People don’t usually get more radical as they get older; it’s almost always the reverse.  And the successful politicians were never radical to begin with.

The one exception to this rule is Ron Paul.

Ron has been around a long time.  The 75-year-old 11-term U.S. representative from Texas ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1988, and before that was a fixture in the broader libertarian movement.  He was our Vito Marcantonio, our congressional Achilles who, in his younger days, never came across as a radical, either temperamentally or rhetorically.  His temperament remains admirably calm, but his rhetoric has shifted, over the years, emphasizing the one issue we former members of the Libertarian Party’s “Radical Caucus” had always feared he was soft on: foreign policy.

Watching the GOP presidential debate the other day, I was startled to hear Ron’s answer to a question about Iran’s nuclear weapons.  Why wouldn’t they want nukes? he asked.  After all, they’re surrounded by nuclear powers—Pakistan, Israel, the United States—with the latter two constantly threatening them.  Why is anybody surprised that they’d want to deter these threats?

I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, but he’s right.  What a long way Ron has come since the 1980’s, when he was supportive of the Nicaraguan Contras and prone to panic over whatever shenanigans the ramshackle Soviet Empire was up to.

Back then, we watched Paul like a hawk, convinced he was about to import “right-wing opportunism” into our movement.  By “we” I mean the Radical Caucus, founded by Murray Rothbard and myself three decades ago.  We were convinced that the libertarian movement would succumb to opportunism without our expert guidance, and that Ron Paul—as the only libertarian elected to high office—would lead the effort.

One of our top associates was particularly alarmed by this prospect.  We called him “The Duenna” because he would escort Murray around as if the famed libertarian economist and theoretician were his personal property.  He wrote a column (Brickbats and Bouquets) for our newsletter, in which he attacked the “deviationists” who dared wander from the straight and narrow.  It was The Duenna who led the fight against the “Koch Machine”—the libertarian apparatus built up by billionaires Charles and David Koch to promote their version of libertarian ideas.

This fight eventually led to a split in the libertarian movement, a division that persists to this day.  Turns out we were right about opportunism, except that it was left-wing opportunism that finally proved the undoing of our movement.  The Kochs were convinced that they could win media attention—and votes—if only they played to sympathetic liberals, and their anointed presidential candidate, Ed Clark, announced on national television that libertarianism is the equivalent of “low-tax liberalism.”  After that, and the refusal of the Clark campaign to come out for the abolition of the income tax, Rothbard went ballistic. It was a factional war to the death—and, in the end, we won.  It was, however, strictly a Pyrrhic victory.  The Libertarian Party was a shell of its former self.

I dropped out soon after the convention, convinced that the third-party strategy was doomed.  It was time to infiltrate the GOP and build a libertarian faction within!  The Libertarian Republican Organizing Committee (LROC), with a few hundred members nationwide, never got anywhere, but we did manage to put out a monthly magazine, The Libertarian Republican, and showed up at the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans, where we handed out copies of our “alternative platform”—a document that, I have to say, reads very well today.  We argued that the Soviet Union was in the process of disintegrating, the Cold War was over, and it was time for libertarians and conservatives to reunite, defeat the left, and take our country back.

Rothbard stayed in the Libertarian Party long after the rest of us “radicals” left.  He supported Ron Paul’s 1988 presidential bid, which we in LROC most emphatically did not.  To our everlasting shame, we issued a pamphlet attacking Ron as an “extremist”—after all, he wasn’t buying our “entrist” strategy of infiltrating the Republicans, and so he must be a “deviationist,” dragging the movement into perdition.  It was awful.

But then our predictions about the end of the Cold War actually came true—and that was the beginning of a new era, one that is culminating in a libertarian-conservative rapprochement—led by none other than Ron Paul.

Whatever happened to The Duenna?  He wound up as assistant secretary of education under George W. Bush—his reward for going to Iraq and working with the Occupation Authority!  I’ll let the reader draw his own conclusions.