I don't care if people on the left don't "get" Ron Paul or the concept of libertarianism/laissez faire. There are perhaps unbridgeable differences there at an axiomatic level. I'm not offended if people with whom I have nothing in common call me an idiot or a kook, though I try to have the good manners not to respond in kind.

What bugs me is the reaction of people on my side of the political divide to Paul's candidacy. I live in the Northeast, in a heavily Republican enclave. People have winced (I have actually seen a doubletake, like out of a cartoon) at my Ron Paul button and bumper sticker. There are waves of hostility emanating from the center-right and the neo-cons(not as much from the religious right) at Paul's candidacy. My last bastion of smugness at not being a Democrat is collapsing: I recall thinking, after 2000, that at least we Republicans would never have been as vicious to a fringe candidate as mainstreams Democrats were to Nader and his voters.

There are different breeds of Republican. Some are in the GOP because their parents and grandparents were. Some are evangelical Christians or family values types. Then there are the neo-cons and others who support the war on terror. I suppose there are a depressing number of racists and sexists who see the GOP as an alternative to the civil rights platforms associated with the Democrats.

But then there are people like me. Hard-core libertarians who at some point in their youth heard the Republicans referred to as the small-government party and plighted their troth then and there. My completely unscientific estimate is that about a quarter of the population, and somewhere between a third and a half of the GOP, are libertarians. The more intellectual members of the group are into Austrian economics and read histories that explain how the effects of the Great Depression were exacerbated (indeed largely created) by FDR's misguided Keynesian policies. Other people don't care about theory so much, they just have an instinctive thirst for personal liberty and a suspicion of a government which seems at every turn to be snatching it from us.

The largely center-left mainstream media basically ignores the libertarian right. Many voting trends and polling results can be explained by this. The New York Times seems particularly confused when, for example, it finds that majorities of the American public oppose the war and the Patriot Act and yet don't seem to vote for anti-war candidates in the same numbers. Another example is Bush's big-government programs, such as his education and prescription drug plans. The MSM assumes that all the opposition for these programs comes from the left, from, say, those who want a more generous drug benefit. A lot of it is libertarian opposition, but that gets lost in the wash. Ditto health-care reform: libertarians agree with everyone else that our health care system is a mess, but we locate the problem in excessive government interference in what should be a free market in health care rather than insufficient government control and dissemination of an entitlement. In polls, however, libertarians get lumped together with liberals as dissatisfied with the system.

Not this election cycle, and maybe not even the next one, but sooner or later, the libertarian vote will be up for grabs. We're just too sick of not even getting lip service from "our" party anymore, even as we have to defend all the true kooks we find ourselves uncomfortably allied with. I don't think a third party is feasible, not because I'm concerned with a spoiler effect but because most libertarians kind of recoil at that level of organization and involvement (thankfully, the occasional Ron Paul is willing to devote himself to public service). Can we migrate to the Democrats? I don't know - they will howl at the presence of pro-business, pro-free-trade, anti-regulation gun nuts in their midst. But sooner or later something's gotta give. It is gradually becoming clear that the new Republican party has little use for us except our votes. They'll might have to lose a few elections before they realize they need us - we're, like, half their voting base!

Right now, I believe that Ron Paul is single-handedly keeping the GOP a viable party. As long as he is (barely) tolerated on a Republican stage, libertarians feel they have some presence in the party. Young people who are still wondering where they stand politically may make a decades-long commitment to the GOP because of their current attraction to this one candidate. I find it annoying, though predictable, that Ron Paul isn't enthusiastically embraced by the party establishment as evidence of our "big tent" and as a proven fund-raiser. I find it offensive that McCain, during the last debate, told Paul that his foreign policy attitude was the sort of thing that caused World War II (excuse me?!? Which of the two of them has ever had a hand in actually *starting* a war?). Anyway, if we ever see a revitalization of the small-government, pro-liberty ethos that drew so many of us to the Republicans to start with, it will start here, with Ron Paul and his supporters.