"He doesn’t go out of his way to convince Republicans that he is one of them." (Image by R. DeYoung.)

Ron Paul has made only slight concessions to the mainstream, pretending he wasn’t responsible for the racist, extremist newsletters that funded his national political career, but in the last five years or so, the center has moved quite a ways to meet him. Rigidly doctrinaire to the point of absurdity, Paul has somehow captured the hearts and minds of a reasonably sizable portion of the American public. But he’s a Libertarian, not a Republican any more than a Democrat, which makes him even more of an odd duck in the GOP field. He’s a third-party candidate running for one of the first two. But is he the beginning of a serious strain of post-party politics?

Some of you read the New Yorker before you read Afflictor (bastids!), so you may have already taken in Kelefa Sanneh’s smart piece about Paul this week. But in case you haven’t gotten to it yet, here’s an excerpt:

“‘I think parties are pretty irrelevant,’ Paul says, and he doesn’t go out of his way to convince Republicans that he is one of them. He firmly opposed Obama’s health-care plan, and he might win a few more votes if he made this opposition the centerpiece of his stump speech. Instead, he tends toward arguments that are almost perversely nonpartisan—elaborating, say, the similarities between Bush’s war on terror and Obama’s. He asks, ‘Have you ever noticed that we change parties sometimes, but the policies never change?’ Even during that first Tea Party appearance, in Texas in 2007, Paul passed up a chance to reassure Republican voters. Skipping over the ‘United Nations’ and ‘I.R.S.’ barrels, he picked up one marked ‘Iraq War’ and heaved it into the river. He was seventy-two at the time, and surely relished the physical act as much as the symbolic one. ‘Start with that, and then we can solve the rest of the problems,’ he said.”

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Paul on Morton Downey, Jr.’s screamfest, 1988: