Although not a single vote has been cast, it's safe to say that Ron Paul has run the most successful libertarian presidential campaign in American history. Sure, the Libertarian Party nominates a candidate every term, but said candidate struggles to garner money and media attention. Paul, however, has become a legitimate phenomenon, if not a particularly likely GOP nominee. With his full-throated rejection of the imperial project in Iraq and a radical vision of a stripped-down state (though, oddly, one that still forces pregnancy), he's attracting large crowds at campaign events and polling at a healthy 8 percent in New Hampshire. In November he broke the single-day fundraising record with a $4.2 million haul.
So you would think that the circle of DC-based libertarians centered around the Cato Institute would be ecstatic. Not quite. "He doesn't strike me as the kind of person that's tapping into those elements of American public opinion that might lead towards a sustainable move in the libertarian direction," says Cato vice president for research Brink Lindsey.
Self-identified libertarians may be a tiny portion of the electorate, but small numbers have never stood in the way of bitter intramural sectarian disputes. When Lindsey says that Paul "comes from a different part of the libertarian universe than I do," he's referring to the libertarian version of the Trotsky/Lenin split, which opened up in the early 1980s and continues to echo through libertarianism today.
In 1981 American libertarianism's founding father, Murray Rothbard, had a falling out with Cato leaders over their weak-kneed conception of libertarianism as "low tax liberalism." After being kicked off the board of the organization he had helped found, Rothbard, a Jewish, Bronx-born economist who'd studied with Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, helped found the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. The institute became the intellectual center for what Rothbard protégé Lew Rockwell termed
"paleolibertarianism," a worldview rooted squarely in the populist Old Right tradition. Paleolibertarians tend to be culturally conservative (attracting, on the edges, a fair share of Confederacy nostalgists and white supremacists), zealously against imperial foreign policy and the Federal Reserve. "Ron Paul has shown that the core of the state is the Pentagon and the Federal Reserve," says Rockwell, who was Paul's Congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982.
more at link:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071224/hayesI read this in the hard copy of The Nation this week, and found it online to post. Paul is of the wacko-Right wing of Libertarianism. Any Progressives thinking they like his anti-war talk should realize how he got there and what else he stands for. Ron Paul is very bad for America, and his support should not be tolerated here.