Brent Humphreys/Redux

Originally published in the May 2011 issue

Now it's time to go backstage. Down the narrow space between the back wall and the high blue curtain, washed by the white noise of eleven thousand overcaffeinated believers waiting in a huge ballroom filled to standing room, plus two overflow ballrooms where the man's message will be received on giant screens. Here's the door to the small drab room where assorted politicians wait to audition to be the future of America. And here's Ron Paul, smiling and holding out his hand. "Nice to see ya," he says.

"You seem a little busy."

"Yeah, we're just about to get ready here."

On the other side of the cinder-block wall and high blue curtain, voices cry out one and two and then a sudden chorus, Ron Paul, Ron Paul, End the Fed, Ron Paul! Ron Paul! End the Fed! RON PAUL! RON PAUL! In another twenty minutes, he'll walk out into the wall of lights and the crowd at this Woodstock for conservatives will explode in cheers and applause and shouts of Ron Paul! and End the Fed!, another step in his amazing journey from eccentric regional oddball to the red-hot center of the American debate — after a lifetime of ridicule and obscurity, sweet vindication indeed.

Now he sits back down, pulling a padded office chair up to a round linoleum table. He's small and trim as a ten-year-old, with an unshakable air of small-town decency, and his expression seems to have just two settings: In repose, at seventy-five years old, with white hair and dark emphatic eyebrows and those deep bags slashed across his cheekbones, he's every inch the stern patriarch. But when he smiles, his features soften and suddenly he's Tom Sawyer cruising the neighborhood on his beloved Schwinn.

He smiles like that when he explains why he's never found it hard to be on the short end of a 1-to-434 vote. "Sometimes a bill will be maybe 51 percent good and 49 percent bad, and you just have to have your own rules about that. Generally speaking, if a bill has bad stuff in it, even though there's a lot of good stuff, I still think that's incrementalism."

See, it's not about him. Ron Paul doesn't think that way. It's about this neat idea, principles versus incrementalism. That's why he's taken more lonely stands than any other politician in American history: against the Iraq war even though he's a Republican, against the Defense of Marriage Act even though he's a conservative Christian, against farm subsidies even though he represents a rural district, against the Texas Medical Center even though he's from Texas — the list goes on and on. He refused to award congressional medals to Rosa Parks, Ronald Reagan, the Pope, and Mother Teresa. After Hurricane Katrina, he voted against sending federal help to Louisiana.

"Once you say, 'Well, you know, we live in the real world and sometimes you have to give in a little bit,' then you're never yourself, you're never your own person, and they'll badger you to death. So it's much easier for me to follow a set of principles than fussin' and fumin' on knowing exactly when you're supposed to throw in the towel."

The hands crossed in his lap are the oldest things about him, parchment between knuckles knobby with age, an echo of his almost priestly mixture of kindness and abstraction. He's still the man who treated poor patients for free and flew home from Washington to deliver babies. But now his patient is a rather audacious idea.

"The police are supposed to be local people, and your own community should decide how many policemen you want. And at the national level, we have nearly a hundred thousand federal agents now who carry guns — OSHA and EPA and the IRS. They carry guns, and they shouldn't."

And the income tax should be cut to zero. "The income tax is based on the principle that the government owns everything, and they allow you to keep a certain percent. So people on the Hill, even Republicans, say, 'Well, we can't cut taxes 'cause that'll cost the government money.' Well, it's your money! How can I say that it's costing government if I give you more of your money back?"

Other Republicans have demonstrated an astonishing talent for revirginization — yes, they voted for destructive and unnecessary foreign entanglements, heedless expansion of the federal budget deficit, and vastly increased federal powers, but once Obama became president the hymen of their small-government ideals spontaneously regenerated. Paul chose to use the new Congress's ceremonial reading of the Constitution — a tribute to him — to chastise his colleagues for the hollowness of the stunt. "Will there be no more wars without an actual congressional declaration?" he asked. "Will the Federal Reserve Act be repealed? Will only gold and silver be called legal tender? Will we end all the unconstitutional federal departments, including the Departments of Energy, Education, Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and Labor? Will the Patriot Act be repealed and all the warrantless searches stopped? Will the TSA be restrained or abolished? Will the IRS's unconstitutional collection powers end? Will executive and judicial quasilegislative powers be ended? Will we end the federal war on drugs? Would we end the federal government's involvement in medical care? Will we end all the federal government's illusionary insurance programs? Will we ban secret prisons, trials without due process, and assassinations? Will we end our foreign policy of invasion and occupations?"

