LIB*ER*TAR*IAN

n. 1. a person who believes in the doctrine of the freedom of the will

2. a person who believes in full individual freedom of thought,
expression and action

3. a freewheeling rebel who hates wiretaps,
loves Ron Paul and is redirecting politics

How to make sense of the Ron Paul revolution? What's behind the
improbably successful (so far) presidential campaign of a 72-year-old
10-term Republican congressman from Texas who pines for the gold
standard while drawing praise from another relic from the
hyperinflationary 1970s, punk-rocker Johnny Rotten?

Now with about 5 percent (and climbing) support in polls of likely
Republican voters, Paul set a one-day GOP record by raising $4.3
million on the Internet from 38,000 donors on Nov. 5 -- Guy Fawkes
Day, the commemoration of a British anarchist who plotted to blow up
Parliament and kill King James I in 1605. Paul's campaign, which is
three-quarters of the way to its goal of raising "$12 Million to Win"
by Dec. 31, didn't even organize the fundraiser -- an
independent-minded supporter did.

When a fierce Republican foe of the wars on drugs and terrorism is
able, without really trying, to pull in a record haul of campaign cash
on a day dedicated to an attempted regicide, it's clear that a new and
potentially transformative force is growing in American politics.

That force is less about Paul than about the movement that has erupted
around him -- and the much larger subset of Americans who are
increasingly disillusioned with the two major political parties' soft
consensus on making government ever more intrusive at all levels,
whether it's listening to phone calls without a warrant, imposing
fines of half a million dollars for broadcast "obscenities" or jailing
grandmothers for buying prescribed marijuana from legal
dispensaries.

Paul, who entered Congress in 1976, has been dubbed "Dr. No" by his
colleagues because of his consistent nay votes on federal spending,
military intervention in Iraq and elsewhere, and virtually all
expansions of federal power (he cast one of three GOP votes against
the original USA Patriot Act). But his philosophy of principled
libertarianism is anything but negative: It's predicated on the
fundamental notion that a smaller government allows individuals the
freedom to pursue happiness as they see fit.

Given such a live-and-let-live ethos, it's no surprise that at a time
when people run screaming from such labels as "liberal" and
"conservative," you can hardly turn around in Washington, Hollywood or
even Berkeley without running into another self-described
libertarian.

The lefty Internet titan Markos "Daily Kos" Moulitsas penned a widely
read manifesto last year pegging the future of his party to the
"Libertarian Democrat." The conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg
declared this year that he's "much more of a libertarian" lately. Bill
Maher, Christopher Hitchens, Tucker Carlson, "South Park" co-creator
Matt Stone -- self-described libertarians all. Surely it's a milestone
when Drew Carey, the new host of that great national treasure "The
Price Is Right," becomes an outspoken advocate of open borders,
same-sex marriage, free speech and repealing drug prohibition. As
Michael Kinsley, an arch purveyor of conventional wisdom, wrote
recently in Time magazine, such people are going to be "an
increasingly powerful force in politics."

Kinsley is hardly alone in recognizing this trend. In April 2006, the
Pew Research Center published a study suggesting that 9 percent of
Americans -- more than enough to swing every presidential election
since 1988 -- espouse a "libertarian" ideology that opposes
"government regulation in both the economic and the social spheres."
That is, a good chunk of your fellow citizens are fiscally
conservative and socially liberal; in bumper-stickerese, they love
their countrymen but distrust their government. Anyone looking to win
elections -- or to make sense of contemporary U.S. politics -- would
do well to understand the deep and growing reservoir that Paul is
tapping into.

Though relatively unknown at the national level, Paul is hardly an
unknown legislative quantity. A former Libertarian Party presidential
candidate, he has at various times called for abolishing the Internal
Revenue Service, the CIA and several Cabinet-level agencies. A staunch
opponent of abortion, he nonetheless believes that federal bans
violate the more basic principle of delegating powers to the states. A
proponent of a border wall with Mexico (nativist CNN host Lou Dobbs
fawned over Paul earlier this year), he is the only GOP candidate to
come out against any form of national I.D. card.

