Ross Douthat offers the logical response to this Jonah Goldberg column wondering why mainstream Republicans and conservatives are down on Ron Paul (who, after all, believes most of the things conservatives are supposed to stand for) and not Mike Huckabee, who exhibits many more deviations from conservative ideology:

[T]he reason Paul has been treated differently than Huckabee by the right-wing media is very, very simple, and it has nothing to do with size-of-government issues: Paul opposes the Iraq War (and war with Iran, waterboarding, and all the rest of what’s increasingly defined as the right-wing foreign policy package) and Huckabee doesn’t. Full stop, end of story.

I think he’s right and it shows to what extent the war (and attendant issues) have crowded out traditional conservative concerns. The popularity of Rudy Giuliani is another example of this phenomenon at work.

It’s illuminating to recall that during World War II there were people with impeccable progressive credentials who opposed the entry into the war and were castigated by FDR and his supporters as reactionaries. Two notable men of letters, Oswald Garrison Villard and John T. Flynn, were liberals who ended up on the wrong side of FDR and became victims of a seismic political realignment..

Villard wrote for the Nation, was a founder of the anti-imperialist league, and advocate of civil rights. Flynn was a left-wing populist who wrote for The New Republic. Both men opposed U.S. entry into World War II and were associated with the America First committe. And both ended up breaking with their erstwhile allies who supported the war (Villard stopped writing for the Nation and Flynn was fired from his regular spot at the New Republic). They found themselves with new allies on the Right who opposed foreign intervention and both became harsh critics of FDR and his policies.

What’s interesting is that both Villard and Flynn apparently underwent an ideological evoultion, becoming more right-wing in domestic as well as foreign policy (at least as right-wing was understood at the time). Both became sharply critical of the New Deal, calling it a precursor to an American form of fascism.

This suggests that war has a way of bringing about political realignments. If “the Right” continues to be defined by a preference for preemptive war, the unitary executive, and “harsh interrogation techniques,” critics of these policies will find themselves to be on the Left de facto if not de jure. But it also raises the intriguing possibility of an ideological metamorphosis on domestic questions too, a la Villard and Flynn. Ron Paul, for instance, while clearly having libertarian leanings, couches a lot of his arguments in rhetoric drawn from the populist tradition. You see this when he talks about returning to the Constitution, about U.S. sovereignty, in his criticisms of NAFTA and the WTO, and so on. And this kind of rhetoric has a lot in common with Left-wing populism.

This doesn’t mean that I agree with conservative critics of Ron Paul that he’s a “leftist,” but once one raises the kinds of questions someone like Paul raises not just about the Iraq war, but the very premises of “conservative” foreign policy, it opens the door to further questions about the foundations of American capitalism as it’s currently practiced, about police powers, about the military-industrial complex and other traditionally “left-wing” issues.

Personally speaking, I considered myself a fairly conventional conservative in 2000 and voted (reluctantly) for Bush, but became increasingly appalled at the conduct of the administration and the support it received from organized conservatism beginning around the time of the run-up to the Iraq war. But this eventually led me to re-think the entire panoply of conservative positions and abandon many of them. If conservatives could virtually en masse be so disastrously wrong, I thought, about foreign policy and issues like torture and executive power, what else were they wrong about? Since then I’ve departed from conservative orthodoxy on enough points that I would be hard-pressed to self-idenify that way anymore (politically I’m registered as an independent). But it was the increasing self-definition of conservatism in terms of the positions connected to the war that initially pushed me into the other camp.