When the Northern Illinois Women’s Center closed its doors for good in early January, after nearly 39 years of profiting from women’s exercise of their “constitutional right” to have an abortion, the death toll stood much higher than 58,000—perhaps as high as 70,000, according to Kevin Rilott of the Rockford Pro-Life Initiative.  Before NIWC founder and first abortionist Richard Ragsdale passed to his eternal reward in 2004, he estimated that he alone had performed 50,000 abortions from April 1973.

Yet how we regard that loss of life depends largely on what we think abortion is, and what we think abortion does.  The many local Christians who prayed outside of the Northern Illinois Women’s Center every day that it was open over the course of four decades, and the many other Christians who supported them with prayers and donations, regard that loss of life with the same sadness as we do the death of American soldiers in Vietnam.  And indeed, in that view, these children were the victims of a war, victims who had one distinct disadvantage over the soldier in Vietnam: They had no means or opportunity to fight back.  Whatever chance they had to emerge unscathed from the house of horrors known as “Fort Turner”—a majestic old public school converted over to the destruction of life—came entirely through grace by the prayers of others.

For those who believe abortion does not stop a beating heart, but simply solves a problem or safeguards a “right,” there can be little question of mourning over the tens of thousands of lives lost.  Even those who regarded the Vietnam War as just and necessary could view the loss of each American soldier’s life as a cause for grief, but in abortion, the child stands in for the enemy soldier, and even the best of us find it hard to mourn the loss of the enemy.  That is simply the way the world works: In war, lives are cut short, futures erased, so that others may continue to live.

Of course, not all of those who support abortion have taken part in the killing.  While the armchair warriors in the media and think tanks are more bloodthirsty than the average soldier, because they do not have to spend the rest of their lives remembering the faces of those their rhetoric has killed, the mothers who end the life of the children growing within their wombs are, like the soldier, much more likely than the abstract defender of “our way of life” to recognize what they have done, even if guilt compels them to continue to justify it as necessary.  The woman who proudly proclaims that she has had several abortions and would gladly have another reminds the normal person of the veteran who laments that he had but one tour of duty to kill for his country.

On Monday, January 23, ten days after the Northern Illinois Women’s Center announced that it would close its doors for good, and 39 years and one day after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade, our eighth child was born.  Because the anniversary of Roe fell on a Sunday this year, the organizers of the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., decided to transfer it to that Monday, as if it were, say, Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.  Interestingly, the supporters of Roe followed suit—a curious sign, on both sides, of how much of the battle over abortion has entered the realm of abstraction.

When, however, your child is born on the day that all of America is either celebrating or commemorating the right of mothers to kill their own children, abstraction is simply not possible.  To receive hearty congratulations on the birth of your child on, say, Facebook, offered by those who have spent the rest of the day expressing their gratitude for Roe and attacking those who acknowledge that life begins at conception, is profoundly chilling.

When did Clare Frances’s life begin?  Not when she emerged via C-section from her mother’s womb a week before her due date—a time when many states would still allow a “late-term” abortion to “save the life of the mother.”  Nor did it begin 15 weeks earlier, when she reached the point of viability—before which almost every state would have allowed her life to be ended to “preserve the health of the mother.”  Nor did it begin another eight or so weeks before, when Amy first could be certain that she felt Clare move.  Nor six weeks before that, when, at ten weeks’ gestation, we first heard her heartbeat, and when abortion is legal in every state for any reason.  Indeed, her heart had been beating since the 23rd day after her conception, a time when many a first-time mother is only just beginning to sense that her life is about to change forever.

Physically, Clare Frances’s life began at conception; but even that does not tell the whole story.  “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you“ (Jeremiah 1:5), and before she was conceived, Clare existed in the sacramental union between Amy and myself.  That, however, is a thought to develop in a different piece on another day.  For now, suffice it to say that if we reduce the beginning of life to a biological milestone, we will never understand just how destructive abortion truly is.

I first visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Wall, a few years after it opened, and found myself there frequently when I was a graduate student at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.  The impact of the Wall on visitors is often ascribed to the fact that the war remains close to us in time.  But I think there is something more to it.  Seeing those 58,261 names all brought together in such a small space distills the very real human costs of the Vietnam War.  The visitor standing in front of the Wall cannot escape the consequences of our actions in Southeast Asia.  And the very design of the wall gives the impression that this is just the tip of the iceberg, that behind and beneath each name lie mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and children and friends, all the lives that the fallen had touched, and those that they would have touched, had they survived the war.

