“Tonight John McCain will be in St. Paul, but St. Paul will be in Minneapolis.”
Huh?
That was a line spoken yesterday by Doug Wead at a political convention in Minnesota. The first “St. Paul” he mentioned was the city where the G.O.P. is holding its convention; the second one is Ron Paul, leader of the “constitutionalists” who convened in his name yesterday in Minneapolis for a counter-convention.
Paul as the messiah.The two gatherings couldn’t have been much more different. The G.O.P. convention, where the candidate has a good chance of winning the Presidency, felt more anxious than triumphant. The Paul convention, meanwhile, felt like a celebration even though its candidate got only a sliver of votes in the Republican primaries and wasn’t even invited to speak at his own party’s convention.
Paul himself was more dour than his supporters. “The American Republic hangs by a thread,” he reminded them, “and a thin one at that.”
The G.O.P. convention has been a tribute to not only “country first” but, primarily, to government itself. The Paul convention, representing “the revolutionary wing of the Republican Party,” was as anti-government as a political convention could be. Arguments were made against nearly every task that government carries out, including taxation (not surprisingly) and regulation (of just about any sort), but also the funding of education.
The Paul convention was upbeat, heartfelt, and a bit on the wild side. If you didn’t know better, you might not have known their candidate had lost.
Grover Norquist speaking at the Ron Paul convention.His supporters rallied with a vigor seeming to suggest that they felt their concerns represent the hearts and minds of the majority of Americans — whereas in fact, if they really did, Paul would have gotten an awful lot more votes. Paul supporters see themselves as the true G.O.P., representing the best intentions and true will of the American people; the big-biz G.O.P., meanwhile, seems to see Paul supporters as a lunatic fringe.
What were the biggest applause lines of the day at the two gatherings? At the G.O.P. convention, the delegates responded mightily to 9/11 references, “country first,” the stories about McCain’s captivity in Vietnam, and the protection of unborn children.
The big applause at the Paul convention went to lines about abolishing the Federal Reserve, getting the U.S. out of the U.N., and being left alone by the government. Grover Norquist, president of the Americans for Tax Reform and a board member of the National Rifle Association, summed up the prevailing view succinctly: “Taxes bad, guns good.”
Site of the G.O.P. convention.One of the very biggest applause lines of the day, believe it or not, came upon a mention of the Austrian School of economics, which was followed by this line: “And by the way, free markets do not cause housing bubbles and mortgage crises.”
What does?
That’s easy: Government.
[Note: Here's my discussion of the Paul rally on The Takeaway.]
and 
. You can also watch it on 
The whole Ron Paul college student/angry middle-aged white men crowd is one of the strangest spectacles in American politics. These guys literally stand across from the Federal Reserve here in Atlanta with protest signs saying, “Abolish the Federal Reserve.” Really, guys?
I mean, I’m trying to be fair when I look at these people. Certainly, it’s nice to see someone exercise their rights to protest against the government on a city sidewalk. As a Democrat, would I really have the same disdain of student socialists, or some bearded guy handing out Trotsky pamphlets? Probably not, even though I’m not that left-wing, either.
The amusing thing about the Ron Paul Re”LOVE”ution (other than what’s reflexively there in the phrase “Re”LOVE”ution”) is that these guys are selling a style typically associated with the leftist agitators and radicals (remember, the phrase radical, when used with precision, politically, refers to the left; reactionary would be a closer description of Mr. Paul’s economic beliefs) to sell Tory monetary policies that benefit bankers and… gold investors? I’m having trouble, I guess, trying to decide whether there were this many day traders and campus Republicans who wanted to rip up their jeans and tie bandanas around their heads to look cool, or whether a lot of naive people are getting drawn into Paul’s campaign style.
Maybe society is just a buffet of ideas now, where left is blue and right is red, and the difference is a matter of personal preference — what WOULD you like your car bumper to look like? I always thought most of the trickle-down economic arguments (although they’d never own up to it, that’s the only answer petitioners of Paul have to why they’re not just a transparent plan to soak the poor) were kind of just jokes, ways to feel good about being greedy if you’re in an upper tax bracket (or feel good about voting for Reagan if you’re ambivalent to his economic policies, but, say, want the U.S. to be tougher on the Soviets). But, no, now the euivocation is complete. No reality is agreed to anymore on economic policy. You can be rich, poor, black, white, whatever, and you can seriously believe that Mr. Paul is as fair and even-handed as Hubert Humphrey in managing the American economy.
Hey, at least these guys are anti-war.
In a piece intended to contrast the Republican convention with the radical fringe counter-convention the writer quotes Grover Norquist speaking at the Paul convention: “Taxes bad, guns good.” Given that Grover Norquist is the king-pin of the Republican party, how can the writer not recognize that the difference between the two conventions are not that great? What else explains the wildly exuberant support for Gov. Palin at the Republican convention other than “taxes bad, guns good”?
What a shame that a great, useful political word like “libertarian” (the opposite of authoritarian) has been usurped by such loonies.
Vincent, you’re parallel to a rising movement would be accurate if what Ron Paul was saying was anything new. What the world needs is a journalistic outlet to lay down the case that no country in the world operates under the principles of the vaunted “Austrian School” of economics. That’s the most ingenuous thing about the Ron Paul “movement” their citation of an economic theory that isn’t taken seriously anywhere in actual economics classrooms other than a historical footnote.
There is no market mechanism for internalizing the famous externalities that negatively impact the environment. You can not compensate for the excess skin cancers from ozone depletion (how do you know that your cancer was excess?), the decreased life span from air pollution, or the impacts of climate change within any market and legal system that the Libertarians would accept. So they are left with the necessity of denying that ozone depletion causes skin cancer, that particulate air pollution shortens life and that long lived green house gases cause warming.
This perpetual denialist stance with regard to the findings and methods of science brands the libertarians as the ultimate traitors to the Enlightenment. They have embraced an ideological product of rationality but have turned their back on the only disciplines that actually have a non-zero chance of finding truth about nature. Their sham intellectualism entails nothing but the navigation of tautologies. Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers estimated that 5 million deaths would result by the year 2165 from excess non-melanoma skin cancers in the absence of policies to protect the ozone layer. Reagan participated fully in the Montreal Protocol Process and the stratospheric ozone layer is being protected. Ron does not like that. Consequences of this magnitude would be an appropriate legacy for Ron Paul and Grover Norquist.
Regards,
Chuck Wilson
To Annie #6:
You don’t like driving? You don’t like trade being opened with other countries? You don’t like education? You don’t like immigration? What’s your last name? How do you have an internet connection? I bet a government grant or investment tax credit made that possible. The truth is, in a democratic government, the people are ultimately responsible for the laws created – even if that means we are merely responsible for the election of the officials who craft those laws. Democracy is always imperfect and, in effect, requires a governmental body in perpetuity in order that laws can be added, taken away, or tweaked according to the times. Just as there are bad laws there are also good laws. One need not throw out the baby with the bathwater!
Is it not funny that the G.O.P. considers the Ron Paul Republicans extremist, but Sarah “McMooseKiller” Palin a godsend Separatist and all. The Republican Hypocrisy never ceases to amaze me.
It used to be that Ron Paul supporters insisted on referring to him as “Doctor” Paul, as if his having been an MD was some sort of credential proving the veracity of his ideology. (It isn’t, so far as I know, no more than Howard Dean’s MD is a credential for his veracity.)
Now Ron Paul is a “saint”? When did the Vatican put that through, and how, given that he’s still alive, and one of the prerequisites for sainthood is being dead?