Some people will try to find any damn reason to get excited.

For example, at the LewRockwell.com Blog, Stephen Carson is amazed and excited to see that Ron Paul’s third coordinated money bomb day has already become the 3rd biggest fund-raising day for the Ron Paul campaign.

Maybe next he be amazed to find that half of all Americans make less than the median income.

Here’s something I wrote a little more than a month ago about principled libertarians who have thrown in for the Ron Paul campaign:

As for rising libertarian consciousness, or openness to libertarian ideas, I'd like to believe that it's true, but I'm not especially convinced. If it is true, though, I would suggest that absolutely the most urgent thing to do is to start those conversations and unhitch them as quickly and as thoroughly as possible from the Ron Paul train, because we have a very short window of time — somewhere in the vicinity of 1-3 months, depending on the breaks — before Ron Paul's prospects in the primaries are completely decided. If nothing significant happens in that direction between now and then, then I think that a lot of money and a lot of organizational energy will disappear right into the same dark, lonely station where the Clark train, the Buchanan train, the Perot train, the Nader train, and the Dean train are sitting idle after all these election cycles. That'd be a shame, because, as much as I dislike some of what they're producing, they are certainly showing a lot of genuine organizational intelligence.

I’d say that recent news — Ron Paul’s next-to-last performances in early primaries, and the rippling effects of the recent brouhaha over the newsletters published under his imprimatur — is as good a reason as you could hope for for believing that time is up. Either the Paulistas unhitch themselves now or they will be carried far away from their intended destination.

Yes, yes, the New Republic article is a sloppy hatchet piece, which mixes genuinely fucked-up shit (such as the vile racism and authoritarianism of the law-n-order pieces that appeared in the early 1990s) together with bogus smears (such as the attempt to use longstanding criticism of U.S. military support for the Israeli government as evidence for a charge of anti-Semitism). And yes, yes, Ron Paul’s relationship to the newsletters was weird and there is some complicated and ongoing movement history that makes the full story much less straightforward than Kirchick’s narrative would imply. But that genuinely fucked-up shit is genuinely fucked-up shit. If you’re interested in an overview of the authorship question and of some of the salient movement history, you can see the article and comments at Kn@ppster (2007-01-08), and also Wirkman Netizen (2007-01-09). As I see it the full story, once told tends to make Ron Paul a little less guilty than Kirchick claims, but much more guilty than his kneejerk defenders claim.

That’s a conversation well worth having, and perhaps I’ll join in in the future. But for the time being, the point that I’d like to stress is this: whatever the full, nuanced, correct understanding of the matter may be, there is no realistic chance whatsoever that the necessary nuance will fit into either person-to-person electoral outreach or political media commentary within the amount of time that remains. News media and politicking in the critical months of primary season just don’t provide a medium for that kind of nuanced discussion to happen. It just doesn’t have the bandwidth to get through anything much more complex than Google Ron Paul, Ron Paul’s a crazy racist, Is not, Is so, Your moms! etc.

So Ron Paul’s chances in the Republican primaries, if he ever had any to begin with, are on death’s doorstep, and all that remains on this point are a number of damning associations with his name that radical libertarians will not be able to dispel or to dissociate within the electoral forum. Those radical libertarians who have tried to use Ron Paul’s personality and campaign, warts and all, as an indirect means for educating people about and persuading them of anti-war and radical libertarian views had best give it up. Those radical libertarians who have tried to use mix with Ron Paul’s other supporters as a source for new recruits had best give up on trying to work together with the Paulistas within the context of Ron Paul’s campaign, and start working on poaching them from the campaign into other projects. Any further effort at bolstering the campaign is, as far as I can see, going to be wasted effort. The campaign is just about dead in the water, and ongoing libertarian efforts to talk it up are, as far as I can tell, very unlikely to educate anyone about the real nature of libertarianism. What they are far more likely to do is undermine any efforts to educate people about what genuine radical libertarianism entails. If these efforts are not simply ignored, then what they will accomplish is not mainly to push more anti-libertarians and not-yet-libertarians towards libertarianism, but rather to push them towards associating radical libertarianism with the reactionary bigotry of the hard Right. What would be far more productive is a concerted effort to break that association, by publicly dissociating from and criticizing the Ron Paul campaign, on the grounds of clear, public, and unapologetic statements of radical libertarian principles.

Now, I believe firmly in honesty, and in open radicalism, and I think that if an extreme position is correct, then public indignation at it, or smears of it, are ever a good reason to abandon, or moderate, or dissemble about your position. You just keep at it, against wind and tide, until your intransigence and the rightness of your position have succeeded in shifting the debate. But when we move away from the moral question of fidelity to principle, and to the strategic question of supporting a particular candidate warts and all, the issue is no longer one of honesty but rather one of whether your chosen means are actually well-suited to your ends. If the hope is to convince non-libertarians through education and persuasion, then you’re not likely to promote that goal through boosterism for Ron Paul’s good name and electoral prospects, after his electoral campaign has become moribund and his name is no longer especially good. If Ron Paul boosterism ever was an effective way to get things done, it no longer is, and it’s time to find a better way.