Fort Turner is, in its own way, just the tip of the iceberg represented by the tens of thousands of children whose lives ended therein.  Might it, one day, become a monument to the war on the unborn, to the tens of millions of lives lost through legalized abortion, and to the hundreds of millions of lives affected by that loss?

Perhaps, but it will not be any day soon.  Just as the Wall could not be built until the war had ended and the nation had begun to come to grips with the destruction it had caused, so, too, we will never fully comprehend the horror of legalized abortion until we have moved beyond it.  Fort Turner, pray God, may remain shuttered for good, but its heart of darkness long ago outgrew its walls and is spreading throughout the land.

[This article first appeared in the March 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  Click here to subscribe.]

The statement on its surface reads like a PSA from the Disney Channel, a favorite of Mr. Obama’s daughters Malia, 13, and Sasha, 10: Follow your dreams, dream big, let nothing stand in the way of your dreams.  Yet underneath is the simmering stench of latex and death.

Babies get in the way of dreams.

Malia, says her father, dreams of getting her driver’s license and having her own car.  In a speech last summer to U.S. automakers, Obama joked that he hoped they were working on a model “that gets a top speed of 15 miles an hour.  [And one that would deploy an] ejector seat any time boys are in the car.”  As a father, he knows what’s on the minds of 16-year-old boys.

And what happens to a boy if he fumbles around in an automobile, with no particular place to go, and happens to unfasten his young female passenger’s safety belt?  Well, nothing, really.  He can go on and pursue his dreams of being an NBA star or a community organizer.

Were it not for Roe, however, the unlucky girl, somebody’s daughter, might face the nightmare of morning sickness, an episiotomy, or stretch marks, not to mention lining up to register at Target or AFDC.

Roe v. Wade helps to fulfill little girls’ dreams.

“When Negroes have been able to ascend economically, statistics reveal they plan their families with even greater care than whites.”  Thus wrote Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1966, in a speech on the occasion of his acceptance of Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award.  “Negroes of higher economic and educational status actually have fewer children than white families in the same circumstances.”

In his speech, Dr. King lamented the “Negro folkways” carried from large plantations and farms into the ghettos of America’s cities, which resulted in “many unwanted children.”  But the blame for their sad existence fell squarely on the shoulders of powerful whites, who, by thwarting Sanger’s efforts, withheld a “profoundly important ingredient in [the Negro man’s] quest for security and a decent life.”

Providing ready access to contraception to black families, King insisted, would help to free the Negro man, unlocking “the income potential he can command.”

One week before the recent Roe anniversary, Mr. Obama marked the national MLK Day by visiting a largely black Washington-area school.  “Today, we celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” he told the children.  “And we should honor that legacy by acting as drum majors for service and lifting up those less fortunate.”

It’s hard to imagine anyone less fortunate, statistically, than an African-American baby in the womb.  For, although blacks make up roughly 12.2 percent of the population of the United States, black women account for between 30 and 38 percent of all abortions.  (According to the Gutt­macher Institute, whites, at 63.7 percent of the population, have 36 percent of all abortions; Hispanics, at 16.3 percent, have 25 percent of the abortions.)

Sanger’s and King’s dream of the great leveling effect of free and easy contraception sank under the weight of the Sexual Revolution.  Ever since Roe, Planned Parenthood has tried to fulfill that dream by transforming itself into a killing factory.  And despite the civil-rights revolution of the 60’s, black ghettos still exist, providing a prime location for Planned Parenthood clinics, who prey on the poor of every ethnicity, but on blacks especially.

One part of Dr. King’s statistical analysis holds true: In the years to come, we won’t likely find the President’s daughters in the waiting room of an abortuary.  They are well educated, affluent, and live in an intact home.  But not every African-American family can afford a hybrid car with an ejector seat: 27.4 percent remain below the poverty level, imprisoned by a welfare state that offers them abortion as a medicine of hope.

“I understand teenage-hood is complicated,” the President told automakers.  But his daughters need not worry about randy young men with illicit dreams: “I should also point out that I have men with guns that surround them, often.”