To the people who say this is wildly impractical, that the whole point of democracy is to make compromises, that you can measure his irrelevance in his long record of lonely votes, the congressman has an irrefutable answer. "It depends on how you measure effectiveness. If you want to pass a law just to say you can pass a law and say, 'I passed ten bills last year,' that's one way to measure effectiveness. The other way is to establish a record and send the message and get people to join you and maybe change people's thinking in the long term. I would say I'm more long term. The next election has never been of much interest to me — it was the next generation that I cared about."

The next generation is on the other side of the blue curtain. RON PAUL! RON PAUL! RON PAUL!

Something strange is happening. It's February in Washington, and for days, these ardent young Ron Paul fans have been zooming around town in packs, skinny boys in dark suits, like church groups or squads of young Scientologists, full of purpose and excitement, all very amiable but also laser-focused and given to chanting Ron Paul! or End the Fed! at any given moment. Most of them paid their own way to come here, couch-surfing and doubling up in cheap motels. They did this because the whole point of this event — the annual gathering of hardcore conservative activists known as the Conservative Political Action Conference — is to gauge the enthusiasm of the base. But the Republican leaders who run the event are doing everything they can to ignore the enthusiasm of the base.

The clash started right at the beginning. The Paul kids spent much of their time attending a completely separate convention across the hall, where the speakers — people like Tom Woods, author of Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse — tell them that elites are looting the national Treasury, that the Patriot Act treats every American as a suspect, that Abraham Lincoln was a dictator who used the Civil War to close newspapers and put editors in jail. At around three on the first day, they began streaming into the territory their advance troops had established on the left side of the main ballroom. Scattered through their ranks were a handful of modern primitives with big hoops in their ears, a girl with a Korn logo tattooed on her shoulder, a Muslim woman in hijab.

Up onstage, Donald Trump was shuffling through his notes and saying that what we need is a competent leader. On cue, one of the kids shouted: RON PAUL!

Trump ignored this. "$4.54 for gas because we have nobody that calls OPEC and says, That price better get lower."

RON PAUL!

Trump ignored that, too.

RON PAUL!

At last, Trump turned to the left side of the room. "Ron Paul cannot get elected, I'm sorry."

The room erupted. Boo! Boo! Boo! Trump smiled at such foolishness. "I like Ron Paul, but honestly he has zero chance of getting elected."

More boos. And when Trump tried to change the subject, another cry broke out. END THE FED! END THE FED!

The Republican leaders who are putting on this show have been as startled as the rest of the country at the sudden potency of once marginal ideas. But to the kids, it's obvious. This is Ron Paul's moment. He's been warning for forty years that easy money would lead to economic collapse, then easy money led to economic collapse. He warned that the Iraq war would be an expensive and bloody mistake, and the Iraq war was an expensive and bloody mistake. He spent forty years asking Congress to follow a strict interpretation of the Constitution and investigate the Federal Reserve, and now there's a powerful freshman class of Republicans pushing a strict interpretation of the Constitution and an investigation of the Federal Reserve. In 2009, he slipped an amendment into the Wall Street — reform legislation that forced the Federal Reserve to release the details of thousands of secret loans it made during the 2008 financial crisis — the Korea Development Bank? Caterpillar? — and suddenly polls started showing that Americans disliked the Fed even more than the IRS. Every Republican in the House signed on to his bill to audit the Fed. In Virginia, Republicans have introduced a bill to study the possibilities of a state currency "in the event of a major breakdown of the Federal Reserve System." He's been called the "Tea Party's brain," and his son Rand is called the "senator from the Tea Party," and all day long the speakers seemed to have been participating in a Ron Paul soundalike competition. Senator Pat Toomey told a story about a little red hen who went on strike when a government agent told her that productive workers had to divide their profit with everyone else. Congressman Raul Labrador said that the best thing the government can do for a poor man is get the hell out of the way. Senator Ron Johnson ridiculed Democrats for passing regulations on fugitive dust and spilled milk, and Grover Norquist said that Obama takes money from people who have earned it and gives it to his friends. To a movement that fetishizes the Founders' act of rebellion over a tea tax, Ron Paul is the founding father.

