Topic: Presidential Campaign 2008
Why It's A Mistake To Assume That Ron Paul's Revolution Can Change The Republican Party Some say that the Republican Party can be saved for "true conservatism." I make the argument that it cannot, because it doesn't want to be saved.by Walt Thiessen
(Libertarian)
Friday, February 8, 2008
Many columnists on this website and elsewhere around the Internet have been presenting their cases for the idea that Republican supporters of Ron Paul should continue to stick with their party and change it from within. Others have argued that the entire revolution should get involved in the Republican Party toward the same end, promoting the idea that the Republican Party can be returned to its "historic roots" of old-style conservatism. Indeed, this has been a claim made by the candidate himself. My reading of the situation is that such an approach would be foolhardy, and the experience of the campaign has shown us exactly how foolhardy this approach has turned out to be.
As Exhibit A, I present this article from the Washington Post, in which it was reported that John McCain was heavily booed at the Conservative Political Action Conference meeting yesterday in Washington, DC. The reason? The people doing the booing feel that McCain is out of touch with the conservative base of the party, but before Paul supporters start getting excited, they should learn why these boo-birds felt that way.
In order to underline her observation on this topic, reporter Ruth Marcus quoted former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed as saying, "This is the first time in 32 years that anybody's won the Republican nomination without support from conservatives and evangelical voters in the primaries."
From the article:
The implications of these doubts for the general election are unsettling to some Republican strategists. As much as McCain may appeal to independents and swing voters, they argue, he can't win in November without motivating party stalwarts. After all, they don't call it the base for nothing.
"We know John McCain's taken some positions we don't like as conservatives," Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn told the group. "John and I have strong disagreements on some issues," added former Virginia senator George Allen.
And these were McCain's assigned warm-up acts, vouching for his bona fides.
Why do these heavyweights feel this way? Indeed, why did most of the room feel this way? Marcus makes that clear too, when she writes:
The CPAC crowd and the Arizona senator are so out of sync that last year, as the race for the nomination got underway, he didn't even bother showing up. This is a group that was on its feet yesterday morning, cheering lustily as Vice President Cheney extolled the virtues of "enhanced interrogation."
So there you have it. The Republican heavyweights are telling us, point-blank, that the evangelical and conservative base of the party don't feel that McCain is conservative enough because he doesn't believe in waterboarding, thinks torture should not be a part of U.S. policy, and criticized Bush on this topic. Nevermind that this is the same guy who projected that we should be in Iraq for the next 100 years. Ignore the fact that he's a former Vietnam POW who has repeatedly shown that he has a hair trigger temper and doesn't hesitate to get in the face of those he disagrees with (inference: Iran). That's apparently not good enough for the Republican base. They want G Bush III. That's what the conservative base of the Republican Party wants, and all of the top conservative honchos at the Conservative Political Action Conference made certain that McCain knows it.
This is the group that some in the Ron Paul Revolution think we need to sway toward liberty. Give it up folks. You're aiming for support from the wrong people, and there's no way these people are going to give up their power positions without continuing to do whatever it takes to make sure you don't have a microphone within the Republican Party, just as they have done throughout the debates and the primary season.
The major media aren't blocking Ron Paul because they're bad people. They're blocking him from accessing the American people because the Republican leadership keep telling them behind the scenes that Paul has (and had) no chance; thus the Republican leadership aren't willing to let him have that microphone (whenever they can get away with it), and the Republican leadership have done everything in their power to make sure the major media knew it and abided by it. Further, these people have the reach, the power, and the connections to the evangelical and conservative communities they claim to be leading, and you don't. So tell me again...how do you plan to "take back" the Republican Party, when they quite clearly feel they're not the ones that need to change?
Some will point to New Hampshire and say, "well, when Fox News refused to include Paul in their forum, the NH Republican Party came out in favor of including him." Yes, but remember that it wasn't until angry Paul grassroots supporters stormed their gates that they finally relented. Even then, it was a touch-and-go thing. It's not like the NH Republican Party were in favor of including Ron all along. If they had been, they would have said so early and often. No, they were clearly pressured by the grassroots into taking the uncomfortable position of having to withdraw their support from that debate. They had to make it look good, like they really believed in equal access to all candidates. They had to try to preserve the support of the libertarian wing of the party, a wing they thoroughly disagree with, but which they know they need to keep in order to compete in national elections.
And that's just a state party, from a relatively friendlier state to liberty.
Speaking of Fox News, when is the revolution going to learn that Fox News is the most conservative TV network in the country? Come on, people, wake up!