Roe v. Wade, now entering ripe middle age, made sure that no protection would surround the very least and most vulnerable among us—black, Hispanic, or white—who dream away silently in their uterine cradles.  Whether the product of outdated folkways or of fumblings in fancy cars, they are, after all, a psychological and financial burden, an obstacle standing in the way of big dreams.  As such, they may be discriminated against at will.

Their dreams don’t matter.

[This article first appeared in the March 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  Click here to subscribe.]

perspective

Revolting Parasites
by Thomas Fleming

views

The Inner Logic of Civil Rights
by Claude Polin

Zora Neale Hurston’s White Mare
by Jack Trotter

news

Crusader in the Crossfire
by Timothy Stanley

reviews

A Warring Visionary
by Tom Piatak

[The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan, by Timothy Stanley]

History Today
by Darío Fernández-Morera

[God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, by David Levering Lewis]

Big Surprise
by Clyde Wilson

[Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa, by Ilana Mercer]

correspondence

Interview With a Border Warrior
by Peter B. Gemma

stories

Ophelia and Genavy
by Tom Landess

vital signs

The Revolution That Wasn’t
by William J. Watkins, Jr.

columns

Paul’s Last Hurrah
by Justin Raimondo

Democracy and the Internet
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The Heart of Darkness
by Scott P. Richert

Aere Perennius
by Andrei Navrozov

Inventing the European Union
by Srdja Trifkovic

Illusions and Delusions
The Artist, A Dangerous Method
by George McCartney

Rage Against the Cowards
by Taki Theodoracopulos

poetry

Pulvis Eris
Half in Love
At the Ford of the Rock
by Thomas Fleming

departments

Polemics & Exchanges

American Proscenium
"Dreams of My Daughters"
by Aaron D. Wolf

Cultural Revolutions

The Crusader: The Life and
Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan

British scholar Timothy Stanley  has produced the first significant biography of Patrick J. Buchanan, describing his life from his boyhood in Washington, D.C., up to the present.  Stanley’s book is written in a breezy, informal manner—Buchanan is referred to as “Pat” throughout—and it makes for quick and generally enjoyable reading.  Stanley gets much right in his general narrative of Buchanan’s life, particularly his description of Buchanan’s 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns.

Despite his recognition that Buchanan has been a major figure in American politics, Stanley refuses to commit himself on the nature of Buchanan’s legacy:

He is a controversial figure, so I have avoided passing judgment.  It is better simply to tell his story from beginning to end and let the reader make up his or her mind as to whether [Buchanan] is a visionary or a brute.

No one who reads Stanley’s biography, however, can reasonably conclude that Buchanan is a “brute,” since the book details nothing that can reasonably be described as brutish.  A former aide, Greg Mueller, recounts that, during the 1996 campaign, Buchanan “was incredibly patient and never got angry.”  Indeed, all those who know Buchanan realize that he is a gentleman, a conclusion buttressed in the book by such disparate figures as liberal columnist E.J. Dionne, Andrew Sullivan (to whom Buchanan wrote a supportive private note after Sullivan was diagnosed with AIDS), and Joe Scarborough, who told Stanley that the young interns at MSNBC would balk at working with Buchanan, until they actually met him: “They’d really squirm and say, ‘Isn’t he an awful person?  He’s so right wing.’  But after a couple of days with him, they’d all want to adopt him as their father.”  Scarborough’s interns were repeating the reaction of Peggy Noonan, who was worried about having to work for the hard-right Buchanan in the Reagan White House, yet ended up making him one of the heroes of What I Saw at the Revolution.

[To subscribe to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, click here.]

Stanley also provides facts that refute some of the attacks made on his subject.  Those who charge Buchanan with antisemitism need to come to grips with the fact that, “Throughout his career, Buchanan had been a cheerleader for Israel.”  Buchanan’s view of America’s relationship with Israel did not change definitively until the end of the Cold War, which caused him to reevaluate his foreign-policy views across the board.  Buchanan opposed George H.W. Bush’s first foreign intervention, the invasion of Panama, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Indeed, as Stanley relates, on Crossfire Buchanan called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, provided the Russians withdrew their troops from Eastern Europe.  Stanley notes that Buchanan’s concern for Americans charged with complicity in the holocaust, such as John Demjanjuk, grew out of Buchanan’s anticommunism and the fact that the evidence being used against such Americans came from the Soviets.  In a similar vein, Stanley writes that Ronald Reagan’s visit to “Bitburg had nothing to do with Buchanan; the decision to go was made before he was appointed.”

