Ron Paul as a Mad Prophet

Ross Douthat has an interesting take on Ron Paul in this column. On Paul's passage from publisher of survivalist newsletters to prominent Presidential candidate, he writes:

There are two commonplace interpretations of Paul’s unusual trajectory. To his many sympathizers — libertarians, dissident conservatives and some left-wingers as well — the extremism in his past has nothing to do with the issues that he’s campaigning on today. The case for Paul, as The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf put it, is that “he alone, among viable candidates, favors reforming certain atrocious policies” — scaling back America’s overseas commitments, ending a failed war on drugs, curbing a runaway public sector and reducing the powers of an imperial presidency. The newsletters may reflect badly on his past, but in the current political landscape he’s a voice of reason rather than of madness.

To his many critics, on the other hand, Paul’s present-day positions are connected to his past derangements, because they share the same essentially conspiratorial root. Then as now, Paul blames shadowy elites for the country’s ills; then as now, he flirts with narratives that are straight out of the fever swamp. For all its superficial idealism, the critics insist, his campaign is a conduit through which fundamentally poisonous ideas are entering the mainstream body politic, and thus he needs to be not only defeated but repudiated.

But consider a third possibility. There’s often a fine line between a madman and a prophet. Perhaps Paul has emerged as a teller of some important truths precisely because in many ways he’s still as far out there as ever.

Exactly. Sometimes ideas get so firmly entrenched in the discourse of the society that they can only be attacked by someone far outside the mainstream. Thoroughing critiques of the received wisdom usually come from people who have embraced, not just different political positions, but a different kind of logic. They find it easy to reject what "everybody knows" because they start from a different vision of reality.

One truth I have learned from 49 years of observing humanity is that people are rarely wacky in just one way. In America, only a politician nutty enough to embrace the gold standard can call for legalizing drugs, curtailing the President's power, and an end to blowing up brown people who annoy us.