Ron Paul is officially
no longer a congressman. Gone from the Washington scene is his
tendency to
cast lone votes, his unique willingness to point out that
government is inherently based
on violence. Paul will continue to be a public
spokesman for liberty—about the only part of his job as
congressman he liked anyway. 

He leaves behind a contested legacy. As Paul’s detractors will

tediously point out, being one of 435 in Congress with views
vastly different from your colleagues’ means you will neither pass
many laws, nor prevent many laws from being passed, nor shape the
ethos of the House. Paul did, though, succeed in shifting “Audit
the Fed” from an issue no one knew or cared about to a bill that
has
passed the House twice.

Through his Republican presidential runs in 2008 and 2012, he
conjured a large and dedicated army of libertarian activists and
politicos where one hadn’t existed before, though we don’t know how
many of the 2.1 million people who voted for him in GOP primaries
in 2012 are as hardcore libertarian as Paul. Two thriving
organizations, Campaign for Liberty and
Young Americans for
Liberty, arose from those campaigns and survive his
congressional career.

But can lasting change within our sclerotic political system
arise from a movement as insurrectionist and outside the mainstream
as Paul’s? And will he have any heirs to keep what he started
rolling? A vote total of 2.1 million is a surprisingly impressive
number, to be sure, especially for such a harsh critic of empire,
drug wars, and fiat money. But it still represents a decidedly
losing portion of what was, nationally in 2012, a losing party.

What the Paul revolutionaries are trying to do, they insist, has
been done before. They are trying to use a rowdy, young-skewing
throng to force a major party to embrace ideas that seem fanatical
to existing party hierarchies. Remember the Barry Goldwater kids in
1960, uniting fervently behind a strongly anti-government author of
a best-selling book of popular political philosophy, freaking out
the party powers with their youth and outsider enthusiasm? It’s
impossible to read a history of the Goldwater movement without
seeing how similar the Goldwater and Paul stories are—the
anti-state energy, the mistrust and warring with the hidebound
establishment, even the streaks of weird paranoia among some of the
activists.

Goldwater and Paul were both legislators known more for sternly
saying “no” than passing laws. Like Paulites today, the Goldwater
movement in the Republican Party in 1960 was “experienced by the
old regulars as if it were an alien invasion,” in the words of Rick
Perlstein in his great history of the Goldwater movement,
Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the
American Consensus. When Goldwaterites took over
state parties, like in Nebraska, the old party regulars fought back
to change rules to blunt their opponents’ victory. Both candidates
lived off a huge number of small donations, cared more about being
right than being president, and were blessed with masses of young,
passionate volunteers willing to overturn their lives to knock on
doors for their man in bitter cold. Both even saw their delegates
involved in scuffles where
cops got called at state conventions. And both, their admirers
insisted, were leaders of a new American revolution to purify and
revive the first one.

From 1960 to 1964, Goldwater morphed from dangerous joke to
candidate. And his ’64 defeat famously bore fruit in the form of
Goldwater supporter Ronald Reagan’s rise to world power 16 years
later. It’s a story whose echoes sound encouragingly in the heads
of many political operatives surrounding the Paul revolution.

A more recent development in the Republican Party—and a more
cautionary tale for the future of Paulism—is the aftermath of Pat
Robertson’s failed 1988 run. United in outsiderhood, Paul partisans
such as Drew Ivers from his Iowa operation were often former
Robertson supporters. Robertson advised his people to organize and
try to take over the GOP from the grassroots. Thanks to Robertson’s
campaign and its aftermath, the Republican Party of the past two
decades has been influenced by the Religious Right more than their
raw numbers might justify.

The fate of the Christian right reveals a trap the Paul movement
must avoid, even as it emulates the Christian right’s tactics of
inhabiting the party from the group up—tactics that have given Paul
forces significant control already of state parties in Iowa,
Nevada, Alaska, Maine, Colorado, and Minnesota. For giving
electoral fealty to the GOP without question, the religious right
received little but lip service to its traditionalist ideas, and
few actual achievements. The libertarian wing could easily see
itself similarly neutered, voting for Romney manqués as far as the
eye can see and getting in return just a contemptuous, “What are
you going to do? Vote third party?”

Goldwater is not the only example of “radical outsider to
candidate” in postwar American politics. While their ideology
matches directly only on opposition to war, Paul’s style and
success most emulates the Democratic Party’s antiwar challenger
Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.) from 1968. McCarthy’s youth appeal,
anti-war stance, intellectuality, and fights with the party
establishment on the caucus and state convention level over
delegates, all track Paul’s story closely.

Both were being trounced within their own party, yet polled
strongly against or ahead of their presumptive other-party
competitor in the general election. Both ran more as themselves
than faithful or committed Party members; Paul never endorsed
Romney, and McCarthy only endorsed Hubert Humphrey grudgingly in
the last week before the election.

Lawsuits over proper delegation allocation were filed on behalf
of both McCarthy and Paul. Both were supported by young zealots who
were willing to tear down their existing party and build it anew.
Both had unconventional, intellectual political styles, and were
aware that what success they had came from decentralized efforts of
fans more than their own official campaigns. Both saw their active
campaigns fizzle in the summer without ever dropping out, and both
felt it necessary to steel their supporters for disappointment by
admitting they knew they couldn’t win before it was all over
(though Paul did so much earlier). And both saw their campaigns as
ultimately educational, and about creating a reform movement within
their respective parties.

