My Sunday column argues that the great Rand Paul filibuster represented an important step in the Kentucky Senator’s quest to widen the Republican conversation on national security beyond the “strength good, appeasement bad” rhetoric that the party had fallen back on (though not as completely as some Republicans would like) in the aftermath of the Bush presidency. The most persuasive counterpoint to my interpretation is that the right’s rally around Paul’s drones-on-American-soil stand is sui generis, with no wider implications for the G.O.P. foreign policy debates: Many of the Republican Party’s hawks have always been skeptical of drone warfare (preferring boots on the ground, more prisoner-taking, etc.), and the fact that Paul was making a reductio ad hellfirum argument about drones taking down latter-day Jane Fondas made it that much easier for them to leap on the partisan bandwagon and #standwithRand.

This is Dave Weigel’s point, explaining why so many normally interventionist Republicans were willing to take sides with Paul against John McCain, and it’s correct as far as it goes. But given how Republican foreign debates have proceeded in the recent past, I still tend to think the legitimization of Rand Paul as a right-wing folk hero has implications that extend beyond the narrow hypothetical where he chose to plant his filibuster flag. That’s because, as I’ve argued before, the relative sterility of the foreign policy conversation on the right doesn’t reflect a deep conservative uniformity on national security questions; rather, it mostly reflects the fact that the potential standard-bearers for a less interventionist worldview have been relatively easy for hawks to delegitimize as cranks, Israel-haters, RINOs, etc. And so the fact that a lot of the support for Paul from his fellow Republicans is opportunistic and confined to a narrow policy hypothetical matters less than the fact that the support exists at all — that a politician who has consistently advocated a more militarily-restrained foreign policy is suddenly being supported, elevated, and extolled at the expense of his more interventionist critics within the party.

None of this means that the entire party is about to tilt dramatically toward realism. But legitimizing, as Real Conservatives (TM), politicians who advocate restraint is a necessary precondition to broader policy change. Opportunism follows influence, and creates it — and right now Paul has more influence within his party than every other realist, paleoconservative and libertarian Republican of the last decade put together.