Sharif Christopher Matar
reason.com
May 16, 2012
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) will no longer be actively campaigning in forthcoming primaries for the Republican presidential nomination. But the libertarian politician’s legacy – including controversial yet popular stands on everything from auditing the Federal Reserve to withdrawing troops from abroad to radically cutting government borrowing and spending – is just getting started.
Paul, says Brian Doherty, a Reason senior editor and author of the new Ron Paul’s Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired, “is leaving in his wake a set of institutions, and a set of hundreds of thousands of energized intelligent youngsters who are unquestionably going to shape American politics moving down the line.”
Doherty argues Paul’s long-term effect on the GOP will be similar to that of Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator who, despite a crushing electoral loss to Lyndon Johnson in 1964, energized and transformed the Republican Party into the limited-government force that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980.
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