Ron Paul is associating himself with a historical figure who spearheaded a plot to blow up the houses of Parliament — by very definition, a terrorist. ~Kay Steiger

First of all, it was Ron Paul supporters who decided on 5 November, which had far more to do with a stupid Brothers Wachowski movie than with Guy Fawkes Day proper.  Second, Guy Fawkes day has a good deal more to do with juvenile delinquency and fireworks today than with any reference to sectarianism or political violence.  Third, the date was largely irrelevant to the outpouring of popular support for Ron Paul.  Fourth, terrorism is actually the targeting of the civilian population with violence to achieve political ends.  The Gunpowder Plot, whatever else you might say about it, was an attempted assassination of the members of the government of the United Kingdom.  It had absolutely nothing to do with the bomb-throwing anarchism with which the movie associated it, but that’s a post for another day.  The conspirators in the Plot were targeting the leading members of government in what was seen to be the first strike in a pro-Catholic coup.  You might use many names for this, but terrorism is not really appropriate.

More to the point, the choice of 5 November by the organisers of the effort was a clear reference to the awful V for Vendetta movie, which pitted ridiculously campy “anarchists” against equally ridiculous “fascists.”  Most people would not normally object to anti-fascist resistance, nor would they go out of their way to defend the repression of religious minorities against which Fawkes was reacting.  Ms. Steiger refers to this as a “choice” by an antiwar candidate, when this was a grassroots effort that operated independently of the campaign.  It wasn’t as if Ron Paul said, “Let’s commemorate Guy Fawkes as a hero and use the day of the Gunpowder Plot as a rallying point.”  Everyone agrees that it was his supporters, quite separate from the campaign, who organised the effort and selected the date, being impressed by an unusually stupid comic book movie.  Whatever that says about them, it is not Ron Paul who made that choice.  As is often the case, some Ron Paul supporters have used poor judgement and brought controversy on what ought to be an otherwise major achievement of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign.  That ought to be the end of it.

We should not call ourselves secularists. We should not call ourselves humanists, or secular humanists, or naturalists, or skeptics, or anti-theists, or rationalists, or freethinkers, or brights.  We should not call ourselves anything. ~Sam Harris

Wouldn’t that just open them up to charges of being a very literal sort of anti-nominalist?  After all, if nomen est omen, and Harris doesn’t want to be superstitious, he would really have to abandon all names and resort to communicating through a series of hand gestures (and one suspects that he would be more persuasive than he currently is).  Regardless, I guess this means that Harris is against really goofy-looking atheist symbols, too, since both names and images are signifiers of something that Harris doesn’t think should be formally represented.

Read the whole of Michael’s article.  As usual, he has captured the memorable details from the conference very well.

My column sums up my views on the current debate, but I did have one more thing to say on the subject of the Armenian genocide.  This was brought to mind as I reviewing part of Bruce Clark’s Twice A Stranger this morning before lecturing on the Megali Idea.  Clark has written a fine book on the population exchanges following Lausanne.  In it he has a few sentences about the genocide on page 9:

In one of the most ghastly chapters of modern history, the entire Armenian population in most parts of Anatolia was deported southwards and at least 600,000 died as a result.  To this day, bitter arguments rage between the Turkish government, its defenders and critics over the cause of these deaths.  Were they the result of a deliberate policy of mass killing, or, so to speak, negligence?  A few courageous Turkish historians have argued for the absurdity of the latter position. [bold mine-DL]

And, of course, that is an absurd position, but it is one that you will see Ankara’s apologists use.

November 5 wasn’t just an outstanding day for Ron Paul’s fundraising–it was also the issue date for the latest TAC.  The new issue has Michael’s report on the New Atheists, James Bovard on Bush and torture, Dan McCarthy on Barry Goldwater, Jim Antle on Obama, my column on the genocide resolution and much more.

Incidentally, while I’m on a somewhat related subject I’d like to state once more that V for Vendetta was an absolutely terrible movie.  The one downside for Ron Paul in having this fundraising effort on 5 November is that many news stories inevitably include references to Vendetta, which might give the impression that Ron Paul fans are also fans of really bad, dystopian pseudo-anarchist fantasies.  We are not, or at least some of us are not.

