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The following reflections are contingent on the American political situation at the time of writing. The kaleidoscope of circumstance will continue to turn & break up old combinations.
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Now that we know the outcome of Super Tuesday, let me first ask: What is the real significance of Ron Paul’s candidacy?
It will prove to have begun laying the foundations for a far wider & deeper interest in the principles of liberty. Many who have emerged will undoubtedly retreat -- but the numbers who remain actively interested will add up to something far larger than previously. Ron Paul is a catalyst -- not just for the US but for the people who support the same principles (under his name) in some 26 countries & more throughout the world.
Let me add, on behalf of the scores of millions abroad who suffer from the US govt’s wars, invasions, military adventures, occupations. These hapless victims cannot vote in US elections, yet they cannot avoid the consequences. If they could vote, how do you suppose it would go? Which candidate would win -- overwhelmingly? Their only plea is a common humanity. They will be the silent millions standing behind everyone in the US who follows the principles that Ron Paul espouses.
Let me now set out why it is crucial that Ron Paul run as a third party candidate:
A. Some necessary preliminaries (the real matter begins with point 4):
1. I cannot see the Republican Party machine allowing the nomination of a complete outsider like Ron Paul --witness the Louisiana murk (for one thing.) Almost certainly, McCain will get the job: after all, he’s been part of the political machinery for some 30 years & more. Assuming this is so, it means that in November, his vote will certainly include his hardcore supporters, at a minimum. But large numbers who might otherwise have voted Republican might well stay home -- finding McCain so off-putting. And I cannot see McCain drawing in very many voters who might otherwise have voted Democratic.
2. So far as the Democratic candidate is concerned, I think that he or they, will be sure of the hard core of Democratic voters -- those who would always vote the party line, no matter what. Additionally, Obama or the Clintons (whoever it is) will get the votes of their personal followings; & possibly also those of some/many otherwise-Republican voters.
3. Putting (1 + 2) together: almost certainly a Democratic president for the US in 2009.
B. Having dealt with that, we now come to the critical point:
4. Ron Paul, however, draws in those voters -- NB, who know about him -- who feel strongly on particular issues: War; solid money; sound banking; corporatism; the vast & growing power that govt officials now have over their subjects; subsidies to foreign govts; intergovernmental bureaucracies; bilateral trade pacts between govts; etc. Most significantly, these issues cross party lines, so they draw in a very wide range of voters, right across the spectrum. This includes especially, followers of both major political parties, ‘independents’ & non-voters. True, the groups who have firm views on these points do overlap, of course -- but taken together they should form a distinctly visible minority.
Now, this purely ‘issue-based’ constituency has not been really tested as yet. Voting in primaries & caucuses is constrained in various ways & only relatively small numbers participate. November, however, is ‘open slather’ (as we say in Oz.) Thus the size & strength of this constituency (such as it is) can only manifest itself fully in November (on condition, see further.) -- Yes, yes I know what the polls say. But by November, voters will have been exposed -- thoroughly exposed -- to the two major party candidates: ‘War-crazy’ McCain on the one side, & either the Clintons or Obama on the other. (Dear heaven, what a ‘choice.’)
However: the ‘party’ of issues -- whatever its size & strength -- must remain invisible:-unless its voters have a candidate to vote for in November. They cannot vote for someone who failed to win the Republican nomination. They can vote for a third-party candidate. Such a candidate, moreover, would stand out in stark contrast to the major party candidates. He would be canvassing serious topics -- not repeating the shallow bleat coming from the others: ‘Please vote for me, I so desperately want to be President.’
5. In short, Ron Paul’s candidacy is only a take-off point for something far wider. Should he choose to stand as a third-party candidate, a party of issues will have at least begun to be identified more openly. It is to this that his advertising can now be directed openly (as others have pointed out.) To use economists’ jargon, the Ron Paul product, already somewhat differentiated, can be differentiated further -- as warranted completely by its inherent characteristics.
Ron Paul’s strength in his Congressional constituency, is in the close personal relationships his staff are careful to maintain with his constituents. This strength can now be applied systematically on a far wider scale. The strongest support for the ideas & ideals he expresses are found at local level. Let it be here -- in local papers, TV stations, radio stations & the like -- that efforts be directed. The objective: To maximise the vote -- show the numbers who really support these principles. Let the MSM go hang. Don’t batter at a closed door -- quietly climb in through the roof or up through the floor.
I think he's done more good running for president than he has in Congress, being the lone vote against tyranny.
Oh well.
Allan Walstad -
2/10/2008
Go Ron!
Tom Woods -
2/10/2008
On the other hand, the Pope is almost 81, and he governs a billion people.
Allan Walstad -
2/9/2008
Paul is 72 now. If he won the presidency in 2012 he would be 77 on inauguration. Not an impossibility, but a bit far-fetched.
Otto M. Kerner -
2/9/2008
Or should Dr. Paul wait until 2012? It's risky, but the iron might be hotter then. If U.S. troops are still in Iraq, then that issue will be even bigger then -- especially if this is under a Democratic president.
Also, a recent article in the American Conservative argues that Paul's campaign missed out on opportunities, especially in New Hampshire, through a lack of campaign skills and quality advertising. Maybe over the next four years, Paul could develop a better staff and be more prepared than he is now (running for president is a lot different than running for Congressman, and Paul's previous presidential run in 1988 might have been too low-profile for him to gain many insights from it).