From the day I first became aware of the new revolution, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this revolution could only be won by appealing to the disenfranchised and the disillusioned. Those who don't vote and those who have given up on voting, those who are disgusted by what the Democrats have wrought and even more dismayed by the way the Republicans have piled on top, regardless of their party affiliation, are the people most influenced and motivated by the revolution.
Among the rest who vote, the largest block of support will come from the independent voters, those who don't identify with either major party. That's also been very clear from day one. There's a small proportion of the liberal Democrats who are against the war and aren't committed to big government and another small proportion of "old-time" conservatives who haven't bolted the Republican Party yet, both of whom could also have supported a Paul nomination, but as the primary results have shown us, they number less than 10% of each major party's base.
I still retain a tiny hope, a mustard seed-sized prayer, that Paul might pull off a miracle and grab the Republican nomination away from McCain and Huckabee, but let's be honest. It's pretty unlikely. It would be good for the revolution if Ron Paul did whatever it took to stay in the race until November, but even if that doesn't happen, the revolution needs to be thinking in terms of how to build outside of a major political party. That's the big challenge we all face today.
So how can the revolution continue without working from within the Republican Party? The answer is ridiculously simple. We work together regardless of party affiliation. We don't affiliate based on party. We don't assume that all we need to do is take over a major party and everything will work out. The 2007-08 political campaign has shown us that that approach is nonsense. This revolution must become a trans-party revolution. It must be an issues-based revolution, a philosophical revolution (liberty) and it can't have a single central leadership. Instead, it must be a loose coalition of people from all walks of life and from all political camps.
Groups of people that have refused to work with each other in the past because of issues like abortion, immigration, 9/11, global warming, etc. must put their differences aside, recognize their commonality (a belief in the necessity of a small, restricted, Constitutional government), and work together to build the revolution. They must all realize that we have far greater issues of concern, issues that directly affect all of our liberty, such as the need to overcome the Federal Reserve and the devastation it visits on the economy year after year by permitting currency competition, Health Care deregulation, a Social Security opt-out plan, a Medicare opt-out plan, a defensive foreign policy where we don't police the world, a general shrinkage in Federal spending, a determination to shrink the national debt, and most importantly a respect for the Constitution as it is written, not as it has been abused.
Ron Paul can continue to be a popular figurehead, but the revolution must grow on its own. That's the challenge that we face. Are we up to it? I don't know, but the way I see it, we can't afford not to be up to the challenge.
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2008 Walt Thiessen, all rights reserved.
Published: Friday, February 8, 2008
Last modified: Friday, February 8, 2008
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Posted By: Ivan from Oregon
Date: 2008-02-08 18:34:09
Good article, Walt - I gave you a thumb. Your point is right - we are not going to change the party because years of entrenched corruption are akin to a cancer (neocons) that has spread and is no longer operable (without killing the whole body). The actual platform being implemented by the GOP today is not recognizable by the standards of yesterday's true republicans (small r). Thus the language changes.
Language is a large factor in societal norms. For example, look at the meaning of the phrase "gay 90's" a hundred years ago and today - no comparison. Just as the "gays" have co-opted the word GAY, the "neocons" have co-opted the word "Republican". If we concede that "Republican" stands for the Neocon agenda (fascist warmonger), we need to find a new way to label ourselves. This is an interesting challenge. The most obvious choice would be "Libertarian" but that label has been marginalized a long time ago as "the dope-smoking hippies who want no rules at all". The label "Constituton Party" has a similar (though different problem). The French Revolution gained momentum through "Liberte, fraternite, egalite" - simple enough for the zombies to grasp and parrot. We need to find the right language to fuel the movement.
I'm not good at that sort of thing, I suffer from the Libertarian disease of talking in paragraphs instead of sentences. However,we have so much talent in our group that maybe we can come up with the right lsnguage that will be on every zombie's lips. I toss the challenge out to our community.
Posted By: Nelson Nieves
Date: 2008-02-08 19:12:56
"and most importantly a respect for the Constitution as it is written, not as it has been abused."
This is the part that bothers me the most. The way the constitution has been deliberately misread to fill the needs of each of the two major parties.
The Constitution needs no re-interpretations whatsoever, I have read it and I understood it clearly, and I didn't need a political -hack of a supreme court justice to misread it to me.
Posted By: Christine Smith
Date: 2008-02-08 20:11:01
Beautifully expressed - the truth is that liberty is our goal and we must remain focused on achieving it. Very well stated. Never should we put any party on a pedestal - our shared goal, our vision, must be liberty at all times.
Posted By: Scott from Oregon
Date: 2008-02-08 22:27:29
The best way for revolutionary changes to be made is for reovolutionists to be willing to do revolutionary things.
Outside of being violent, there are an enormous amount of defiant gestures that can be performed to "shock" the system back into a liberty minded state. This could include tax protestation, sit-ins in federal buildings, embargoes and/or pickets and/or blockades of media outlets...