The author also deals with the Myth of Houston: the notion that Buchanan’s speech to the 1992 Republican convention blindsided the White House and destroyed George H.W. Bush’s chance for reelection.  Indeed, the Bush White House coveted Buchanan’s endorsement and vetted the speech.  As Greg Mueller told Stanley, “The White House saw that speech.  And they loved it.”  They were not alone.  David Brinkley pronounced it “an astoundingly good speech,” and Sander Vanocur agreed:

Viewed in terms of classic raw rhetoric, that was the most skillful attempt to remind the party faithful of the role that ideas have played in American politics since Eugene McCarthy nominated Adlai Stevenson at the 1960 Democratic convention.

The polls validated the judgment of those veteran political journalists: Following Buchanan’s speech, Bush went from trailing Clinton by 52 to 35 percent to lagging behind him by only three percentage points (45 to 42 percent) with a lead among male voters of 47 to 41 percent.  Indeed, given the state of the economy, the social and cultural issues highlighted by Buchanan were Bush’s only possible road map to victory.  But after the left savaged Buchanan’s speech, Bush grew timid and went down to defeat instead.  The soundness of Buchanan’s strategy was shown by Bush’s son, who used the division of America into Red States and Blue States that accompanied his 2000 election to win reelection and elect more Republicans to Congress in both 2002 and 2004, until the disastrous tendencies of his administration became impossible to ignore.

Stanley’s narrative also provides plenty of facts to support the view that Buchanan has been a “visionary.”  In the Nixon White House, he played a significant role in crafting Spiro Agnew’s attack on the media, an attack that has been imitated by conservatives ever since.  Buchanan wrote to Nixon that “Our future is in the Democratic working man, Southern Protestant and Northern Catholics,” and also “argued that if [Nixon] wanted to get reelected, he had to reach out to the people who voted for George Wallace.”  Republican success in winning over such former Democrats has been instrumental to the GOP’s political success, and likely would have made the Republicans as dominant as the Democrats were under FDR, had the GOP not stood by and allowed the left’s Gramscian march through the institutions and the Immigration Act of 1965 to transform America.

Buchanan’s foresight has been clearest in the areas where he broke from the Republican mainstream.  As Stanley notes, Buchanan was one of the first Republicans to argue that America should resume her traditional policy of nonintervention following our victory in the Cold War.  After the United States lost thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in a vain attempt to transform the Middle East into something resembling the Middle West, more and more Americans have come to agree with what Buchanan has been saying forcefully and consistently since the collapse of communism.

[To subscribe to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, click here.]

Buchanan was one of the first Republicans to question the GOP’s policy on trade and economics, decrying “vulture capitalism” long before Rick Perry applied that term to Mitt Romney’s career at Bain Capital and opposing the free-trade policies that decimated American manufacturing long before Rick Santorum began lamenting the deindustrialization of America.  Stanley quotes these remarks by Buchanan from his 1996 campaign:

There’s no doubt there is an inherent contradiction between conservatism and unfettered capitalism.  Conservatives ought to be worshipping at a higher altar than the bottom line on a balance sheet.  What in heaven’s name is it that we conservatives want to conserve if not social stability and family unity?

Stanley is correct in seeing Buchanan as a conservative transformed into a revolutionary by the leftist ascendancy in American society:

Traditionalism created a paradox among orthodox Catholics like Pat.  On the one hand, Buchanan longed to obey.  On the other hand, to preserve anything worth obeying he had to fight the authority of reforming priests and bishops.  Traditionalism turned conservatives into unlikely revolutionaries.

This insight is also applicable outside the Catholic context.  Stanley quotes the penetrating analysis of contemporary America offered by Buchanan’s friend Sam Francis in this magazine:

We must understand that the dominant authorities in . . . the major foundations, the media, the schools, the universities, and most of the system of organized culture, including the arts and entertainment—not only do nothing to conserve what most of us regard as our traditional way of life, but actually seek its destruction or are indifferent to its survival.  If our culture is going to be conserved, then we need to dethrone the dominant authorities that threaten it.