Such positions may not be fully consistent or equally attractive, but
Paul's insistence on a constitutionally limited government has won
applause from surprising quarters. Singer Barry Manilow donated the
maximum $2,300 to his campaign; the hipster singer-songwriter John
Mayer was videotaped yelling "Ron Paul knows the Constitution!" and
67,000 people have signed up for Paul-related Meet Up pages on the
Internet. On ABC's "This Week" recently, George Will half-jokingly
cautioned his fellow pundits, "Don't forget my man Ron Paul" in the
New Hampshire primary. Fellow panelist Jake Tapper seconded the
emotion, saying, "He really is the one true straight talker in this
race."

Yet Paul's success has mostly left the mainstream media and pundits
flustered, if not openly hostile. The Associated Press recently
treated the Paul phenomenon like an alien life form: "The Texas
libertarian's rise in the polls and in fundraising proves that a small
but passionate number of Americans can be drawn to an advocate of
unorthodox proposals." Republican pollster Frank Luntz has denounced
Paul's supporters as "the equivalent of crabgrass . . . not the grass
you want, and it spreads faster than the real stuff." And conservative
syndicated columnist Mona Charen said out loud what many campaign
reporters have no doubt been thinking all along: "He might make a
dandy new leader for the Branch Davidians."

When conservatives feel comfortable mocking the victims gunned down by
Clinton-era attorney general Janet Reno's FBI in Waco, Tex., in 1993,
it suggests that a complacent and increasingly authoritarian
establishment feels threatened.

And little wonder. In the 1990s, conservative Republicans rose to
power by relentlessly attacking Big Government. Yet the minute they
took control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, they kicked out the
jams on even a semblance of fiscal responsibility, signing off on the
Medicare prescription drug benefit and building literal and figurative
bridges to nowhere. From 2001 to 2008, federal outlays will have
grown by an estimated 29 percent in inflation-adjusted terms,
according to the Office of Management and Budget.

The biggest Big Government expansion during the Bush era is the one
that Americans now despise most: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
whose direct costs are already an estimated $800 billion, plus 4,000
American lives. Paul's steadfast bring-the-troops-home stance -- not
just from Iraq, but Korea and Japan as well -- is the major engine
powering his grass-roots success as ostensibly antiwar Democrats in
the majority can't or won't do anything on Capitol Hill.

But if war were the only answer for his improbable run, why Ron Paul
instead of the perennial peacenik Dennis Kucinich, the Democratic
congressman from Ohio whose apparent belief in UFOs is only slightly
less kooky than his belief in the efficacy of socialized health care?

Part of the reason is Republican muscle memory. Paul's "freedom
message" is the direct descendant of Barry Goldwater's once-dominant
GOP philosophy of libertarianism (which Ronald Reagan described in a
1975 Reason magazine interview as "the very heart and soul of
conservatism"). But that tradition has been under a decade-long
assault by religious-right moralists, neoconservative interventionists
and a governing coalition that has learned to love Medicare expansion
and appropriations pork.

So Paul's challenge represents a not-so-lonely GOP revival of
unabashed libertarianism. All his major Republican competitors want to
double down on Bush's wars; none is stressing any limited-government
themes, apart from half-hearted promises to prune pork and tinker on
the margins of Social Security.

College kids (a key bloc of Paul's support) have seen no recent
evidence that the GOP has anything to do with libertarianism. Yet
there's no reason to believe that Democrats will do anything useful
about the government intrusion that so many young people abhor: the
drug war, federal bans on same-sex marriage, online poker
prohibitions, open-ended deployments in Iraq.

This is the mile-wide gap in the Maginot line of "serious" Washington
politics. Undergrads aren't the only ones weary of war and moralizing,
and more interested in exploring new frontiers of technology and
culture than in heeding the stale noise coming from inside the Beltway.

More than at any other time over the past two decades, Americans are
hungering for the politics and freewheeling fun of libertarianism. And
with the dreary prospect of a Giuliani vs. Clinton death match in
2008, that hunger is likely to grow even faster than the size of the
federal government or the casualty toll in Iraq. Ron Paul may lose
next year's battle -- though not without a memorable fight -- but the
laissez-faire agitators he has helped energize will find themselves at
the leading edge of American politics and culture for years to come.