When Trump finished, the moderator came out, joking. "Now there's a guy who doesn't suck up to an audience — I'm guessing there are a lot of Rand Paul fans out there!"

The left side of the room exploded in cheers. Then Rand Paul came on with curly hair and a confident rock-star energy that seemed to crackle in the dry air. In a speech that could have been written by his father, the most striking moment is a gauntlet in the face of mainstream Republicans: "If you refuse to acknowledge that there's any waste that can be culled from the military budget, you are a big-government conservative."

You could measure the shifting consensus in the size of the cheer, which built to a standing ovation. Then things really started to get uncomfortable. As Senator Paul waved goodbye, the Paul kids got up and began to walk out in an orderly file, hundreds of them crossing to the doors like a line of ants. Then, suddenly, boos and chants of RON PAUL! started breaking out along the line, as up onstage, a skinny old man in a dark suit began moving gingerly toward the podium.

The skinny old man was Donald Rumsfeld. From the center of the room, a commanding voice broke through the din: "QUIETTTTTT!"

A startled hush followed, and then Dick Cheney walked out from behind the curtain. He was the surprise guest, there to give his old friend CPAC'S "Defender of the Constitution" award. The authoritarian wing of the room exploded with glee as the Paul cadre continued to file out, an act of rebellion that threw everything slightly off. As the former vice-president told his old story about meeting Rumsfeld more than forty years ago during the Nixon administration, someone yelled, "Draft dodger!"

After a stunned hush, a single voice rang out across the room:

"Where's bin Laden?"

Necks craned as people looked for the source. There, over by the exit doors! That white kid with dreadlocks. In seconds, men in suits descended upon him and led him away.

Rumsfeld smiled, but he looked shaken. Not only should you buy a dog if you need a friend in Washington, he said, you should buy a small one, "because he might turn on you."

In the hall, one of the Paul kids muttered in disgust, "I was hoping someone would get up and throw the Constitution at him."

A CONSERVATIVE COSMOLOGY We measure the schism between Ron Paul's libertarianism and everybody else. Click here to enlarge the full map.

All this started because Ron Paul said something he wasn't supposed to say. During the second Republican presidential debate in 2007, when they had him shunted off to the far side and gave him as little airtime as possible, the subject of Al Qaeda came up. "They attack us because we've been over there," he said. "We've been bombing Iraq for ten years."

The idea that terrorists attack the U. S. because "they hate freedom" was always more of a slogan than a serious position, but it had frozen into Republican orthodoxy. "That's really an extraordinary statement," said an outraged Rudy Giuliani. "I don't think I've ever heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11." Even the moderator got huffy. "Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?" But Paul just continued in the same placid and rational way, oblivious to ordinary political calculations. "I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and free. They come and they attack us because we're over there. I mean, what would we think if other foreign countries were doing that to us?"

Outraged, some GOP officials mounted a campaign to have him barred from the next debate. The American Conservative dismissed his answer as a "technical response" that "didn't connect with the audience." Michelle Malkin said that "Ron Paul really has no business being onstage as a legitimate representative of Republicans." But the Internet exploded. Tens of thousands of young people joined his Facebook and Meetup groups. On hip news sites like Digg, stories about him consistently topped reader-interest statistics. The million-eyed hydra that is YouTube began spewing out Ron Paul raps and ballads and homages and even a rockumentary. He held an online fundraiser and raised more than $6 million in small contributions in a single day. And young people started showing up to his speeches by the thousands. At the University of Michigan, they broke into their first chant. END THE FED! END THE FED! END THE FED! They lit dollar bills and held them up like lighters at a Rush concert.

