Illustration by Tom Bachtell

For the past six months or so, the Republican-primary electorate has had a polite, patient, reliable, steadily employed suitor chatting with Mom and Dad in the parlor, while a series of more exciting but less appropriate rivals have come knocking at the back door. Mitt Romney will probably win in the end, but each of his serially surging competitors enjoys more immediate access to some essential region of the Republican soul. Herman Cain is the tough, no-bullshit businessman, Rick Santorum the devout pro-lifer, Rick Perry the hypermasculine cowboy, Michele Bachmann the evangelical populist, Newt Gingrich the swashbuckling geostrategist.

It seems fitting that the final surge should belong to Ron Paul, who speaks most directly to one of his party’s deepest emotions: hostility to government. At seventy-six, Paul has aged perfectly into his personality. He’s a white-haired, wide-eyed prophet—it’s easy to imagine him in white robes, instead of a business suit—who must rail against the outrages he has witnessed. To a pinched, stressed, war-weary, declinist nation, he offers the clearest program of any of the candidates. Five federal departments gone in Year One. Ten per cent of the federal workforce laid off. Income tax abolished, along with the I.R.S. Regulations and social programs repealed. No more foreign wars; no more foreign aid; not even very much foreign policy.

Especially to the self-selected group that comes to the Iowa Republican caucuses, Paul’s positions are pulse quickening. If you are antitax, Paul has that sentiment nailed more than any other candidate. If you are antiwar, Paul is right there with you. If you fear for your personal freedoms, Paul has you covered. And if you want a sweeping philosophy, deeply grounded in fundamental texts (Hayek, von Mises, Rothbard), Paul is your man. Nobody has a better claim to be a protest candidate. He’s the only one who has ever run for office from a third party. He’s not about passing bills; he’s about root-and-branch change. His popularity, even if it’s temporary, demonstrates that all politics isn’t necessarily local—that big ideas can exert a pull on voters, too.

Paul’s baseline obsession is with currency: President Nixon’s decision, forty years ago, to take the United States off the gold standard is what brought him into politics. His hatred of the Federal Reserve Board is related to a mistrust of currencies managed by governments. Underlying everything is, of course, a larger mistrust—the sense that in some hushed Washington conference room highly consequential arrangements are being made that will help a few privileged insiders and hurt ordinary Americans. Although Paul has spent most of his life directly benefitting from one or another federal payroll or program, starting when he served in the Air Force, he isn’t just striking a pose when he describes government as the enemy of freedom. He means it.

The other candidates ignored Paul until he looked like a serious threat, and then they began attacking him. He doesn’t care whether Iran has nuclear weapons. He wouldn’t have killed Osama bin Laden. He’s the only Republican candidate who is not an ardent supporter of Israel. He suggests that the 9/11 attacks were comeuppance for our misguided interventionism, and doesn’t think they justified a declaration of war. He has given at least silent assent to full-on paranoia and racism among his supporters. Gingrich has declared Paul’s views to be “totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American.”

Yet what is and isn’t part of the mainstream is something that political campaigns determine. And the truth is that Paul’s vision reveals—with candor and specificity—what the G.O.P.’s rhetorical hostility to government would mean if it were rigorously put into practice. A minimal state, without welfare provisions for the unemployed. A quarter of a million federal workers—as a first installment—joining those unemployed. Foreign policy and national defense reduced to a few ballistic-missile submarines. The civil-rights legislation of the nineteen-sixties repealed as so much unwarranted government intrusion. As for the financial crisis, Paul would have countenanced no regulation that might have prevented it, no government stabilization of the financial system after it happened, and no special help for working people hurt by it. This is where the logic of government-shrinking leads.

Even if Paul wins in Iowa, his campaign will almost surely falter; don’t count on seeing him deliver a prime-time address at the Republican National Convention. Still, Paul’s brief heyday will—like the Tea Party, itself a rather Pauline affair—have an effect, on both parties. For the Republicans, the question is whether Paul’s enumeration of the minimal-state particulars will entrench the appeal of government-bashing or serve, instead, as a vaccine that protects the Party against taking politically disastrous stands in the future. Would a President Romney be able to operate under the rules that applied to Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes—as long as you say you’re for limited government, you can expand government freely as the need arises—or would the lingering effect of Paul’s campaign curtail his options?

For the Democrats, Paul presents a different problem. In politics, there’s the small set of issues that draw public attention and then there’s everything else—ninety-five per cent of what happens in Washington. When anti-government rhetoric meets big issues like war and economic disaster, it’s usually good for the Democrats, because they can make the argument for action without being hypocritical. On the small issues, though, the triumph of anti-government rhetoric has been a real impediment for President Obama. It gives the Republicans a justification to oppose, by rote, every appointment and every expenditure, which helps make their belief in public-sector inefficiency self-fulfilling but otherwise doesn’t do anybody much good.

Right now, it must be tempting for Obama to let Ron Paul’s moment play out as long as possible: it usefully draws attention to the less seemly aspects of Republican political culture. But silence doesn’t solve the problem of day-to-day, full-bore Republican resistance. Obama would do well to take Paul’s success as an opportunity to engage in a debate about fundamentals. He’ll have an easier time governing in practice if he can defend governance in principle. ♦