For once, we actually had a candidate, but as Ron Paul retires and his son does his best to sully the family brand name, the future of the movement he inspired is in doubt.  No one was surprised that Jesse Benton, head honcho of the Paul presidential campaign—known for his propensity to sell out at the drop of a hat—went to work for Mitch McConnell.  And Rand Paul not only endorsed the man who had stolen half his father’s delegates, but actively campaigned for him.

As Murray Rothbard used to kvetch, Are we to be spared nothing?

It gets worse, however, because now we are faced with a choice between Mitt, a hologram masquerading as a person, and That Man in the White House.  What is a reactionary to do?

Despair is one alternative, and beyond that, indifference.  We could adopt the Olympian perspective of a Robinson Jeffers, hole up in some secluded spot, and contemplate the decline of what had once been a great nation as a scientist would contemplate the death of the universe: as a natural event, to be appreciated for its terrible beauty.  Shine, perishing republic!

Yet the Paul campaign—and the Buchanan campaigns before it—gave us some hope, however dim, that the reactionary populist fire hasn’t gone out of the American soul.  As the crisis of the regime accelerates, its cruelties and aspirations to absolute tyranny provoke resentment and rebellion, however inchoate and unconscious.  Can these upsurges become not only stronger but fully conscious, ending in the overthrow of the regime?

The main obstacle to the restoration of our Old Republic is the Republican Party and its “brain trust,” the neoconservatives.  Romney is their perfect instrument, giving voice to the same tired talking points of plutocracy and untrammeled militarism.  While his views on the budget and taxes are somewhat mysterious, his foreign-policy pronouncements are fraught with a monstrous clarity.

The Romneyite enemies list is a long one: Iran, Syria, Russia, China, Venezuela, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the world’s one billion-plus Muslims, and anyone who has ever looked cross-eyed at his old buddy Benjamin Netanyahu.  As for our friends, the list is short, consisting only of Israel, “our closest ally,” as Romney invariably puts it.

Romney and Paul Ryan have repeatedly attacked Obama for failing to meet with Netanyahu in New York when both spoke before the U.N. General Assembly.  It’s the most extraordinary example of shilling for a foreign power in the history of U.S. politics since the Federalists colluded with Great Britain in the War of 1812—the only difference being that the Federalists kept their treason under wraps, while Romney-Ryan wear theirs as a badge of honor.

Netanyahu has done everything but endorse Romney, warmly receiving him in Israel while taking to the American airwaves to criticize American policy toward Iran as insufficiently warlike—with the full knowledge Republicans would use these soundbites in their ad war against the President.

In his bid to drag us into a catastrophic war with Iran, Netanyahu is pulling out all the stops.  That he has commandeered one of our nation’s two major political parties as his fifth column is a disgrace unparalleled in our history.  Netanyahu’s American sock puppets deserve to go down to a miserable and crushing defeat.  Their entire movement must be consigned to history’s dustbin before we can even begin to think about restoring constitutional government in America.

But what about the threat represented by Barack Hussein Obama?  Isn’t he leading us down the road to socialism—a world of death panels and Kafkaesque bureaucracy, confiscatory taxation and supercentralism?  This is a myth created by and for today’s phony “conservatives,” who are supporting a candidate whose own healthcare program in Massachusetts was a model for Obama­Care.  It is nonsensical to believe the pragmatic Obama would push anything so ideological as socialism, which has fewer real adherents in this country than even constitutionalism—and certainly none in Washington.  Obama is no more a socialist than was Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose programs were far more radical than anything Obama has proffered.  When Harry Truman nationalized the steel mines at the height of a strike wave during the Korean War, no one called him a socialist—yet Obama somehow earns that label for bailing out the auto industry.  No one called John McCain a socialist when, in a joint statement with Obama, he called for bailing out the banks.  For Republicans, that’s a different story.  Socialism of the plutocratic variety gets a free pass.

The truth is that Obama, far from being a radical of the left, is a conventional Democratic Party politician, who will do no more—or less—harm than his predecessors.  Romney, on the other hand, promises us a return to the rule of the neocons—the worst of all possible worlds.