It wasn't just the war that moved them, the kids at CPAC explained. Ron Paul put a deeper meaning beneath everything. Words that other politicians used like screeches of chimpanzee code, Paul actually meant and could explain so that everything from the economic collapse to marijuana legalization to terrorism actually connected and made sense. Like the words on everyone's lips these days, small government. The way Ron Paul explains it, the U. S. Constitution was all about setting up a balance of powers in order to prevent a recurrence of government tyranny, a purpose emphasized by the Bill of Rights. The underlying principle was freedom. But there was a birth defect, in Paul's view, and that was Alexander Hamilton's success at pushing the other Founders down the path of centralized federal control. He doesn't care that it was a powerful American government, based in Washington and willing to invest in its people, that ultimately made the United States into the world-historic power that it is today, with a huge economy and a vast middle class. Nor does he care that it was that strong central government that ensured the survival of the young country, which was on the brink of failure without it. Nor does he care that the U. S. Constitution actually came into existence to take power away from the states, leaving them but the scraps in the vestigial Tenth Amendment. And he doesn't care that it was actually the sainted Jefferson who executed the Louisiana Purchase (unconstitutional in Paul's view), which doubled the size of the country. If we had stuck to what Congressman Paul views as our founding principles, we would have undoubtedly been a smaller and poorer and less consequential country, but also purer and freer and more peaceful. It's a trade he is willing to make.

From here, Paul's analysis leaps to the work of three refugees from totalitarian countries — Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand. All three saw pretty much any central government planning as a step on the "road to serfdom," as Hayek put it in the title of his most famous book. Planning was rooted in the idea of compassion, in the idea that a government had the right and even the obligation to take from the "producers" and give to people in need. Hayek and Mises showed how this led to a central bank that inflated the money supply to build grand projects or finance wars, slowly smothering freedom with the infinite ravenous blob of government. Rand popularized the movement with a novel called Atlas Shrugged, in which unions and regulation so ravage the American economy that the last producers withdraw to a hidden valley called "Galt's Gulch" while violent starving hordes wander the countryside like escapees from a Cormac McCarthy novel.

The last piece of the puzzle is the Federal Reserve, the demon child of Alexander Hamilton's central bank. Hamilton said a central bank could regulate and issue dollars, which would help the young nation trade with other nations, build an infrastructure and a Navy, react to crises, and pay off the Revolutionary War debt. But Thomas Jefferson warned against it in almost apocalyptic terms as a system "contrived for deluging the states with paper money instead of gold and silver, for withdrawing our citizens from the pursuits of commerce, manufactures, buildings, and other branches of useful industry, to occupy themselves and their capitals in a species of gambling, destructive of morality, and which had introduced its poison into the government itself."

Hamilton won, but his victory was only temporary. As every Ron Paul follower knows, the nation got rid of the central bank twice and brought it back each time. The last time was in 1913, when a cabal of private bankers led by J. P. Morgan created the Fed at a secret meeting on Jekyll Island. That set the stage for disaster, in Paul's view. He argues that the Fed caused the Depression by inflating the money supply to cause the boom of the Roaring Twenties, financed the welfare state and thousands of coercive attempts at social engineering, and made it way too easy to pay for a long series of unnecessary and wasteful wars.

This is why we can't trust a "fiat currency" like dollars, Paul says. In a world that seems to be out of control, where experts tell us what we're supposed to think, we need to place our trust in something real. That was Ayn Rand's message, linking liberal relativism to tyranny to paper currency. "Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced," Rand said. "Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it."

To Paul's followers, this story has become as familiar as the gospels. At CPAC, they even told it through a startling animated movie that portrayed bankers as monsters with octopus arms and bloodsucking ticks for heads. A cartoon Thomas Jefferson said the tree of liberty regularly needed to be watered with the blood of patriots, and the room broke into wild cheers when Aaron Burr shot Hamilton dead — and cheered again for the death of Hank Paulson, the former treasury secretary.

Any observer of the news can see how many of Paul's preoccupations have become central themes to the public debate — the Jeffersonian view of the Constitution, the revisionist claim that liberals made the Depression worse, the hostility toward bankers awkwardly stitched to a celebration of capitalism, the idea that there is something both impractical and immoral about taxing the "producers" — impractical because it only stifles them, and immoral because it is theft. The government has no legitimate claim on any citizen's money.

Common as these tropes have become, these are truly revolutionary ideas, which have taken root so firmly that it has become essential conservative thought that any taxation is theft, and that any spending of the public coin is socialism.

