Thanks to
Ron Paul, the Conservative movement is having an identity crisis.
The old guard of the Conservative movement, which also happens
to be the Republican Party establishment, still clings to the
old creation myth of the Conservative movement. Namely, that there
was no opposition to the New Deal-Liberal consensus until William
F. Buckley and National Review came along in 1955, saving
America from the American left, social democracy, moral turpitude
and international Communism.
The modern
gatekeepers of the movement, and the Republican Party officials,
who fancy themselves as the keepers of the last word on the acceptable
range of debate within the movement, cannot understand why the
Ron Paul movement is more concerned with actually shrinking the
size of government than with waging endless wars for endless peace.
They cannot fathom that people claiming to be part of the American
Right might actually be interested in rolling back government
power to tax, wiretap, spy, arrest, imprison and feel up American
citizens. This runs contrary to everything they have ever imbibed
about what it means to be Conservative in America.
And to a
certain extent, they are correct. Since the Buckley-National
Review wing of the movement in the 1950s gradually took control
of the American Right, the movement became recognizable no longer
by any particular concern with freedom or with free markets, but
with a struggle against international Communism, with fighting
culture wars and with other collectivist and big-government notions
that came to dominate the movement by the 1960s. Thus, in response,
the modern National Review columnists and the established
Conservative punditry has repeatedly attempted to read the Ron
Paul movement out of the American Right wing, although to very
little effect.
While the
modern disciples of Buckley and American interventionism act aghast
and claim that the Conservatives and libertarians within the Paul
movement have some how betrayed the ideals of the right, it is
actually the laissez faire and anti-interventionists among
the Paul wing of the movement that have the better claim to being
true to the roots of the movement.
