With the US election still 11 months away, the cable news bobbleheads obsess over Hilary and Rudy, Obama and Huckabee. But they rarely talk about the only candidate in with an actual grass roots presence. You see Ron Paul’s supporters in every American city: holding up hand-made banners beside the highway, hauling signs in their SUVs, going door-to-door with leaflets and petitions. Last Sunday, they translated sentiment into Benjamins, collecting a record US$6 million in a single day, primarily from small individual donors.

The Ron Paul Revolution, as his followers style it, is a peculiarly American phenomenon. Much of Paul’s support comes from his vocal opposition to the Iraq war. He features alongside John Pilger on the list of regular contributors to Antiwar.com and used one of the Republican debates to call for the withdrawal of US troops from the Middle East. He defends civil liberties, denounces the powers amassed by the Bush gang during the War on Terror, and regularly appalls Beltway insiders by broaching polite conventions on acceptable politics. Most recently, Paul responded to a cross-draped Mike Huckabee commercial by quoting Sinclair Lewis: “when fascism comes to this country, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross.” It’s worth watching the YouTube clip if only to note the speed with which the interviewer changes the subject.

In a recent Salon profile, Paul’s supporters came across rather like people who’d vote for the Greens in Australia.

“I never voted before in my life,” says Trevor Lyman, 37, a former music promoter who now does independent online fundraising for Paul. “I always thought that the system was working. The war showed me that it wasn’t.”

Yet Ron Paul’s a Republican from Texas, rather than some dreadlocked environmentalist. In economics, he follows Hayek and Ayn Rand; he wants to abolish both income tax and the education department. Oh, and he’s fanatically anti-abortion, too.

In other words, he’s closer to Pauline Hanson circa 1996 than Bob Brown in 2007. Not so much with the racism, because in the US that’s largely mainstream (all the leading Republicans seek the mantle of the anti-illegal immigrant candidate) but as the voice of the outsider disenfranchised from both the left and the right. Like Hanson, Paul builds a nutty (and at times, quite unpleasant) platform out of ideological flotsam and jetsam: states’ rights, gun ownership, opposition to the UN, a return to the gold standard and so on.

The Paul campaign reflects the real division in American politics: not between Republicans and Democrats but rather between the tiny minority contented with the political status quo and the vast majority entirely alienated from it. In lieu of any progressive alternative, some of those will gravitate towards contrarians like Ron Paul.