Naturally, in keeping with Ron Paul’s excellent disinterest in mass media products, he hasn’t seen the movie.

So there is at least something in Paul’s worldview for most people to strongly dislike, even hate, if they are so inclined. Yet that apparent political liability is really what accounts for the passion his campaign is generating: it is a campaign that defies and despises conventional and deeply entrenched Beltway assumptions about our political discourse and about what kind of country this is supposed to be.

While Barack Obama toys with the rhetoric of challenging conventional wisdom, Paul’s campaign — for better or worse — actually does so, and does so in an extremely serious, thoughtful and coherent way. And there are a lot of people who, more than any specific policy positions, are hungry for a political movement which operates outside of our rotted political establishment and which fearlessly rejects its pieties, even if they disagree with some or even many of its particulars. ~Glenn Greenwald

Ross makes the argument why Ron Paul should run as a third party candidate:

Second, if it wasn’t clear already it should be clear now: Paul ought to run as a Libertarian in the fall. Those Republicans who say that Paul is too far outside the party, ideologically-speaking, to be running for its nomination aren’t that far wrong: I suspect that if the Democrats take the White House, certain elements in the GOP will rediscover their 1990s-vintage fealty to a Quincy Adams foreign policy, but for now at least Paul’s positions are at once popular enough for him to run a well-funded campaign and almost completely unrepresented in the mainstream of either party.

Stop for a moment and think about the claim that Paul is “too far outside the party, ideologically speaking,” and reflect on how bizarre that is.  I’m not saying it isn’t a correct assessment about the party, but it is a remarkable transformation (or rather deformation) that has taken place in the last decade.  Twelve years ago, there was a freshman House class whose ideas about sovereignty, foreign policy and most other major policy questions were an awful lot closer to Ron Paul than to the modern Bush-afflicted GOP, and seven years ago (as Paul never ceases to remind us) the Republican nominee, old what’s his name, ran at least as a foreign policy realist with limited ambitions overseas.  On issue after issue, Ron Paul espouses the strict construction constitutionalist line that other Republicans pretend to believe when it’s election-time, while also defending objectively popular positions opposing illegal immigration and free trade agreements and also affirming his opposition to abortion.  Social conservative, economic conservative, populist, libertarian–you would think that he has something for all of them, and ought to be winning support from most factions of the party.  Of course, the war trumps everything and drives these potential supporters away, and so we have the strange spectacle of possibly having a pro-abortion social liberal as the nominee while imposing a litmus test on whether we should perpetuate an aggressive war and occupation of another country.  The endless pursuit of the “real” conservative candidate continually disappoints voters, because they seem intent on ignoring the one candidate who actually agrees with conservatives on everything where modern conservatives don’t radically abuse the Constitution (particularly relating to war and civil liberties).

Okay, so given that the majority of the GOP is pretty much completely hostile to Paul and his message, should Paul break away and run on a third-party ticket?  Certainly, he could serve as a pro-life protest candidate if Giuliani were the GOP nominee, but if that were going to work it would also be necessary for him to gain the Constitution Party’s nomination to keep the two “third parties” of the right from splitting that protest vote and thus maximise the protest’s effectiveness behind one candidate.  However, as he keeps telling us, Ron Paul has no intention of running on a third party ticket or as an independent, and I think this is the right judgement.  It is also entirely consistent with how Paul has campaigned to date.  

