The Crossed Pond

I can’t quite place the origin of the idiom. One of those fifties westerns, I suspect, starring John Wayne. Having been pushed too far, our hero straightens up his stetson, puts his hands to the holsters of his sixguns, looks his enemy in the eye, and declares the local environs to be “a dyin’ place.” The dyin’ place is the last point at which compromise is possible. It is the moment at which things either get fixed or get broken beyond repair.

The Reagan coalition, which has been critical to Republican success at every level since 1980, has reached a dyin’ place. The central issue is the treatment of Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul. The decisions Republican officials make over the next couple of months could well decide whether hundreds of thousands of neo-libertarian voters permanently abandon the Republican party as their default electoral choice.

It is no secret that the libertarian wing of the Republican movement has been increasingly alienated by the tactics of the Bush administration. Some of them, Brad for one, have been bothered to such an extent that they voted for John Kerry in the last election. Despite this, a plurality of self-described libertarians, given a choice between Bush-style Republicans and modern Democrats, still opt for the GOP. The numbers for the 2004 election were on the order of a 13 point margin–nothing like the monolithic libertarian block that Reagan produced, but still tens of thousands of people, certainly enough to make the difference in places like Ohio (2004) or Montana (2006).

It goes without saying that the GOP’s hold on these voters grows more and more tenuous as the administration’s civil liberties policies fall into more and more disrepute. Still, the existing set of Presidential contenders offers a number of opportunities to rebuild bridges with the libertarian wing. Giuliani’s pro-choice and pro-gay rights stances, Mitt Romney’s (occasional) support for a broad spectrum of civil liberties protections, and John McCain’s dramatic opposition to coercive interrogation all establish the prospect that the margin among libertarians might widen in 2008, especially if the Democrats nominate an economic statist like John Edwards.

But all of this assumes that Republicans do nothing in the interim to deliberately alienate their libertarian supporters.

It is almost impossible to overestimate the fondness that libertarians have for Congressman Ron Paul. As the 1988 presidential candidate of the libertarian party, Paul was the framing libertarian influence for a number of young supporters of the cause. His consistent adherence to principle and willingness to stand alone in defense of what he thinks is right–as expressed by numerous 434-1 votes in the Senate–have won him the admiration even of non-libertarians like George Will and Andrew Sullivan. And whatever may be said about the size of Paul’s base, their enthusiasm is clearly matchless in the Republican field. Witness Paul’s unfathomable victories in poll after poll following debates that he clearly didn’t win. Witness his elevation to the most-searched-for figure in numerous internet databases. Witness the YouTube barrage in support of his candidacy. To his thousands of supporters, Ron Paul is more than a mere politician; he borders on being a messianic figure.

Yet this four-term Republican congressman is now the target of a smear campaign that is practically unprecedented in the post-Reagan era of Republican internal politics. In the past 48 hours alone we’ve seen Paul’s alleged friends and colleagues propogate the allegation that he authored racist and anti-Semitic material. These tactics are as far from Reagan’s eleventh commandment –”thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican”–as anything Karl Rove ever did in support of Bush’s primary candidacy. Moreover, and far worse, we have a deliberate attempt to exclude him entirely from the Republican primary debates. This effort is based not on the idea of excluding candidates without sufficient support (the advocates of this effort make no suggestion that Duncan Hunter or Jim Gilmore be axed), but solely on the fact that Ron Paul expresses ideas that some Republicans don’t like.

The words of Michigan party chairman Saul Anuzis are instructive:

I have long respected Congressman Paul’s principle position on many issues, regardless if I ever agreed with any specific proposals or conclusions he had come to. However, his statement on why the terrorists attacked America is so out of the mainstream geo-political thought in the west and is increasingly becoming a distraction versus a supplement to the debate, I think we should just come out and say so.

Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that Anuzis’ assertion is out-and-out incorrect, in that a sizable percentage of western observers do agree with Paul’s “blowback” argument (a fair number of them even agree with Giuliani’s mischaracterization of Paul’s position). Anuzis’ idea that Paul’s contribution was “a distraction vs. a supplement to the debate” runs counter to the observations of every single media outlet that covered the event. Paul’s head-to-head face-off with Giuliani was the lead item in virtually every story written and in virtually every analyst’s commentary, from Fox News right on down to the Crossed Pond. For those who (like me) feel that Giuliani decisively won the exchange and the entire debate, the Ron Paul intervention was the principle reason.

It is the position of most prominent conservative analysts that all Ron Paul accomplished was to solidify the core Republican position on the war on terror and to strengthen the position of those who make security the core issue in November 2008. But if it is true that Ron Paul has done the party this alleged service, then why on earth would the Republicans want to exclude Ron Paul from future debates, and why would they be seeking to tear his personal reputation apart?

It seems that the true core motive of Anuzis and his allies is fear. There is something about Ron Paul’s expression of his ideology that they find threatening. Now, frankly, this suprises me; I WISH the neocon wing of the Republican party had reason to fear Ron Paul, but the polls suggest otherwise. And yet they fear him enough to attempt to make an example of him in the media and an exception of him in terms of inclusion in the debates.

And that would be a catastrophic mistake. Because including Ron Paul in the Republican debates costs core Republicans nothing. But excluding him is guaranteed to be the final straw in terms of libertarian support for Republican candidates generally.

Take me, for instance. Despite my fondness for Ron Paul, I part with him on the idea of international engagement. My position on 9/11 is closer to Giuliani’s than Paul’s. But I am far, far more offended by Anuzis’ remarks than by Ron Paul’s. The positions which are core to the Republican party are not decided by officials, but by the party membership generally. If we are to make decisions of this sort, we need to hear conflicting perspectives expressed. I don’t have any use for party officials who want to protect my tender ears from dangerous perspectives.

Let me be blunt. I have spent the three days since the South Carolina debate more or less SEETHING over the Republican party machine’s treatment of Ron Paul. I have no expectation that Republicans ought to agree with Ron Paul, or even be civil to him in the process of disagreeing. I do, however, expect that any party which wants to stake a presumptive claim to libertarian votes will at least give libertarian voices the courtesty of a public hearing.

I don’t know how many of us there are. But I do know that for Republican-leaning libertarians, the exclusion of Ron Paul from the debates would be a dyin’ place.

It would mark the formal death of the Reagan coalition and the official designation of the Republican party as an exclusively neocon/social con movement. Any residual loyalty that libertarians feel for GOP free market principles would be instantly eradicated by this sort of slap in the face. Some (not me) might turn aggressively to the social liberalism and civil liberties emphases of the liberal “netroots” movement. Others (me) would become active campaign volunteers for any Democrat opposing Rudy Giuliani in the general election. There are some insults so grotesque that they trump ideology completely.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali knows something about being a dissident in a broadly unappreciative community. “All we have,” she said, “are our ideas, and all we ask is the freedom to express them.” Denied this by two seperate societies, she became a woman in search of a country. If Ron Paul is silenced, libertarians, too, will seek a new homeland.