The difference is that a lot of conservatives just say this stuff without meaning it. It was conservatives, after all, who said that you can have small government along with two wars and seven hundred overseas military bases. But Ron Paul goes the other way. Philosophical and systematic and pure in a way that young people may be best qualified to understand, he lays bare the contradictions. That is the reason his ideas have spread like hidden veins throughout our culture, the reason he has become such a stunning challenge to the existing order. He means the words that everyone else just uses. He's flinty as a Founder and solid as the gold standard — not just the messenger but also the message.

This is how one of his CPAC fans puts it: "He makes you study economics, history, philosophy — when that light goes off, it lights up everything."

Backstage, Paul sits quietly in his chair, his hands folded in his lap. Trump's dismissive words didn't bother him, he says. "I don't take it personally. I mean, I'm always amazed at how much support we get. I always assumed that there would only be a small number of people who cared."

He really seems to mean this. Last night, during an appearance with his son Rand in front of a thousand young fans, he said he had always worked on low expectations. "I thought I'd come and go, and nobody would notice I'd ever been to Congress."

Spontaneously and in unison, the audience reacted: "Awwwwwwww."

"For years and years, I'd go to a campus and get fifteen or twenty people."

A boy stood up and shouted: "I love you, man!"

Sweet moments of male tenderness are the last thing you'd expect at the most conservative political gathering of the year, but Paul regularly inspires this kind of response. He tries not to let it affect him. "I'm always guarded," he explains backstage. "If I prepared for grand victories and said, 'I'm going to Washington, I'm going to balance the budget and restore liberty' — I mean, you could become neurotic. 'Cause you'd walk away and you wouldn't do anything."

On the other side of the curtain, prompted by some remark from the moderator, a thousand voices call his name. RON PAUL! RON PAUL! RON PAUL!

Paul usually stays away from personal topics — and he wouldn't think of framing a political attack in personal terms — preferring to focus instead on ideas. But the intensity of the moment leads to a rare glimpse of his earliest memories and deepest motivations. "We were five boys and we were all born in the Depression, so there wasn't really a lot of stuff around," he begins. "You didn't get allowances — you wanted money, you had to go work."

He was five when he got his first job, checking the bottles on the conveyor belt at his father's small dairy and earning a penny for each dirty one he caught. For the rest of his life, he remembered taking four or five of those pennies to the local store and getting a small bag of candy. He also remembered his grandmother saying they should hold on to the family land "in case the money goes bad."

After that, Paul worked all the time. He was a star on the high school track team, president of the student council, a wrestler, a swimmer, and an honor student, but he also managed to mow lawns, deliver newspapers, clerk in a drugstore, paint his high school, and work for his father's small dairy business. "I remember when I was sixteen, I thought I was pretty grown up because my dad allowed me to drive a truck," he says with a smile. "The milk truck was a very important thing to me."

He also delivered furniture and laundry and mail and managed a restaurant, too, working his way all through college and medical school. And he married his high school sweetheart and had five children just like his father and grandfather before him, and money was so tight that one Thanksgiving their collie had a litter and they sold a puppy for thirty-five dollars — gas money to take the kids to see their grandparents.

But college was when he began to question the values he'd been raised on, just like the students who are out there cheering for him right now. Part of it was the war in Korea. There was a draft on, and Paul heaved a huge sigh of relief when Eisenhower announced the truce. Then Suez blew up and he worried some more. "I was so thankful I didn't get drafted — it was very personal."

In the turmoil of those years, he began to wrestle with the conflict between faith and reason. Raised a strict Lutheran steeped in the catechism, he didn't see why the creator would give us such a powerful tool as reason and then expect us to ignore the fruits of science. "I just totally rejected the idea that we have to give up reason," he says. Today, he's just as flinty about political orthodoxy. "A substantial portion of the conservative movement has become a parody of its former self," he says. "Once home to distinguished intellectuals and men of letters, it now tolerates and even encourages anti-intellectualism and jingoism that would have embarrassed earlier generations of conservative thinkers."

It was during his earnest struggle with this question that he joined the conservative book club that introduced him to Hayek, who was soon followed by Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand. At the same time, he was reading Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative and studying isolationist conservative leaders like Robert "Mr. Republican" Taft. It all fit together in a brilliant flash. "Like a great discovery," he says.