Throughout the campaign, Paul has stated that his foreign policy views belong to the tradition of the Republican Party and that Bush Era interventionism is a departure from that tradition.  He has made what I think is much more than a tactical appeal to Republican Party political fortunes, insisting that the GOP has to embrace non-interventionism (or at least turn against the war) if it is going to fare well in the future.  He has cast his candidacy as the one that represents the best of Republicanism and the one that will make the GOP the most competitive.  Whether or not you find these claims convincing, he wouldn’t have made the claims if he didn’t mean them (this is one of the fairly refreshing things about Ron Paul).  Besides, to split off into a third-party campaign and guarantee a Democratic victory that is likely to happen anyway will simply provide the militarists with an excuse for their repudiation at the polls and will change nothing.  The campaign more likely to steal Ron Paul’s issues would be the Democratic one, especially if Clinton is the nominee, as this would be a way of neutralising the threat of disaffected antiwar progressives who will be unhappy with a Clinton nomination defecting to a third party.  A third party run would make sense only to the extent that it could realistically force the Democratic nominee to become seriously antiwar and less belligerent on Iran.  Both of those seem unlikely.

As we all know, Ron Paul induces a strange dual reaction of fear and loathing in conventional Republican circles.  He is supposedly so irrelevant and “nutty” that he can be safely dismissed and his supporters ignored, but at the same time he allegedly represents a dire threat of an independent run, potentially Naderising the 2008 election.  The first response seems foolish, since a lot can change in Iowa and New Hampshire between now and January–voters there make their final determinations fairly late in the process. 

Despite the fact that he has explicitly and repeatedly ruled out an independent run, the fear of his impact on the general election is real enough.  Dismissing and insulting Paul’s supporters are the defensive responses of a crumbling, dying party, as if to say, “Yes, most Americans may despise us and everything we have done, but at least we’re not a bunch of kooks who talk about the Constitution!”  If things were like they were in 2002 and the GOP was still dominant, this arrogant dismissal of a small but noticeable group of Republican and independent voters might make more sense, but under the present circumstances it is baffling why anyone interested in GOP victory next year would go out of their way to insult and denigrate a relatively small but extremely active segment of the electorate.  This response is premised on the assumption that Ron Paul has little Republican backing, but until a couple months ago no one thought Huckabee had that much backing, either.  There is a significant bloc of Republican primary voters in New Hampshire who favour immediate or near-term withdrawal from Iraq, but many of these voters are currently split among the various pro-war candidates.  They make up approximately a third of the Republican electorate up there–there are many in the modern GOP who want to write off 30% of its supporters who are antiwar.  This 30% represents a bloc of natural Paul voters, who could lift him to a respectable third or second-place finish if he could rally them on the question of withdrawal.  That doesn’t mean this will happen, but it shows that Paul’s potential base of support is much greater than current polling suggests.       

Sullivan hasmore.

Longtime friend of Eunomia, Joshua Snyder, has a good article at LewRockwell.com on Ron Paul’s support among American expatriates.

Ross offers this depressing, but accurate, statement on the pathetic state of our government:

But in a sense, to ask the question is to answer it: If you’re young and charismatic and interested in politics, the rewards to staying within the mainstream political consensus are so high, and so readily apparent, as to be near-irresistible. If Ron Paul looked and sounded like Bill Clinton, he probably never would have become a constitutionalist in the first place.

Whether Ross intended to or not, he has just stated in a single paragraph the principal reasons why mass democracy is the enemy of both good and lawful government.  It creates a kind of politics that makes austere constitutional republicanism seem absurd, because such a view assumes that the welfare of the commonwealth and the preservation of liberty are sufficiently admirable and worth supporting that they do not need a demagogic spokesman (and I mean to use demagogic here in the least pejorative way).  But most voters really like demagogic spokesmen, and in the modern age they much prefer the telegenic and oleaginous to the severe, earnest, if sometimes eccentric, people who have infinitely more in common with most Americans. 

The reason why principled constitutionalism gains so little electoral traction is that it proposes to curtail and distribute power.  Few rising stars in the political firmament want to ally themselves with a cause that, if successful, will actually decrease their power in the future.  Curtailing and dispersing power displease any number of factions that much prefer jockeying for influence over a consolidated, concentrated center of power.  Constitutionalism offers citizens no spoils, except a liberty and independence they typically would rather abandon if it meant greater convenience or benefits.  It is a sorry statement about Americans that strict adherence to our fundamental law has become popularly identified as a “fringe” and “eccentric” position.