Movements need heroic actions and sane thoughtful planning to be effective.
Movements need defiance and a willingness to not get up from our seats when told to ala Rosa Parks.
Movements need a physical presence as much as a mental one.
Posted By: Walt Thiessen
Date: 2008-02-09 07:44:59
Right after I wrote my article, Ron Paul came out with a press release stating that he has no intention of running on a third party ticket and that he is committed to working within the Republican Party. I respect his position, and I think it's good to try to make change within any party. I agree with Dan Hansen that there's nothing wrong with doing this within any party. My point was that we shouldn't limit ourselves to that thinking, that we must transcend it and realize that this is a revolution that transcends party barriers. It cannot grow if some of us insist on limiting it to party barriers.
Posted By: Dennis from Missouri
Date: 2008-02-09 15:09:57
Ivan from Oregon has a point it's in words that we share ideas & thoughts. We need something that's simple to the point fairly easy to define like maybe Patriot Party that uses Ron Pauls ideas as a cornerstone definition; or perhaps Old Republic Party. I just know that we have all these meet up groups which is a powerfull tool used properly.
I like the article. One thing I have noticed around here, Oregon, is that we outnumber the Republicans. They are old and their parties are losing money. It doesn't seem like the party has much longer from what I am seeing. In fact, some counties we have trippled their numbers. Anyone else seeing the same?
Posted By: mike montagne
Date: 2008-02-10 13:29:21
Walt,
A thumbs up to you. You raise many important points.
Our movement can and will go on, because like the movement which established our country, what we want are the things humanity will forever want. Hope cannot die. The desire to establish anything worth establishing lives forever, because the things which are worth establishing are the principles by which a free humanity can prosper in all the ways we should.
Adam raises another point. It may not be evident everywhere, but the thing is, for the reasons I just stated, the phenomena is one begging for a place to happen. The present revolution is evidence of that. Ron didn't invent the idea of dissolving the Federal Reserve System. I've been advocating that, and I've advocated that there is one and one only solution to the iniquities of the so called Federal Reserve System for 35 years. Many of the sites you see around the internet today borrow from my material to make different deductions -- false deductions.
This is the issue I thus introduce to this discussion. If we cannot unite upon a singular solution, what ever can we be effective in accomplishing? Of course, I'm not saying we cannot accomplish anything; I'm telling how we have to work together.
At the founding of our nation, Thomas Jefferson prevailed. Jefferson didn't speak louder; he didn't elicit more commentary or controversy; his arguments prevailed because they were the highest quality arguments that the convention could even envision.
I'm saying then that I believe my work is the rabbit you need to pull out of our hat. I'm saying if we can't do that, we will fail. Why?
Evidently, you folks are yawning at my proposition of mathematically perfected economy. But the thing we have to realize if we want to stop all the present usurpations of representation is that it is thru he unassented monetary system that your enemies in these issues have developed a political power which you cannot overturn. We have to get them out of the position by which they take unlimited unearned wealth from us, because through the monetary system's incredible thefts from us, they seal their power. Follow the money. There's always a trail. It always leads to usurpation.
But why did Ron Paul so scare the mainstream media? Why did they do all that they did, right out in the open, and right underneath our noses... to deny him the opportunity to expose the faults of the so called Federal Reserve System?
They had to defeat Paul, because he meant to address the faults of their system.
Why then did they decide that they could tolerate him in some of the debates?
Because he didn't make perfect sense. He only appealed to others who knew something was wrong, and too did not have their finger on bona fide solution. They could tolerate a little Paul, especially if they could make him and his supporters look silly -- especially if he didn't have his finger on the actual problem, and therefore could not make perfect and wholly encouraging sense. "Out of thin air," I'm sure, was quite the joke behind the scenes in the offices of our usurpation, because it fails to nail the identity of the real problem.
The fact that a particular imposed form of currency however can only multiply debt into insoluble debt is another matter. If we all understood this undeniable property of the privatized currencies of the world, the central bankers of the world would have to hide.
Knowledge is the truth, and only the whole truth can set you free, because there is no truth, but the whole truth.
We still have 7 months to pull the rabbit out of our hat. Mathematically perfected economy is your rabbit.
This is my article on that matter, and a fitting introduction to what I believe are the issues critical to our success:
I reiterate... I think we can only fail if we fail to unite over this most important issue. Our enemies dictate war and peace; they bankrupt nations at will; through U.S. hegemony, they control countless foreign governments for the purposes of the central banks of the world. Saddam Hussein himself was the darling strongman of the principals who perpetrate these ominous crimes across the globe until he announced he would no longer be trading oil in the phony currency of "our" (unassented) central bank. What is the sudden problem with Iran? They've made the same announcement.
