...The war over the war is about to commence, and the interventionists are braced to take on challenges to their hegemony percolating in both major parties. My guess is they’ll barely manage to hold on to their bipartisan monopoly, which has so far successfully managed to ensure that the Democrats and Republicans remain the "left" and "right" wings, respectively, of a single party, i.e. the War Party.
Wars are transformative events, and all sorts of partisan and ideological allegiances fall by the wayside, while new alliances and political realignments are forged in the heat of battle. Popular opposition to the Iraq disaster is at an all-time high, while Bush’s poll numbers have sunk below 30 percent. A delegation of frightened Republican members of Congress paid a visit to the President the other day, telling him in blunt terms that they’d had enough of his war, and it’s time to start withdrawing.
The reckless pursuit of a crazed foreign policy – centered on leading what the President once hailed as a "global democratic revolution" – has brought the GOP to utter ruination. If even Republican office-holders and party officials are chafing at the President’s fealty to his neoconservative first principles, then surely the rank-and-file Republican primary voters are at least as restless and even rebellious. Polls show over a third of Republican voters disapprove of the President’s policy, and nearly a quarter of registered Republicans support a timetable for American withdrawal from Iraq: a hard core of over 10 percent would cut off war funding.
This is a significant base, in a crowded field: mobilized on behalf of an antiwar Republican candidate, dissenting GOPers could pose a serious challenge to neocon dominance of the party. Just as the Goldwater partisans rose up from the grassroots and routed the Rockefeller Republicans and the Eastern Establishment from the leadership of the party – and paved the way for the conservative ascendancy in the GOP – so the Paul campaign could augur a new libertarian turn in the party’s politics, one more attuned, ironically, to fiscally conservative and socially liberal "centrist" voters than any of Paul’s rivals.
Rep. Paul’s cause, however, is not exactly a return to the Republican party of Barry Goldwater: he is a true paleo-Republican in that he wants to go all the way back to the conservatism of Robert A. Taft. Here is a ten-term congressman from Texas who remembers what the Republican party used to stand for – limited government, the foreign policy of the Founders, and the preservation of our old Republic against the Scylla of domestic tyranny and the Charybdis of conquests abroad. There is much history here, and, in Paul’s case, authenticity – he’s a country doctor, a man who oozes sincerity, and just the kind of stern yet benevolent figure, brimming with integrity, who is conceivably capable of leading the GOP out of its ideological quagmire, and reclaiming its lost heritage.
Paul could conjure a Goldwater moment and revitalize his party. All he has to do is mount a visible challenge to the sterile neoconservative orthodoxy. This would scare the bejesus out of the neocons – and perhaps frighten them back into the Democratic party from whence they came. That alone would be a great boon to the GOP.
A Republican victory in the next presidential election seems unlikely no matter who wins the nomination: if Republicans can’t win the White House this time around, perhaps they’ll be content with winning back their own souls.
Ron Paul's Goldwater Moment
He's a Republican, he's antiwar – and the Establishment is deathly afraid of him
antiwar.com |