The finishing touch, a surprising one, arrived with the 1960s: his draft notice. He didn't know much about Vietnam but he knew he didn't want to go anywhere to kill people. He volunteered for the Air Force to avoid the Army and ended up as a flight surgeon in San Antonio. "I did a lot of physicals of young men who thought it was exciting to fly helicopters," he tells me. "And I often wondered how many of those people I participated in sending over, and so many helicopters went down. For what? For what? The war was totally lost. Totally fruitless. Well, I wouldn't do that today. I would refuse to do that today."

When he got out, he moved to southeast Texas and began delivering babies. He started running for office after Nixon eliminated the last shred of the gold standard in 1971.

And for the next thirty-six years, the nation ignored him.

A few minutes later, he gets up and walks down the hall between the cinder-block wall and the blue curtain. A huge cheer breaks out as he walks onto the stage.

"Great to see you!" he cries. "Glad to see the revolution is continuing!"

He's completely transformed, on fire with purpose and pleasure. The task ahead goes deeper than just changing the parties, he says. We need to change our philosophy. The Patriot Act has nothing to do with patriotism. They always give laws names that are the opposite of what they really are. It's about destruction of the Fourth Amendment! We need to be just as concerned about our civil liberties as we are about our economic liberties.

As a speaker, Paul has always had the reputation of being dull and technical. Now he speaks without notes or teleprompter, the words flowing easily. Where the others tiptoe around the uprising in Egypt, he knows exactly what he thinks. How much money have we invested in Egypt, and now the government is crumbling?

His followers cheer. Foreign aid is "taking money from poor people of a rich country and giving it to the rich people of a poor country," he says. And how is it possible that the same neocons who mired us in Iraq and Afghanistan are now consulted as wise men by newspapers and television stations? The Constitution says to avoid foreign entanglements. It's none of our business.

The left side of the ballroom rises in a standing ovation.

It's time to bring the troops home, Paul continues. Half the people in this room wouldn't cut a penny from the military.

A guy in the audience flashes a peace sign, a startling sight at a convention of right-wing activists — a fish with feathers, a chimera out of ancient fables, the warning sign of strife among the gods. The kids break out in their END THE FED! chant as Paul charges ahead. If you can't steal from your neighbor, then you can't ask the government to steal for you. The right amount of redistribution of wealth is zero. Everybody talks about bipartisanship, but there's way too much bipartisanship. Democrats and Republicans both love to spend money! And here's an idea — wouldn't it be great if a person could just opt out? Say you give 10 percent of your income but don't ask the government for anything?

When he's finished, the whole room rises in a standing ovation, accompanied by the piercing blaaat of an air horn.

But the next day, the tension comes back during a session on foreign policy. The kids stream into the main ballroom around two, claiming their seats for the results of the CPAC presidential straw poll. Up onstage, John Bolton is warning about the dangers of the uprising in Egypt. Clearly the Muslim Brotherhood should not be allowed to participate in a future government because they are not a "real political party," and clearly President Obama isn't capable of dealing with the issue, so let's not lose sight of traditional Republican priorities. Cut entitlements, not the military, he says, getting some general applause.

But when he criticizes Obama for leaving Iraq, not a single pair of hands claps.

In the panel discussion that follows, an old-school foreign-policy realist named Anthony Cordesman tells the crowd that America is going to be in Afghanistan way past the official withdrawal date of 2012. "The spreadsheets already go on to 2020."

A cry goes out from the left side of the ballroom. No! No!

This will cost $100 billion a year or more, Cordesman continues.

More groans and cries. No! No! It's insane!

Cordesman looks down at them and speaks in a clipped, military voice that seems to come from another era. "Conservatism is supposed to deal with the facts. You have to deal with the situation as it is and not as you'd like it to be."

The next few speakers plunge into furious damage control. We don't need to be building roads and bridges in Afghanistan! Let our ungrateful clients solve their own problems! Where did we ever get the idea that the same government that can't educate our children or create jobs can create a viable nation overseas? A relieved audience cheers and whoops. But Cordesman cuts in coldly: "Get a few facts before you start cheering."

A few minutes later the same audience breaks into cheers for another military expert, except this one is describing the pleasures of vaporizing Taliban soldiers with U. S. missiles. The back-and-forth between the traditional Republican fans of military supremacy and the fans of small government goes up another notch at question time, when the Paul fans rush the microphone. The first one asks, "Which is closer to American values, being friends with Israel or knowing there are jailed dissidents and journalists?"

