I don’t think Ron Paul is nuts, but all too many of his supporters are, and he does little to rein in their juvenile conspiracy thinking. Their diatribes make last decade’s Waco and Randy Weaver legends appear sane in comparison. Now, when we think of those who stick to reasoned arguments and avoid guilt-by-association and ad hominem arguments, one name that usually does not come to mind is that of Andrew Sullivan. He’s famous for castigating his opponents as hate-mongers and “Christianists.” He has a rabid hatred for Bush based largely, it appears, on Bush’s opposition to gay marriage. So lately he’s enamored of Ron Paul, whose rhetoric appeals to the Constitution-lover in all of us. Yet Paul can’t win. He is too dismissive of the threat of terrorism. He can’t think of a principled reason to oppose mass immigration. His willingness to embrace states’ rights would soon alienate many of his supporters, not least folks like Sullivan who don’t want states to ban gay marriage (or permit segregated schools), both of which would be allowed in Ron Paul’s universe.

Sullivan seems to have forgotten what is normally important to him; he notes that among Bush’s people “you will hear Paul described as ‘nutty’ and anti-Semitic and fringe and marginal and on and on . . .” Well, isn’t this funny, considering how often Sullivan employs this line of argument against anyone that disagrees with his thoroughly radical view of family life, or his defense of pederasts, or his hatred of Evangelicals (and the leadership of the Catholic Church), or the like.

You see, for most people, including Sullivan, liberalism is simply obvious; it’s in the air that they breathe. Its premises, its controversies, and its narrow range of thinking are beyond question. Those who deviate are utterly baffling to liberals, who presume their traditionalist critics are malevolent.  Incidentally, Ron Paul does not deviate from this orthodoxy; he’s just an old-line classical liberal who accepts the fundamental liberal view that society has no particular purposes other than the facilitation of individual desires. To think outside of liberal individualism, to acknowledge some prudential limit on a libertarian or liberal viewpoint, to suggest that something is owed to society or the past or the state is anathema. Because rationalistic liberalism, of which libertarianism is just an off-shoot, by its nature does not have any internal limiting principles. Society must be organized according to its rationalist and materialist lines or, according to its logic, the absolute demands of “human rights” are being violated. This is not the politics of balance and prudence and compromise, but the total politics of ideology. With such totalism comes the ritual denunciations of others as Christianists, haters, war-mongerers etc.

Ron Paul only appeals to Sullivan because he’s a gadfly who shares Sullivan’s (au courant) view that the Iraq War is a mistake. As with Bush, whose “compassionate conservatism” once appealed to Sullivan’s gobbeldy-gook moderate views, Sullivan’s romantic sentiments will soon be dashed by some expression of a genuinely conservative viewpoint by Paul, such as his opposition to civil rights laws. At that point, expect Sullivan to return to his tried-and-true modus operandi: hysterical denunciation of yet another heart-breaking politician who has the temerity not to agree with him on everything.

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