Ross Douthat at the New York Times (seconded by Rod Dreher at the American Conservative) thinks that Ron Paul plays a salubrious role as truth-teller and gadfly:

The United States is living through an era of unprecedented elite failure, in which America’s public institutions are understandably distrusted and our leadership class is justifiably despised. Yet politicians of both parties are required, by the demands of partisanship, to embrace the convenient lie that our problem can be pinned exclusively on the other side’s elites — as though both liberals and conservatives hadn’t participated in the decisions that dug our current hole.

In this climate, it sometimes takes a fearless crank to expose realities that neither Republicans nor Democrats are particularly eager to acknowledge.

In both the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, Paul has been the only figure willing to point out the deep continuities in American politics — the way social spending grows and overseas commitments multiply no matter which party is in power, the revolving doors that connect K Street to Congress and Wall Street to the White House, the long list of dubious policies and programs that both sides tacitly support. In both election cycles, his honest extremism has sometimes cut closer to the heart of our national predicament than the calculating partisanship of his more grounded rivals. He sometimes rants, but he rarely spins — and he’s one of the few figures on the national stage who says “a plague on both your houses!” and actually means it.

"Unprecedented elite failure"? Does Douthat actually believe that the conservative elite has failed? That is a daunting suggestion. When I arrived at Columbia in 1969 as a flaming leftist, there was no such thing as a conservative elite. The conservative movement still lay under the rubble of the Goldwater disaster. There was National Review, to be sure, whose readers "also serve who only stand and hate," as William F. Buckley quipped.  Irving Kristol's Public Interest (to which I contributed  much later) was just in transition from liberalism to neo-conservatism. Robert Bartley was yet to take the helm at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Supply-side economics was a gleam in Robert Mundell's eye (Jude Wanniski's programmatic essay for Public Interest on Mundell and Laffer appeared in 1974).

Now we have an army of conservative intellectuals, working out of the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and too many other think tanks and publications to follow. Robert Mundell went on to win the Nobel Prize, and the "voodoo economics" of 1980 has become mainstream Republican policy. Natural-law Catholic intellectuals like Princeton's Robert George and Amherst's Hadley Arkes--scholars whom I had the privilege to meet as an editor at First Things -- have trained a generation of students. The evangelical movement is a formidable political force. Fox News churns out the conservative message daily, along with Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and dozens of other media personalities -- not to mention PJ Media founder Roger Simon. The universities remain captive to the tenure system that left the '60s radicals in positions of power, to be sure, but that doesn't stop conservatives from thinking, publishing, and addressing a mass audience.

There is no shortage of smarts, and no shortage of institutional support, and no shortage of public outlets. Even the New York Times feels obligated to give a major slot to a conservative Catholic like Ross Douthat.

What, then, has failed?