Rep. Paul can find success by framing his noninterventionism not as a corrective for America’s sins, past or present, but as the way forward to restoring America’s independence and sovereignty. ~Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Politico

Michael makes a good point that this is the sort of rhetoric that will appeal viscerally to American nationalists, who constitute a significant, perhaps dominant, part of the GOP coalition.  The nationalists in question should be understood here as those Americans whose concern is with the preservation and defense of the actual nation, and not those abstract nationalists who think that America is only as good or as meaningful or as worthy of loyalty as the ideas that it embodies.  They are the “Jacksonians,” the people who despise Bush on immigration–because his immigration proposal seems to threaten the nation–just as much as they support him on the “war on terror” (which they think “defends” the nation).  This actual nation would be the nation of American citizens, not the mythical proposition nation or “nation of immigrants” (as nonsensical and anti-assimilationist a phrase as can be found).  The problem with such an appeal, while it may be possible, is that nationalist audiences are not known for their interest in self-criticism and reflection, to put it mildly, and they have a bad habit of valorising every war their government has waged because they cultivate a strong attachment to those who “serve our country.”  Noninterventionist foreign policy requires a certain amount of self-criticism (even if it only involves saying, “our government was short-sighted and stupid,” which should be easy for everyone to accept) and a willingness to question the identification between implementing state policies and serving the country. 

Once that identification has been made, the nationalist instinct of saying, “my country right or wrong,” becomes a reflexive endorsement of government actions: “my state, right or wrong.”  In a putatively representative political system, it is even more difficult for nationalists to perceive sharp differences between the people and the country on one side and the government on the other.  Democracy encourages one of the worst traits of nationalism by reinforcing this (false) sense of identity of government, country and people.  It is difficult for a small government conservative or libertarian to speak in an idiom that would be comprehensible to those who follow this line of thought, since that conservative or libertarian rejects key assumptions of this audience.  Ron Paul frequently argues for noninterventionist foreign policy by pointing to the damage to constitutional liberties that war and empire cause.  He is entirely right about this, but like most libertarian and small-government appeals it tends to fall on deaf ears.  When voters are given the choice between policies that allow more liberty or those that promise more government power, they almost always choose the latter, because most are convinced in a very confused way that vesting more power in “their” government means that they, the voters, and the nation as a whole have more power to cope with this or that problem.  Nationalists have a hard time believing that weakening the state and stripping it of many of its powers will benefit the nation, because, perversely, most of them see the rollback of the state as a challenge to and an attack upon American sovereignty.  (Don’t even get me started on the free-trading, pro-immigration, pro-corporate internationalists who have the gall to complain that opponents of free trade agreements and mass immigration are in favour of “big government” in the form of border control and tariffs, as if they were dyed-in-the-wool libertarians!)

Independence and sovereignty are clearly good things.  They are not only entirely consistent with constitutionalism, but inextricably bound up with adherence to our fundamental law.  Find someone who supports global trade organisations, global regulatory institutions or global hegemony and you will find someone who more or less despises and loathes the idea of a federal government of limited, delegated powers.  You will find someone who is willing to cede the proper functions of the federal government to international bodies while scrapping limits on the executive for the sake of projecting power around the world.  The Constitution gets in the globalists’ way, and so they ignore or violate it as it suits them.  

Independence and sovereignty are things that Ron Paul consistently supports and defends, whether on immigration, foreign policy or even on trade (he is against NAFTA and the WTO, at least partly for what I assume are constitutionalist and pro-sovereignty reasons).  Indeed, in these areas he is a much more reliable defender of American sovereignty and independence than many of his colleagues who speak in the nationalist idiom but often serve, whether wittingly or not, globalist goals.