Ron Paul's rEVOLution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired.

• Author: McMaken, Ryan W.
• Position: Book review

* Ron Paul's rEVOLution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired

By Brian Doherty

New York: Broadside Books, 2012.

Pp. 294. $17.63 cloth.

Only five years have passed since Ron Paul began to put together his 2008 presidential run, but in that short time the American political landscape has been altered in a way that few imagined. Paul is likely the first libertarian pundit or politician in generations to attain household-name status, and he is almost certainly the only one in that time to actually claim the title libertarian. But this septuagenarian member of Congress who reminds many people of their grandfathers has managed to gain a nationwide stage for his libertarian ideas while injecting gravitas into political positions that were once considered to be the fringe of the fringe.

Just five years ago, the idea of ending--or even substantially limiting--the Federal Reserve System's powers was not even up for debate, and the ideas of ending the drug wars and the regular wars as well were reserved, or so we were told, for a few guys in a phone booth somewhere. Since then, the national media and the national political establishment have been forced to grapple with these libertarian ideas that they have been ignoring with impunity for decades. Paul can claim millions of followers of varying degrees of enthusiasm, and he has become one of the most recognized national political figures in the United States today.

How did Ron Paul go from obscure congressman to leader of a national libertarian movement? Brian Doherty, in his new book Ron Paul's rEVOLution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired, strives to answer this question. In the process, he gives us one of the first contributions to the documented history of the Ron Paul movement, its members, and the ideas behind it.

Doherty begins by attempting to place the Ron Paul movement within the taxonomy of American political movements, drawing primarily on the Jacksonians and, more unexpectedly, on William Jennings Bryan's movement as well.

The Jacksonians offer an obvious connection, of course, in their opposition to central banking, but a connection in tone also exists. Paul's movement, with its antielitist and populist tone and its opposition to centralized government, can clearly be grouped with the Jacksonian movement on a variety of issues. As Doherty points out, Paul himself in the 1982 book The Case for Gold (reprint, N.p.: Important Books, 2012) claims the Jacksonians as intellectual...