Incidentally, two mitigating things:

1. He is not wrong about Ron Paul’s legacy as it concerns the financial crisis, though as Rojas points out that’s not really germane to what we’re talking about.

2. I suppose I have to admit, it’s not Baldwin or the Constitution Party’s social conservatism that bothers me, but more the way the Paul campaign has devolved as a tactical organization.

Would it not be more accurate, or at least more constructive to say “but then you emphasize social issues more than I” rather than that I get hung up on them? The latter is pretty dismissive of issues about which I care greatly.

My post was about Ron Paul’s endorsement of Baldwin, and the negative impact this will have on his legacy. I felt the post particularly relevant in light of TCP’s history with RP. It was not a post about the financial crisis and bailout. You might have noticed there are already one or two TCP posts about that subject, but if you missed them, I would be happy to point you in the right direction. Further, on one of my crisis/bailout posts, I included a link to Ron Paul’s relevant article on CNN, and clearly indicated it was good to see them give him that prominence. By contrast, we had not posted or discussed at any length RP’s endorsement of Baldwin.

I never know whether you care so little about social/culture war issues such that you are always willing to manufacture apologies when one of your preferred libertarian/paleo-conservatives blunders, or whether you actively support the positions of people like Baldwin. The former is merely disappointing, the latter quite ugly. Ron Paul endorsed this cretin. He lent his moral authority, his patronage, his name to the positions of The Constitution Party candidate. It is more than appropriate that we discuss it on this blog.

Will this be one of your drive by shootings, or will you perhaps return to the comment section for further discussion?

Again, legacies are more complicated than any one thing, and this movement is about more than obeying every instruction Ron Paul gives.

The fact that we don’t march in lockstep makes us less effective than we might be in some ways; but it also insulates us from the failings of any one leadership figure. We can appreciate what is best in Ron Paul without excusing what is worst. The Show Will Go On.

You really get hung up on the social issues, Jack. You have to make trade-offs.

It’s a damned shame. But one of the benefits of being a Ron Paul supporter is that you’re not expected to march in lockstep, on this or any other matter.

The Libertarian component of the Ron Paul support were surely already used to disappointment, backbiting and factionalism.

Anyhow. I wondered a while back about what the Ron Paul movement should become, after Brad had linked his own plans, and expressed the desire that it shouldn’t be about Paul:

Essentially, my opinion is that the next thing shouldn’t be “Ron Paul Revolution Part II”. Ron Paul appears to be a nice guy but I don’t want him leading any movement I care about and I particularly don’t want his branding over any movement I’d support. For that matter, I don’t want the movement named after anyone — it’s not as if I have a favoured leader of my own — because a movement built around a person inevitably has, at root, that person’s flaws.

My bottom line was this:

One of the problems with Paul is that he has run a campaign, which is, at the end of the day, about one person running for office, like a movement. Too much tolerance and too little cannyness aimed at political success, even when that ‘political success’ was never going to include ‘getting nominated’. Whatever comes out of this in terms of a small-government movement/caucus has to be rather more selective than Paul’s ostensible campaign has been; as Rojas observes, that stuff was poisonous to Paul’s campaign, but it’s also not what you want out-front in a movement, either. An approach of “everyone knows that’s not what we’re about” just doesn’t cut it, politically. In fact, if everyone knows what you’re about and you’re still only hovering around 5-10% of the people who can be bothered to vote in GOP primaries and 10-20% of those that can be bothered to participate in GOP caucuses, then the actual message just isn’t popular enough, which is another reason that serious change is needed. In fact, I believe that both things are true; the smears do damage but the message is also wrong. The Paul campaign massively overachieved in fundraising, attention and expected votes and still got utterly spanked.

It would be a Bad Thing indeed to compound the previous errors by running a small-government movement, that we would all like to see gain in strength, like a campaign, featuring Ron Paul front and centre. Within any movement with as much enthusiasm as the ‘Ron Paul Revolution’ has built around the Ron Paul campaign, there’s going to be a lot of real affection for the movement, the campaign and its leader but that shouldn’t guide planning going forward; the people who aren’t currently within the movement, the very people that have to be attracted to the hypothetical new small-government movement, almost certainly don’t feel the same way. You will already have a lot of the Paulites and for the rest, a Ron Paul branding isn’t an inducement to join.

For me, the small-government movement that arises from the Ashes of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign — a campaign which I don’t see as a serious presidential campaign so much as phase one of a small-government movement — needs a lot less of Ron Paul and his particular intepretation of what small-government should be. This isn’t because Ron Paul’s not a nice guy, but because he’s not a good leader of a political movement that’s supposed to gain political power. Of course, as a movement, there will be a broad range of views of small-government within it and some of them will be aligned with those of Ron Paul — that’s inevitable even if this wasn’t to rise out of the ashes of his campaign for the nomination — but if there’s special status given to Paul, or his views, however, I shan’t be joining.

I think that there was no real hope of disentangling the movement from Paul so soon, so what he’s done with the Baldwin nomination is inevitably bad for that movement even if Paul was going to fade out soonish. Even making an official endorsement at all is problematic given that the movement has yet perhaps to work out what it really is about (except I think that most of them know that they’re not about Chuck Baldwin).

Unless you care to argue that Paul’s historical legacy will be majoritarian neo-confederate theocratism, an argument I’d be more than happy to join.

Paul’s divergence here is disappointing for its missed opportunity, not for its legitimizing the Constitution Party (which, A. would not be a terrible thing for any candidate of the outside-the-two-party-system stripe, but B. isn’t going to be the take-away of the Paul legacy in any event, save for among his left-libertarian critics).

One could argue, certainly, that Paul’s run further added to the notion that libertarian = kookiness, and that’s a more even argument, but given the complete absence of any alternatives even approaching libertarianism this cycle, and given the, even you would have to admit, surprising success of Paul in creating a libertarian-leaning movement in the context of a two-party primary (and, as Rojas points out, with the added benefit of nothing really approaching dogmatic orthodoxy regarding his biggest faults), I’m willing to throw down there too.

Unless you hold the belief that doing nothing would have been preferable to Paul. Though I’d ask there how doing nothing has been working out for libertarianism so far.

I think it’s, at this point, nigh on undeniable that Ron Paul has been the most effective mainstreamer of libertarianism in a generation at least. I also believe he’s squandered the opportunity to take that farther, to take that, himself, out of this cycle. But the two positions, make no mistake, are not mutually exclusive.

Plus, I had to get that off my chest. Like I said, I’ve been chewing it over the last few days and it’s increasingly been leaving a bad taste in my mouth.