While McCarthy himself fizzled when he tried to run again in
1972, George McGovern’s winning ’72 campaign was in most respects
the rise to power of Eugene McCarthyism: anti-war,
anti-establishment, and opening up the Democratic Party’s rules and
delegate selection in a more populist manner.

Historical analogies don’t prove further victories for Paulism
are destined; just that we know it isn’t impossible for factions
seen as small, outré, failed, and repudiated to quickly dominate a
political party. If Paul’s general outlook has any validity,
history is on his side. The problems he and his movement provide
unique insights into and solutions for—overstrained fiscal and
monetary policy, overreaching foreign and domestic mission—are not
likely to disappear in the next decade unless a Paul-like solution
is attempted.

But his ideas won’t march on in a vacuum; actual human
individuals and groups need to further them. Various possible and
presumptive heirs remain or are arising in Washington—including,
most literally, his son Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Ron Paul had a very
precise and detailed set of positions, attitudes, and strategies
that no single remaining politician shares precisely. But it’s not
just Rand Paul and second-term Paul fan Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.)
around now; an entire mini-caucus of people Paul explicitly
endorsed (which he didn’t do a lot of) are currently in D.C.,
including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Reps. Thomas
Massie (R-Ky.), Ted Yoho (R-Fla.), Kerry Bentivolio (R-Mich.)
and Steve Stockman (R-Texas)

Most of them have already shown their insurrectionist stuff by
feuding with House Speaker John Boehner,
refusing to vote for his preferred fiscal cliff settlement, or

for his continued speakerhood. The Paul-identifieds are just
one faction of a larger bunch of new Republicans who
Politico is calling the
“Hell, No!” caucus. They are, Politico writes,
“opposed to any new spending, willing to risk default to force
spending cuts, dismissive of new gun laws and deeply skeptical
about immigration reform…. Many in the media…often underestimate
just how conservative and how impervious to criticism and
leadership browbeating these members are when appraising the
chances for change in the next two years.” The fact that such
Paulite tendencies, at least when it comes to taxing and spending,
stretch beyond his self-identified admirers is key to those
tendencies sticking and thriving in the GOP.

Because, make no mistake, Paulism or even any kind of mild
support for tougher, less compromising, more small-spending
measures is under attack from the party and its media enablers (and
even its media detractors). Amash was booted from his Budget
Committee seat, and John Podhoretz in the New York Post
characterized the mini-rebellion against Boehner
as
“cannibalism.” Michael Tomasky at Daily Beast
considers
them
“vandals” and David Frum is appalled the Republican Party is so
full of maniacs that it can’t get its members to vote for crappy
bills that
barely touch spending. With self-identified Tea Partiers

shrinking and losing independence, there is room for a new
dominant anti-establishment wing of the party, and Rand Paul and
Justin Amash are well-positioned to lead it.

On the national level, a former Maine Paul delegate, a George
Mason University law graduate and former U.S. Army Security and
Intelligence Command man named Mark
Willis, is running an insurgent campaign against Republican
National Committee Chair Reince Preibus, vowing
to repeal various rules passed at the Tampa convention this
year that centralize power over rules and delegates nationally.
Willis vows to return power to the insurgent grassroots. But being
from the Paul team does not necessarily mean one is a bomb-thrower
in the party—former Paul Iowa campaign worker A.J. Spiker, who
recently
won re-election as Iowa’s state party chair (and is still

dueling with the old guard), is
sticking with Preibus.

The GOP is staggering, and proving itself incapable of
meaningful change in the direction its core voters are supposed to
care about. Some strong shift from Romney/Boehnerism is desperately
needed, though some suggest instead a doubling down on
the GOP’s social conservatism rather than flirting with
libertarianism. Liberal journalist Peter Beinart has made a
convincing case that a confused Republican Party will be primed for
a
convincing “political outsider” to dominate in 2016. With Ron
Paul gone, few people of any political heft are more outside the
general Washington attitudes about spending, taxing, and foreign
policy than Rand Paul.

Ron Paul both embodied and inspired a no compromise libertarian
radicalism, one that no one on the scene now fully embodies. Rand
Paul upsets some of his dad’s foreign policy fans by seeming too

solicitous of Israel on his trip there this week; Justin Amash
admits he’d
consider tax hikes as part of a serious entitlement cut deal;
Kerry Bentivolio explicitly denies being a Paul guy—he’s
a Reagan man. Thomas Massie told me in an interview in the
forthcoming March Reason that he doesn’t want Ron Paul’s
mantle.

Ron Paul is gone from American politics. But important aspects
of Paulism—a willingness to seriously cut government spending and
functions, an unwillingness to be a good party member at all costs,
a willingness to rethink our foreign military and aid commitments
and
respect civil liberties—still have a scattering of staunch
defenders, one of them also named Paul. And if federal
irresponsibility on spending and debt continues as it seems it
will, these radical solutions may start seeming sensible and
necessary to more than just the 11 percent of the GOP primary
voters who made Ron Paul a legend.