God,
Some people just cant believe that Ron Paul has a following in the GOP itself. If you watch Fox, they treat Paul like some kind of interloper. Paul is for limited government and non-intervention. This is very old school Republicanism.
You mean like in the 1930's, when the GOP was keeping refugees from Europe out and insisting that Japan and Germany were not a threat?
Yeah, I'll agree with that. Since the early 1950's, though, he's as much an aberration on foreign policy as Lyndon LaRouche for the Democrats.
There are two Republican FP camps - the Reagan/GWB strong interventionist model, and the Nixon/GHWB pragmatic interventionist model. Noninterventionism is anathema to most Republicans.
He was, not to the extent of Paul though (supported NATO and the Marshall Plan). But in many ways he was the last of a breed, dying in 1953.
I can even extend my model backwards, with the pragmatists being represented by Ike and Vandenberg, and the hawks by Dulles and Goldwater.
But then, Democrats were divided in much the same way at the time. The 1950s was not a good time to be a noninterventionist. The advent of ICBMs, nukes, and space flight, combined with the failure of appeasement, WWII and the beginning of the Cold War, was enough to convince Americans as a whole that two great oceans were no longer a perfect defense against the troubles of the planet.
The thing is, on foreign policy everyone besides Paul, Huntsman and Johnson are of the more hawkish wing. than Reagan. And Huntsman and Johnson are not considered in a place like Iowa. And so plenty of people who wouldn't go as far as Paul in his non-interventionism find him relatively closer to their point of view. Plus you have the Constitution Party types and Buchanan supporters who will go for Paul. The anti-interventionist/anti-globalist sentiment among social conservatives (esp. fundamentalists) shouldn't be underestimated.
