Why are Ron Paul supporters so weird?

The Ron Paul phenomenon is bizarre. A student friend of mine has become genuinely creeped out by the Paulie presence on campus. "They've turned into the new LaRouchies," she told me. So enmeshed are they in their own private Pauliverse, they cannot notice the aroma of psychosis perfuming their interactions with the public, and they refuse to see that evangelical zeal can repulse as well as convert.

Because Paul embraces conspiracy theories -- and let's have no argument: He does -- his supporters now feel free to view all opposition as evidence of The Grand Plot Against Paul, who would surely top all polls if not for said Plot. A presidential campaign has become a paranoia engine.

If the Israel first 'American' media made the following 'Neo-CONNED' speech known to a majority of Americans, Ron Paul would be the leader of the pack..

Then there's the always-lovable Alan Stang, who thinks that the Soviet Union never fell:

Will the conspiracy for world government assassinate Dr. Paul? That is the stark question now before us.

The answer, you will not be surprised to learn, is yes. To prove the point, Stang quotes the author of what appears to be a crankish book about the Bilderbergers.

He says that sources in a think tank in U.S. intelligence tell him that people at the top of the U.S. government are considering the execution of Dr. Ron Paul, whose exploding popularity is causing them to fear they could lose control.

Sources. In a think tank. In U.S. intelligence. Who won't talk to normal reporters. But they will talk to the writers of wacky books about the Bilderbergers -- about the mortal threat posed by a candidate with single-digit poll numbers.

Today, Josh Marshall walks into the paranoia-cloud swirling around the Paulies. They have accused him of being part of the dreaded MSM. The anti-Paulies have proven just as wacky: They have pleaded with Marshall to "disavow" Paul, even though Marshall has never avowed the man.

The reason for this madness is not, I think, Paul's stance on the war, but his refusal to go along with the national consensus that Israel deserves unending support. I don't go along with that consensus myself, yet I recognize that merely bringing up the subject suffices to create outbreaks of mass hysteria.

As you know, my problem with Paul lies not with his stances on foreign policy, but with his Libertarianism. To a great degree, Libertarianism cannot be distinguished from Milton Friedmanism -- and as Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine proves beyond all rational argument, Friedmanism is the problem, not the solution.

Yet the zombie adherents of laissez faire (like the zombie adherents of Leninism) keep insisting that their Grand Theory has never received a proper trial. In their view, the one thing we must never, ever contemplate is the European mixed economy model, because that approach always leads to ruination and mass misery. Don't you know that they're stacking up the corpses of the homeless like cordwood on the streets of Oslo? Don't you know that that the French and German economies are doomed to fail completely within the next few months? True, the Libertarians have made that prediction for thirty years or more -- but this time for sure. (In the real world, the main economic problems facing Europe were created by George W. Bush's favoritism to his rich cronies.)

When I contemplate Friedmanism/Libertarianism, my mind keeps returning to the fascist connection. No, I'm not going to argue that Ron Paul is a secret Nazi. I don't think that Uncle Miltie was a Nazi, either. And yet no-one can deny that post-war fascism has allied itself with the Friedmanite death march throughout the third world. To prove the point, one need only point to Pinochet's use of Colonia Dignidad.

Oddly, the Nazis did not espouse laissez faire in the 1920s. Their chief economic theoretician in that period was a strange man named Gottfried Feder, who drew a distinction between industrial capitalists (the guys who make shoes) and finance capitalists (the bankers who loan money to the shoemakers). The former were the good guys, said Feder, while the latter were very bad guys indeed.

When the Nazis attained power, they never applied strict Federism. In the post-war era, those attracted to fascist thought seemed to gravitate toward Randroid economic views. Even so, a scan of the crank-right literature reveals that paranoia about finance capitalism remains strong. Of course, the term "finance capitalism" is no longer used; post-war fascists prefer to talk about the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the international bankers and so forth. During the cold war, there was even a strain of Nazism that favored the USSR over the United States. Francis Parker Yockey exemplified that stance; I suspect that he was impressed by Stalin's late segue into anti-Semitism.

So please do not classify me among those who simplistically conflate the Paulies with fascists. Fascism itself is such a complex phenomenon that, even after decades of study, I'm still not sure how to define the term.

But I do think that the Paulies are weird.