Ron Paul Revolution?

and I say this living in a town where a huge Paul fanatic is an elected official (and blogger).

Much of the Paul support comes from techies who are extremely cutting edge. They do not wait for government solutions since they are accustomed to finding their own. They most certainly do not consider themselves retro in any sense.

But much of the Paul agenda amounts to a repudiation of about 80 years of American foreign and fiscal policies.  The Federal Reserve Board has been around since 1913.  The income tax dates from this period as well. Woodrow Wilson whether wisely or not committed the U.S. to military intervention in Europe.  Federal food and drug inspections,, et al, all predated even the New Deal. 

I'm sure the Paul supporters will argue these were all mistakes. But there are two problems. One is the ideological one that in a sense ripping up 75 years of settled policies is not "conservative". The second problem is that NATO, central banking et al is now the "installed base" of the postindustrial world. Any effort to abandon these practices would produce incompatibility with our traditional trading and security partners, as well as huge levels of domestic economic dislocation.

Perhaps the brilliant minds behind the Paul effort can answer the question : How does 21st Century America work if we go back to 19th Century institutions? I suspect rather than sitting down and drawing up a practical alternative agenda we will be treated to a dissertation about obscure intellectual authors and how anyone who fails to grasp their brilliance is simply too dumb to make it work.

Or like my local officeholder, who's default position is "well, you know he really wants to follow the Constitution"   Thankfully, that is not how he campaigns at the Dunkin Donuts.

There are some admirable things about the Paul campaign.  The way he went from obscure long-time congressman to garner a cult-like following of devoted supporters, raised gobs of money, mostly online, and never backed down from his somewhat odd set of beliefs. 

But had he ever become someone who crawled up the leaderboard (for all his fans and money, he has a total of 29 delegates!), people would have seen some scary skeletons.  First off, his direct family members received a good chunk of money from his campaign.  Paul is an all-out conspiracy theorist, especially with the insane North American Union.  I'm not entirely sure  where he stands on 9/11, I don't think he's a complete nut, but I believe he thinks our government at least should be investigated. 

The most concerning association is certainly his connection with American Free Press, the Nazi newspaper in America.  He has long written a column for them.  Not all Ron Paul supporters are Nazi's, but all American Nazi's are Ron Paul supporters. 

All this doesn't even the mention things that don't fit with current conservatism, especially the isolationist foreign policy, as Tom points out in his post.  There are some rules of conservatism that can be bent a bit, but peace through strength is not one of them. 

That said, Republicans should welcome Paulistians and try to bend (not outright change, we don't want or need a homogeneous party) their values closer to ours.  They certainly ought to vote R, their  beliefs are much more in line with conservatives, and a 3rd party vote is stupid waste of time. 

Why is it that some people refuse to acknowledge that a lot of Ron Paul's support actually does come from long time Republicans?  I am a Ron Paul supporter who has been a registered Republican my entire life and have never ever voted for a Democrat (though I will vote for a Libertarian every once in a while). In fact, I voted for Bush both in 2000 and 2004. I have even worked on the campaigns of Republicans in the past and am doing so now. I will not vote for Obama because he is a socialist and is completely opposite of my beliefs. For Czarmangis to suggest that I am a Democrat is ridiculous.

Most of the Ron Paul supporters I know of actually have been registered Republicans for a long time but are fed up with the party actually ignoring the conservative economic part of their platform. For many of us, fiscally conservative policies are the most important. We understand that for all of McCain's griping on pork barrel spending, he is not a true fiscal conservative. The money we spend on government beauracracy and entitlements is way more than pork projects ever will be.

With that being said, the current Republican party better get their act together and fast. There are too many of us out there for them to ignore. Many of the people I know of are still clinging to the Republican party by bare threads and are looking more towards the Libertarian and Constitution parties. This point is particullarly important when you look at the number of young people involved with the Ron Paul campaign. These people are the future and see that they are getting ripped off with excessive borrowing from foreign countries to support entitlment programs that are going to be dumped in their laps.

As a final point, I find it interesting that people are suggesting that these rifts in the Republican party are a relatively new phenomenon. How quickly people forget the division between the conservative Goldwater Republicans and the moderate Rockefeller Republicans in '64. There literally was an outright "war" between these two factions at the Presidential nominating convention. It was Ronald Reagan who brought these groups together and it is going to take somebody like him again to usher in a new Republican era.

Elmore beats him by ten. Does that say anything about Paul's revolution? Could it be that Paul is a staunch pro-lifer as well as a libertarian?