Ron Paul and the Politics of Readjustment

It’s one of the most puzzling puzzles of the presidential campaign: Why have so many young people latched onto Ron Paul?

Sifting through his campaign platform doesn’t provide much of an answer. Most voters under the age of 25 don’t even know what “hard currency” is, never mind that Ron Paul supports it.

He’s tapped into some of the cultural ferment spurred by the Iraq War, but so have the Democrats. And when it comes to courting the youth vote, he’s on the wrong side of some of the most important social and economic issues (abortion, education, taxes).

Yet somehow he has renewed the previously dormant political passions of young voters across the country – especially those who have never considered supporting a Republican for president.

So there must be something about Ron Paul that makes him appealing to voters under the age of 25. There must be something that makes him … different.

Maybe it’s not what he is, but what he isn’t.

In a speech here at Johns Hopkins last month, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean tried to sell the Democratic candidates by telling college students that the America they’ve grown up in – the Bush America – is “not normal.”

Our government hasn’t always detached itself so unflinchingly from reality, he said – it just seems like that because, for most college-aged voters, the last time George W. Bush wasn’t president was when they were in the eighth grade.

Whether you accept that diagnosis or not is up to you. But it might offer an insightful glimpse into why Ron Paul of all people has gotten large numbers of college-aged voters excited about a Republican presidential candidate (and an older one at that).

Most of the major Republican candidates have to some degree accepted or even attached themselves to the legacy of George W. Bush (whatever that legacy is). Some have done so tacitly, others publicly; all have gone to great lengths (even openly contradicting themselves) to court the base that lifted Bush in 2000 and sustained him in 2004.

Even John McCain – who had all but trademarked the word “maverick” eight years ago – seems to have forfeited some straight talk in order to connect with the Christian conservative base.

One of the few Republican candidates who has not converted on the road to the White House is Ron Paul. At a time when many people feel so utterly disenfranchised by their government – including the Democratic congress – Ron Paul seems ready and willing to turn it on its head, for better or worse.

Making government work – albeit while doing very little – might seem a radical notion to people who have grown up in the America of George W. Bush. College-aged voters are rapidly readjusting (a process that has been both jumbled and accelerated by the internet), shaking themselves out of a political dormancy that has persisted for almost a decade.

Ron Paul has on some level captured that sense of political re-identification. He seems to agree that the America we’ve known for nearly our entire adult lives has been “not normal,” and his answers have been just disquieting enough to rile politically disoriented college students out of their sleep.

To the average college-aged voter, our government has become an insulated cluster of ideological bottom-feeders, forfeiting nuance and principle for rhetoric and dogma. They’ve closed themselves off from reality and the public, dividing Americans along nonexistent cultural lines and conquering as needed.

So it’s no wonder that many college-aged voters find it refreshing and even a little idiosyncratic (which is certainly “in” these days) to hear Ron Paul lash Sean Hannity with his passionate constitutionalism, or lecture Bill O’Reilly on the history of U.S.-Iran relations (the video of which, incidentally, has garnered hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube).

Hordes of Ron Paul “revolutionaries” follow him to appearances on shows like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, and his Internet reach outstrips that of his opponents. (When my newspaper, The Johns Hopkins News-Letter, ran an article that merely mentioned his name, it was by far the most popular of that week.)

Ron Paul may turn out in the end to be no more than a gateway candidate – someone just compelling enough to help young voters emerge from eight years of ideological fog. Once they’ve reoriented themselves politically (and Paul has been eliminated from the running), some might migrate to Mike Huckabee or even Barack Obama, two of the more magnetic presidential candidates.

But then again, the alternatives might all be the same, in which case we’ll need Ron Paul or someone like him to prod us out of our collective political coma.