"I think there should be more jailed journalists," Ann Coulter says.

Standing in the back, a Paul fan named Geoff Schipley — Ohio State, 2009 — suppresses a grimace. "Locking up journalists is a joke now?"

The next questioner presses the point. Isn't everything more complicated than liberals versus conservatives, Right versus Left?

No, Coulter answers. "Liberals want the family destroyed, they want religion destroyed — because then you have loyalty directly to the state."

The right side of the room laughs, the left side doesn't. "That kind of talk is so useless," Schipley says. "I don't want to have quick one-liners. I want to have substantive policy discussions about why we got here in the first place."

Finally, it's time for the straw poll. The moderator reminds the huge crowd that it's a straw poll, not a Zogby poll, which the kids naturally interpret as a diss.

RON PAUL! RON PAUL!

The pollster tells them that this year shattered every record, with 3,742 votes cast.

RON PAUL! RON PAUL!

And the winner of the straw poll is —

A solid minute of screaming follows. The most conservative gathering of the year has been taken over by a populist rebellion.

"Your base is watching," says the moderator.

A week later, sitting in his office in Washington, Paul laughs about the reaction to that moment. "Did you see what Fox did?"

"Where they accidentally ..."

"Accidentally! They showed me winning, then they used a shot of booing from last year's convention."

It's true. Not only that, but Fox played the tape while Paul was on camera. When the footage ended, Bill Hemmer summed it up. "Probably not the reaction [Ron Paul] was hoping for." Then he turned to Paul. "Who is in the audience booing you?"

Later, Fox said it was just another mistake, like the time two years ago when they spliced unrelated footage of an enormous crowd into a story on a much smaller Tea Party rally. But Paul isn't buying it. "I don't know why I should bug them," he tells me.

Paul's office is right across from the Capitol Building, almost level with the white dome. The walls are a somber dark blue, with pictures of his grandchildren tucked in empty spots. He sits at a small conference table with the same relaxed dignity as before, philosophizing with the enthusiasm of a college student.

"If we had more freedom, we would be more prosperous, we would have less wars, and we would have more influence because we would be a better example. Whether it was the Spanish-American War or World War I or Vietnam, how many millions of people died, how much wealth was consumed? Boy, I don't know how anybody could argue the case that we would be a better nation if we hadn't all adjusted to big-government programs and become Hamiltonians."

But without a central bank to build the Interstate Highway System and the Erie Canal, without the GI Bill and Social Security ... ?

"If the Fed comes in and says, 'We're impatient, we'll just print money, boom!' Yeah, there is a boom and you might build the canal faster, but you'll get careless and do the wrong things and build things that you don't need. And it serves special interests, the bankers and the big corporations who get injected by the Fed."

But can't the road to serfdom go both ways? Lots of governments cut back.

"I'm all for the effort, but it's probably similar to me treating an alcoholic and saying, 'Well, just quitting makes you get DTs and you can die, so let's say we wean you off. So let's say you drink' — well, I don't know. What's a lot?" He turns to an assistant. "Could anybody drink twenty beers in a day?"

"Oh, yeah."

"In an evening," another person says.

Paul laughs. "Let's say they drink thirty bottles of beer a day. 'All right, tomorrow, I want you to drink twenty-nine bottles of beer.' "

He stops for a moment, and sings. "Twenty-nine bottles of beer on the wall ..." It's a disarming little moment of boyish spontaneity, then he goes back to the sentence in progress. "Then twenty-eight, then twenty-seven, then twenty-six, and wean yourself down. Have you ever heard of an alcoholic being treated like that? It doesn't work! It doesn't work. The alcoholic has to change his philosophy of life. He has to get down to the bottom and swear it all off and go through the agony of withdrawal."

The agony of withdrawal is the tricky part. At the beginning of one of Paul's favorite books, Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt admits that the traditional craftsmen who rioted during the early Industrial Revolution were not exactly irrational, since "their families did not fully emerge from the hunger and misery entailed by the introduction of the machine for the next forty years." That's why all of Paul's economists slip in a

qualifier. "A bridge is built," says Hazlitt. "If it is built to meet an insistent public demand, if it solves a traffic problem or a transportation problem otherwise insoluble ... there can be no objection." For Hayek, the loophole is industrial safety. "To prohibit the use of certain poisonous substances or to require special precautions in their use, to limit working hours or to require certain sanitary arrangements, is fully compatible with the preservation of competition."