Buchanan’s campaigns were an attempt to dethrone those dominant authorities.  He was shaped by, and remains loyal to, the America that existed before the cultural revolutions of the 1960’s, just as the revolutionaries have no use for the America that predated them.  This is why Buchanan was viciously attacked at the time and is still viciously attacked today, most recently by leftist groups petitioning MSNBC to terminate his employment, using Buchanan’s most recent book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive Until 2025?, as a pretext.

Unfortunately, Buchanan’s presidential campaigns, to which Stanley devotes the bulk of his biography, did not succeed.  There were many reasons for this failure.  The task was always a daunting one.  As I argued in 2008 in an article on VDare.com,

What Buchanan did in his campaigns, by defending traditional morality and beliefs and arguing against mass immigration and globalism, was to take on both wings of America’s elite at the same time—the left-wing elite that gives lip service to displaced manufacturing workers but is really animated by its hatred for traditional morality and its desire to advance social radicalism; the right-wing elite that gives lip service to defending traditional morality but is really animated by its desire to advance the interests of transnational corporations and enrich its members.

When Buchanan showed signs of succeeding, both wings attacked him.  As Stanley notes of Buchanan’s victory in the New Hampshire primary in 1996, “No humiliation the Tea Party endured in 2010 could match the things that were said about Pat Buchanan in New Hampshire, 1996.”  And the resources of the campaign were simply insufficient to meet such a challenge.  What Stanley wrote of the 1992 campaign was true of them all: “his campaign was a genuine crusade of the little man; paid for and staffed by ordinary people united in anger at the way things were.”

[To subscribe to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, click here.]

But another reason the campaigns failed is that too many of those who knew enough to support Buchanan refused to do so.  Buchanan has long been a stalwart social conservative, and he certainly is the most socially conservative candidate to have won a Republican primary or caucus in the post-Reagan era.  But Buchanan ran his campaigns without any significant support from the leaders of the Religious Right.  As Stanley observes (again regarding the 1992 campaign), “the organized religious right was committed to supporting [President Bush].”  In 1996 and 2000, its leaders preferred Bob Dole and George W. Bush, even though neither man could match the consistency and intensity of Buchanan’s social conservatism.  Indeed, in 1996, Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition did all he could to help Bob Dole beat back the challenge from Buchanan, especially in the South Carolina primary.  The same is true of the more conservative members of the Beltway Right, none of whom bestirred themselves to help Buchanan, even when they agreed with Buchanan on most of the issues.

Then there was Buchanan’s run as the Reform Party candidate in 2000.  Although Stanley is critical of that campaign, he does note that at one point national polls showed George W. Bush at 39 percent, Al Gore at 35 percent, and Buchanan at 16 percent—far more than the 5 percent the Reform Party would have needed to continue to receive federal matching funds.  Buchanan’s goal, as he told supporters, was to create “a new fighting conservative traditionalist party in America.”  Unfortunately for Buchanan, mainstream conservatism had become obsessed with the obvious moral failings of Bill Clinton, and, as a result, most conservatives were too consumed by the need to deny Al Gore the White House to consider whether the cause of conservatism might benefit from “a new fighting conservative traditionalist party in America.”  Another significant problem was Ross Perot, whose chief political aide, Russ Verney, had encouraged Buchanan to run for the Reform Party nomination.  But after Buchanan had served Perot’s interests by thwarting former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura’s attempt to take over the Reform Party, Perot turned on Buchanan: “Perot could use Pat to break [Ventura], and then use the convention to break Pat.  The Buchanans were being set up.”  Indeed, Perot later signed an affidavit stating that he regarded Buchanan’s opponent for the Reform Party nomination, John Hagelin (a devotee of transcendental meditation and “yogic flying”), as the nominee of the Reform Party, and ultimately endorsed George W. Bush—even though Bush championed NAFTA, which both Perot and Buchanan had opposed.

There are problems with Stanley’s biography.  He sometimes adopts conventional criticisms of Buchanan without much additional thought or analysis.  He has a tendency to employ colorful generalizations to keep his narrative flowing, even when those generalizations are supported by scanty evidence at best.  And he gets a number of details wrong, including attributing to me a belief that the Republican establishment “cheated” during the 1996 campaign and citing me to establish that John Hagelin won the support of the Reform Party in Ohio.  Neither statement is accurate.  Stanley devotes little attention to the substance of the many books Buchanan has written since the 1996 campaign, not to mention the many White House memos and hundreds of columns Buchanan has authored, and the transcripts of Buchanan’s numerous television appearances.

