Rand Paul’s victory is another sign that there’s a roiling, libertarian revolt within the GOP that is likely to fuel an out-of-nowhere Dean-style “Republican-wing of the Republican party” candidate for 2012. The way Dean represented a rejection of Clintonism, this candidate will represent a rejection of Bushism. He may upset the apple cart on foreign policy the way Dean did—perhaps by calling for a pull-out from Afghanistan. ~Rich Lowry

Anything’s possible, but one reason I find this doubtful is that Lowry profoundly misunderstands what Howard Dean represented in the Democratic primaries in 2003-04. Dean did not represent a rejection of Clintonism. Dean was a relatively “centrist,” DLC-backed governor, and he was both fairly fiscally and socially moderate. When he began his long-shot presidential bid, his main issue was health care reform, and it was only as he started questioning the wisdom of continuing the Iraq war after originally supporting the invasion that he was able to tap into the energy and resources of online progressive activists. Opposition to the Iraq war in late 2003 and early 2004 was hardly proof of a “rejection of Clintonism.” If it had been, Al Gore’s speech explaining his opposition to the invasion before it happened would have also represented a rejection of something of which he was the last standard-bearer. For the most part, liberal hawks discredited themselves within their party and generally with their overwhelming support for the Iraq war, but one could still remain a liberal interventionist similar to Clinton while opposing the war. After all, Obama was just such an interventionist who objected to the Iraq war. For his part, Dean was also extremely hawkish on Iran, and repeatedly said that one of the principal reasons he opposed the Iraq war was that it was a distraction from the “real threat” Iran posed.

Dean was also running within the DLC consensus on social and cultural issues in 2004. Lowry seems to forget completely that Dean took a lot of flack for his stated interest in expanding the Democratic Party to include, as he put it, “guys with Confederate flags in their pick-up trucks.” His idea was to try to make the Democratic Party competitive nationwide, and he argued that this involved tailoring candidates to their constituents, which is more or less what the DCCC and DSCC ended up doing in the last two cycles. The idea was to minimize and downplay differences over social and cultural issues in order to appeal to working- and middle-class voters, many of them white men, who had once been Democratic voters. In many respects, Dean had a record as governor very much in the mold of Clinton himself. Stupidly, Republicans refused to distinguish between Dean and his politics and the politics of his netroots supporters and insisted on portraying Dean as a left-wing fanatic.

So the Dean comparison doesn’t work at all. In any case, the Republican equivalent to Dean would be for a reliable Bush supporter, such as Mitch Daniels or John Thune, to emerge as a zealous opponent of bailouts, unfunded liabilities, excessive executive power, and intrusive anti-terrorist measures. Except for anti-bailout rhetoric, that’s not going to happen. Could there be an “out-of-nowhere” Republican presidential candidate similar to Rand Paul in 2012? Gary Johnson is an interesting possibility, but as much as I would sympathize with a Johnson candidacy I confess that I just don’t see how it goes anywhere.

Supporting withdrawal from Afghanistan is not likely to energize nearly as many activists and voters in the GOP as supporting an end to the Iraq war energized Democratic activists and voters. For one thing, the Obama administration may already be well on its way to withdrawing many U.S. forces by the time primary voting begins. There will be minimal advantage in the Republican primaries to be the candidate who proposes to do what Obama is already doing. There will be much more of an advantage for the hawkish candidates that demagogue Obama’s decisions on Afghanistan and foreign policy generally. I’m glad Rand Paul won and I think he’ll make a good Senator, but even Paul made a rather embarrassing attack on Obama’s “apologizing for America” during his victory speech. Almost all of the incentives in the party and movement are still on the side of fairly shameless demagoguery on foreign policy.

A depressing truth about the enduring power of Bushism is that Bushism satisfies most of the major factions in the party in one way or another. During the last primary contest, McCain represented the general continuation of Bushism, and both Romney and Huckabee were basically presenting themselves as adherents of Bushism who also had executive experience. All signs right now point to a 2012 field that offers the same choices.