For those who may be curious, here’s my attitude towards the Ron Paul primary campaign. I would not vote for Ron Paul, even though I don’t have any in-principle objection to voting defensively in government elections. The short explanation is that I don’t vote for anti-abortion candidates, and I don’t vote for candidates who are significantly worse than the status quo on immigration. Unfortunately, whatever it’s other merits, Ron Paul’s campaign features both of these poison pills. On the other hand, currently he is running in a primary, and so to some extent I wish, without much hope, that he might somehow manage to defeat his current opponents, i.e., the other Republicans, i.e., that bunch of howling bare-fanged war-fascists.

But that’s about all the enthusiasm I’ve got. Many anti-war types and many libertarians are getting positively gleeful about the campaign, claiming that even if Ron Paul has little real hope for electoral victories, the campaign will at least provide a platform for outreach and education about libertarian and non-interventionist ideas, both through media notoriety and also through attracting an obviously enthusiastic and organizationally clever following of base supporters. For my part, I certainly hope that the Paulians learn something in the process, but the first problem is that Ron Paul’s positions, however preferable a select set of them may be to the positions espoused by the rest of the pack, are not libertarian; they’re Constitutionalist, which is something different. He can’t even always be counted on to mount principled, non-legalistic arguments against the war, and that issue’s the centerpiece of his campaign.

The second problem, even setting aside the ideological differences, is that the usual dynamics of electoral horse-racing, and the sometimes ridiculous tone of uncritical personal adulation toward Ron Paul’s personal virtues and the shining radiance of Ron Paul Thought, give me a lot of reason to fear that whatever lessons are drawn may very well be the wrong lessons, and that in any case the enthusiasm and activity around his campaign is likely to collapse into frustrated torpor more or less immediately after their sole vehicle for activism, the Ron Paul political machine, closes down for the season, and stays shuttered for the rest of a multiyear election cycle. Unless something changes, but soon, I see no reason to believe that the flurry of activity, as exciting as it may seem, is going to survive the end of this one maverick candidate’s personal electoral prospects.

Micha Ghertner recently posted a good article at The Distributed Republic, which touches on some similar themes and makes a number of other good points besides, focusing on the way in which the choice of electoral politics as a vehicle seriously hobbles the prospects for accomplishing much in the way of successful education about freedom or anti-imperialism through the Ron Paul machine. Thus:

But it is unreasonable to expect most of the target audience, having been successfully persuaded that Ron Paul is the candidate to support, to then go through the trouble of seperating the wheat from the chaff and come to the self-realization that implicit in Paul’s message of liberty is the notion that our focus should not be on selecting a candidate with admirable qualities such as honesty, integrity, and devotion to constitutional limits on government, but instead our focus should be on the inherent threat to liberty of the system itself, regardless of who happens to be temporarily at its helm. Bundling these two things together involves a self-contradiction between the medium and its message. Expecting people to ignore that contradiction, expecting people to hear the message we actually intend to send while rejecting the message of the medium itself, is expecting too much.

— Micha Ghertner, The Distributed Republic (2007-11-28): The Medium Is The Message: Why I Cannot In Good Conscience Support Ron Paul

Meanwhile, in the comments section, in order to prove that Ron Paul’s supporters really are approaching this from the standpoint of fair-minded principle, really are making the necessary careful distinctions, and really are putting principled concern for liberty over electoral politicking and partisan cheerleading, an anonymous paleo comes along in the comments to reply that You beltway libertarians are morons and that Micha’s remarks sound like the uninformed commentary of Hillary Clinton pollster.

Well, I guess it’s a fair cop. What could be more inside-the-Beltway than considered opposition to making an incumbent Congressman’s candidacy for the Presidency of the United States the main vehicle for your social and political vision, or encouraging means of activism, education, and resistance that bypass the machinery of the federal government?

Ron Paul’s supporters have been putting a lot of volunteer work into amateur ads promoting his campaign. With all this activity, I feel like I ought to set aside my carping, and do my part after all. So here you go, Ron Paul Revolutionaries: a couple of contributions of my own, in accordance with the spirit and the general tone of ads like this recent Land of the Free video. Behold:

Long live our great leader Chairman Ron!

Chairman Ron is the Red sun of our hearts!

Hold high the great red banner of Ron Paul Thought–thoroughly smash the rotting counterrevolutionary revisionist line in Constitutional law!