Wake up. The foreign policy to which Ron Paul objected (and we have objected to for decades) is the foreign policy of the world's unassented central bankers.
Wake up. Those bankers *have* to own the media to perpetuate their crimes; and they have to filter the news -- all the news -- to keep every subject public so in the dark about the nature of the currency and the false proposition that it multiplies their wealth for them. Nothing could be further from the truth.
You are now faced with national and international "economic" failure as a consequence of a privatized currency intended from its inception and unassented imposition to multiply unearned profit from you by multiplying debt.
The only fatal flaw in the process is that the process is irrreversible; ultimately it multiplies debt into collapse. And if the prospect of that collapse is not enough to wake you, to give you due focus, and to unite you, then you have no hope, because you are not up to the challenges before you.
It is our youngest generations who will pay the steepest price; and it is our oldest generations who are most responsible for condemning our country to the coming inevitable failure. But everyone who has not dedicated their self to mathematically perfected economy, including Ron Paul, is at fault.
Why?
Because there is no other solution.
Just something to think about, as international collapse as a consequence of insoluble debt is just around the corner.
Walt, very valid points. There should be a trans-party coalition, Dr Paul's has a liberty PAC already: a transparty PAC, including Republicans and Democrats (that agree with with the foreign policy) is important. It should be a loose coalition, and a core basis also. I think Dr. Paul's decision to stay in the R - for now - is the correct one. There is not enough financial and other power to mobilize for a third party (which should either be under the Reform party, integrating the CP and LP or a total new name). The timing for a massive movement is apparently not there yet, but in a few months it could be so (economic and political problems will affect enyone). In order to make a lasting effect, there should be a lot of latent forces and pressures building up for a true third part. At the moment it is too early for Dr. Paul, he does not have enough money. You need 100m USD plus and be polling at at least 15% in order to participate in debates and - for now - Dr. Paul will be even more be ignored than up to now. To make the changes in the GOP, take a lot of time, influence and pressure indeed. The currently majority policy line must have an incentive, an a ha experience in order to motivate to change. It would be to no effect if Dr. Paul would stand as a third party and act simply as a vote splitter: he should run to win, thus obtain 35% plus. He could possibly later decide to go Indy, but the best way is to go to the convention, he can approach Bush then in person. Someone has noted that those who meet Dr. Paul, 80% like him and his message eventually. Also: if he abandons the Republican Party now, he is also in effect osilating him from his policial and potential politicla friends. People have to be persuaded, it cannot be only a party of the disillusioned etc. (5-15% will have no lasting effect) If Dr. Paul sees - during the convention, that a change within the Republican Party cannot be made eventually, then it could be an incentive to break and form a third party. The rally in March in Washington DC will have a very positive and powerful effect, more than any "moneybomb". There will have to be some takeover of a lot of influential groups and policy influencers. It has a lot to do with trust.
IMHO one important reason why Fox banned Dr. Paul from the debate and had a negative influence, is the fact that they think he is a Democrat, speaking about opposition within the Republican Part, like a Democrat. (Interesting fact is that Rupert Murdoch has contributed to the Hillary Clinton). There are" neocons" in both parties. People react irrational (and immoral) in the wake of the fear-psychosis that is created. The "split" int eh GOP between the conservatives and the liberal McCain, although they are both pro-Iraq war, does offer some new possibilities. Of course it would take time to persuade the conservativ epro-war faction, but they have the fiscal and social conservatism in common with Dr. Paul and this is a good starting point. Many of them had a negative perception - media created - of Dr. Paul (as a liberal), but they can take a second look at Paul. We have seen after the CPAC meeting supporters of McCain and Huckabee has joined Dr. Paul.
Then of course CNN has also ignored Dr. Paul, probably as they want a Democrat to win, they know the GOP will loose over Iraq with any candidate, except Dr. Paul and are aware of the powerful position of Dr. Paul, which endanger (if not destroy) the Democratic Party chances
Also: when Dr. Paul had the statement about almost zero chance for a brokered convention, that was based - after Romney's departure - on an extrapolation of the SC, FL and Super Tuesday results, e.g. that the same would happen with the remaining states. However, McCain's poor showing in kansas and Louisiana has made the possibility of a brokered convention higher more realistic again, have to see what happens. It is also possible that even if McCain gets the majority/magic number soon, he may not be able to get the nominee, if by the time of the RNC, he is polling low against Obama or CLinton and of course his weakness and mistakes will be discussed. It is good that the Democratic Party also seem to lead to a broekred convention, takes the pressure off the need to get a solution before the RNC.
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2008 Walt Thiessen, all rights reserved.