, as a Republican, already has had more attention, and caused more of a stir, than any libertarian has ever accomplished, with the only possible exception of Harry Browne. In 2008, when the LP endorses and starts to market some “also-ran”, no-name candidate, to try to convince people to vote for liberty, it’s only going to reinforce the image that the LP is something to consider only after the “real” options have been exhausted.

Which brings me to the second point, which has been debated internally in LP circles for some time, is whether the LP should run a Presidential candidate at all. I happen to agree with the late, great, Harry Browne who made the point that a presidential race affords an opportunity for a libertarian to gain a platform that is unavailable to anyone else in the liberty movement. The presidential candidate can create attention for libertarian ideas, and attract people to the party to help grow it, and advance the political agenda of the movement as a whole. Ron Paul, running as a Republican, while certainly calling attention to the ideas of liberty, and helping to advance that cause, is not helping the LP. In fact, he is doing the opposite, as I see many libertarians scrambling to get registered as Republican voters in order to vote for him.

I have always said that if the LP wants to be thought of as a real party, it needs to start acting like one. That means sticking with and focusing on building up the team. When do Democrats abandon their party to go headlong into supporting a Republican? They don’t. Granted, I don’t begrudge anyone – libertarians included – for supporting Ron Paul. My point here is that those “Big-L” libertarians who are waving their Ron Paul flags are leaving the reservation here. As long as we are clear on that point, and what it means for the LP as an organization, then I have no complaint, objection nor criticism to offer. We Libertarians, after all, desire liberty-directed change, and how that exactly comes about is irrelevant.

But make no mistake, about it: Party-Libertarians have a huge challenge to face, namely, how to use Ron Paul’s non-LP candidacy to convince his Republican supporters to join with the LP, and not re-dedicate themselves to “reforming” the Republican party. Many small government advocates have long held that the Republican party, despite its flaws, was the best way to get what they want from politics. They believe this despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary. An even semi-successful Ron Paul campaign may reinforce their naïve idea that liberty lovers can “take back” the Republican party, (“See! Someone like Ron Paul can harness and invigorate a coalition of people dedicated to limited-government, the Constitution, and liberty! We need to get behind him and his party!”) Party-Libertarians run the risk of sacrificing their own Party’s marketability, while helping to sustain the illusion that the Republican Party is still the party of smaller government.

Having said all that, am I anti-Ron Paul? No, I am not. I certainly can cheer the guy on and wish him well. More than anything, what I want is to live in a free society. To that end, it really doesn’t matter if that happens by way of a successful libertarian party winning elections and dismantling the State, or by some other means. The Libertarian Party, we must remember, is simply a means to an end – not an end in and of itself. To say we shouldn’t cheer on a Republican like Paul, or a Democrat like, say, a hypothetical Joe Schmoe, who are clear opponents of the Imperial Warmongering State, would just be foolish and non-productive.

But I can’t help but think that, in light of the last Presidential campaign, which was severely under-organized, and much less-funded than the previous two, combined with some murky ideological stances that have been pushed through the LP in recent years, that the LP is in a state of decline, and that the Ron Paul candidacy will simply show that liberty’s political agenda can, and will, advance, regardless of whether there is a Libertarian Party