Those are big loopholes, just like the Commerce and General Welfare Clauses, big enough to drive a big government through. But Paul's response is as serene as ever. "Maybe Hazlitt would disagree with me, but I argue the case that if 1 percent of the people need food stamps, you give up 100 percent of the principle. And then 1 percent becomes 2 percent, until now we have 30 percent. It's not gonna be the perfect free society until you reject the whole idea that the government should be redistributing wealth."

The implications are ruthless — starving old people in the street, literally. But Paul has been thinking about this ever since those years in medical school when he started to wrestle with Ayn Rand, the source of so many currently popular ideas about winners subsidizing losers and "parasites" sucking the life out of "producers." It is a view of the world that is almost purely academic, so devoted to an ideology of pure libertarianism as to erase notions of the common good, so strictly bound to a philosophy as to almost render to abstractions the actual people who populate the earth.

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil," Rand wrote in Atlas Shrugged. "That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter."

The impact she had on Paul was profound. "She challenged me more because she was so critical of the compassion of Christianity — or any religion, for that matter. So she made me, you know, reassess my values."

Was there a fundamental split between capitalism and Christianity, between freedom and responsibility? Paul read all her books and searched his heart. Finally he found the answer.

"The more I understood Christianity, to me it's very libertarian. You talk about salvation, your soul. How can anything be more important? And how is it done? It's done by the individual. It's not done collectively. In the Parables, in the New Testament, so often they emphasize the importance of the individual, the ninety-nine and one and the sheep, you know. The individual is so important. To me, that's very libertarian."

It all connects, not just economics and politics but the deepest questions of spirituality. "My assumption is that a hundred years ago or so, liberty got divided in pieces," Paul says. "The Founders, I believe, thought it was one piece. Your personal liberty and your economic liberty were one in the same."

Paul is the Christian Scientist of economics, convinced that the "medicine" of government planning is the sin of pride — if you really trust the Lord, you don't give your children antibiotics and you don't give your grandparents Social Security. He is willing to increase social pain dramatically so the nation can be born again.

"But now you have people all over the place," he says. "You can have somebody saying the president can do anything he wants, that civil liberties don't mean anything, but defending economic liberties. If you say the general-welfare clause overrides the powers enumerated in Article 1, Section 8, you can probably take that document and make it say anything you want. But there's so much in the Constitution that gives the responsibility to the Congress. The president's not supposed to go to war, or be in charge of taxing and spending. The Founders thought the Congress would always remain the number one of the three branches — that's why it's high on a hill, above the Supreme Court, above the White House."

But you can't win this argument in the halls of Congress. You have to convince young people. "That's the only thing that will work. It's not going to be something we're gonna impose on people. People have to have a willingness to believe." That's why the thing that bothers him the most is the attacks on the kids — David Horowitz called the Paul kids "Jew-hating storm troopers." The right-wing blog RedState accused them of "mouthbreathing" and "poor personal hygiene." Radio host Kevin McCullough called them gay-marriage supporters who "slander public servants."

"I signed more books than I had ever signed before. I think I signed a thousand signatures afterwards. And they were so clean-cut. I'da been proud if they were my kids. Of course, it doesn't annoy me when their hair is purple either. That's part of what it's all about, is not being overly judgmental politically. Now if that had been my kid ..."

He laughs. "But no, most of 'em, I was so pleased with. And it always seems to get better. But not many people interview 'em. I never see those young people interviewed on TV."

And to the people who say this is all a chimera, who say that Paul's plan to restructure the life of America according to his interpretation of the Constitution is central planning on a giant scale, that trying to stop the government from fixing problems is contrary to human nature, that it's just plain wrong to claim that your economic system is scientifically determined and morally superior, that the whole point of democracy is to make compromises and you can measure Ron Paul's irrelevance in his long record of lonely votes, Ron Paul has an irrefutable answer. It is pure and unshakable, as solid as the things we used to make in the days when men could still touch the things they made: The state gets in the way of our salvation. And someday, in the sweet but distant future, when our hearts are finally pure, the state will wither away, and all men will be free.

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