Despite these flaws, anyone who followed Buchanan’s presidential campaigns and remains interested in this American statesman will want to read Stanley’s biography.

This review first appeared in the March 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. To subscribe, click here.

It’s when we get to the “beyond,” however, that things get interesting.

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What, exactly, is Paul’s endgame?  What does he want?  This is the question the pundits are asking, and the answer is maddeningly elusive.

On the one hand, Republican primary voters are increasingly open to his message of real free markets (as opposed to the crony capitalism championed by most Republicans), the defense of civil liberties (against largely Republican antagonists), and a noninterventionist foreign policy (an idea opposed by the leadership of both parties).  He is regularly getting around 20 percent of the vote in GOP primaries, and his supporters are mostly (albeit not exclusively) young, independents inclined to vote Republican, and not that well off (under $50,000 per year).

His support grew by the day, in spite of a media blackout—and when simply refusing to report on his campaign didn’t put a dent in his support, the mainstream media turned to smear tactics.  That hasn’t worked, either.

On the other hand, Paul’s support within the GOP has a definite ceiling: I’d be surprised if his poll numbers exceeded 25 percent in any state’s primary.  This is a commentary not on Paul, but on the evolution of the Republicans, whose brand has been sullied by eight years of George W. Bush’s big-government conservatism.  Since many Republican presidential primaries are closed, Paul’s political fortunes are left in the hands of those who are registered members of a party committed to eternal war, corporate subsidies, and the cult of the presidency.  The political independents and disaffected Democrats who make up half his base are prevented from voting for him in closed GOP primaries, which is why we see polls showing him in a dead heat with Barack Obama in the general election juxtaposed against other polls showing him in the upper teens in the GOP primary pack.

GOP leaders are living in fear of a Paul third-party candidacy in the general election: Polls show Paul would garner 18 percent of the vote as an independent, and as the election draws nearer and scrutiny of Romney gets more intense, I fully expect that number to rise.

Provocatively, Paul hasn’t ruled out a third-party run, but he says he isn’t planning on it, and doesn’t want to do it.  Of course he doesn’t want to do it: Who would?  After all, even getting on the ballot is a Herculean task; and besides, he’s having too much fun right now running in the major leagues to be sent down prematurely to play third-party “gadfly,” which he did in 1988 with negligible success.  So he’s likely to keep them guessing until the very last moment.

[Click here to subscribe to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, so you won't miss one of Justin Raimondo's exclusive columns!]

If the GOP bigwigs are hoping Paul will eventually endorse the nominee, and bring his supporters into the Romney camp, they don’t know anything about the Texas congressman, who has spent his whole political career fighting the very forces represented by Romney and his backers.  Take it from me: It isn’t going to happen.  And even if it did—if Ron Paul were suddenly possessed by an evil spirit—he wouldn’t bring very many of his supporters with him.  His followers are just like him: principled, cantankerous, and uninterested in merging with the “mainstream.”

The GOP hierarchy thinks it has Paul over a barrel.  By holding his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), hostage, the wags inform us that Paul is unlikely to launch a third-party campaign, because it would supposedly end Rand’s career.

Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.  This isn’t just a political campaign—it’s a cause.  The many followers who have been recruited to his banner are expecting something more than a fizzle-out in Tampa.  They have put their hearts and souls—and, more significantly (for libertarians), their cash—into this effort, and they aren’t going to be happy with some anticlimactic end to the Ron Paul story.  They want closure.  They want to know they at least did everything they could to avoid the apocalypse Paul has spent the last 30 years or so warning us about: an economic downturn that will make the crash of ’08 look like child’s play, and the end of liberty in America.

In my view, a third-party campaign by Paul is the logical outcome of his entire career: After being rejected by a GOP mutated beyond recognition, he and his brigades of fervent followers will not be content until they’ve stormed the gates of the federal Leviathan and made a good-faith attempt at bringing the monster down.  It will be Paul’s last hurrah—and, perhaps, the last hurrah of our Old Republic.

This article first appeared in the March 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  Click here to subscribe, so you won't miss one of Justin Raimondo's exclusive columns!