Andrew D. Todd -
2/9/2008
Well, in 1969-71, the Communists, or, more precisely, the Students For a Democratic society, found themselves at the apex of a surge of protest sentiment against the Vietnam War. They managed to convince themselves that the war proved the invalidity of all the structures of daily life, and that they were now going to lead the American people forwards to true communism. If you read the works of someone like Abbie Hoffman, you can see the spirit of excess. Of course, there was never a mandate for anything like that. President Nixon did the sensible thing-- he withdrew from Vietnam and resumed diplomatic relations with China, spouting fine words which he knew were meaningless ("Peace With Honor," he called it), and set up a new defensive line a safe distance back, in the Philippines. The anti-war movement in the United States promptly collapsed, having been made into a rebel without a cause. The United States reverted back to a reasonable development of where it had been in 1960, except that certain structures of militarism, such as conscription, no longer existed. Hillary Clinton, assuming she gets elected, will do something similar. It has been demonstrated that she can weep at will. She will surely announce that whatever she winds up doing is all Bush's fault, and that the Army was betrayed by Wall Street. She will create the equivalent of the Watergate Hearings by publishing assorted government documents which embarrass the Bush administration, and many of its midlevel officials. In short, she will behave as cynically as Nixon did. American society will revert back to a pattern largely descended from the status-quo-ante-9-11. The military will probably wind up smaller, and with less of a role in public education than it used to have. There will be fewer GI clerks and mechanics, joining the service to learn a trade and get college money, who can always be issued rifles and turned into ad hoc infantry. The next president who wants to invade foreign countries will find himself with lesser resources at hand, short of full mobilization. People will get their college money and their technical training in other ways, probably mediated by the internet. My guess is that we will probably move closer to the European-Russian-Japanese norm of intensively educating twelve-year-olds, and giving nineteen-year-olds more opportunities to let off steam.
Where full collectivism did have sufficient traction, as in Soviet Russia, circa 1930, the result was the collectivization of Soviet Agriculture, and the death of ten million people. That is what I think the enthusiasts of politics don't quite grasp. As for attracting "...a lot of new people into politics, many of them young, enthusiastic, and idealistic," electoral politics is rather a dirty business. Idealism doesn't last very long. There's a wonderful line in the film _The Lion in Winter_, in which Henry II (Peter O'Toole) says to Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katherine Hepburn) "You're like a democratic drawbridge, going down for everyone." To which she replies, in the subtle Hepburn manner, "At my age there isn't much traffic anymore..." I cannot quite say why this reminds me of Hillary Clinton.
This is not a new phenomena. At the end of the Revolutionary War, Thomas Paine woke up to discover that the people of Pennsylvania had reverted to their peacetime norms, only without a king. He went off to France, becoming a tourist of revolution in a country whose language he never attained a very good command of.
Over the next few years, we are likely to have quite enough technological changes to cope with, without gratuitously introducing radical economic changes, such as the abolition of Social Security, Medicare, etc. There is no evidence of deficit-driven inflation at present, as distinct from oil-driven inflation, so it seems premature to worry very much about budget deficits. Parenthetically, the major known instances of hyper-inflation were in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, and the driving force behind them was not some economic mechanism, but the destruction of human capital on a huge scale. Too many widows had been promised pensions for their husbands-- about ten million of them-- who had been killed in battle.
Allan Walstad -
2/9/2008
I'm not sure how the Communists got into this discussion. Ron Paul is religious, as most libertarians must be aware.
Libertarians worked themselves into a state of hysteria? That's not my impression as a card-carrying member of the LP for over twenty years. What actually appears to have happened is that Ron Paul has attracted a lot of new people into politics, many of them young, enthusiastic, and idealistic.
Libertarianism doesn't have traction? Well, at one time collectivism wouldn't have had traction. Things change. Change starts somewhere. If people can learn from mistakes, it is possible to dismantle the collectivist monster in DC.
As for the "ultimate libertarian heresy that every man is an island"--that's a pretty ignorant characterization of libertarianism. Libertarians aren't against people helping people, they're against coercion.
On a third-party run: I think it depends on whether Obama or Clinton is the Democratic nominee. If it's Clinton vs McCain, then you have two warmongers, and an anti-war candidate would draw from both.
Andrew D. Todd -
2/9/2008
I don't know if you have ever heard the term, "flyover country," that is, the vast majority of the United States, territory which the speaker does not visit, but merely flies over in a jetliner, en route from the east coast to the west coast. McCain has not done very well at securing votes in flyover country. Where he has been successful is mostly in two states, New York and California, and in a number of small states (Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Delaware) which constitute de-facto suburbs of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, the cities of the Eastern Seaboard. McCain can probably add Maryland and Rhode Island, but it open to debate how far he will get in Virginia. At a certain point, he will run out of the suburbs of Washington, DC, and wind up in small towns which are part of the South rather than the Eastern Seaboard. Broadly speaking, and subject to complications, McCain got his delegates from places where the Democrats could routinely expect to collect sixty or eighty percent of the vote. The Republican vote in these areas is very much a suburban vote, expressive of distaste at the lower classes. In the cities, the best job a workingman can aspire to is usually as a manual civil servant, for example, a bus driver or a postman, and it is frequently required that he live within the city limits in order to hold a city job. There is not very much manufacturing left in the Eastern Seaboard, and what there is, tends to be the kind which primarily employs trained scientists. This means that the whole urban lower middle class is broadly hostile to the whole proposition of downsizing government. Nearly all the states in the "McCain Region" have already voted. The states which have not yet voted are mostly in the other regions.
In the middle west, one gets rather more manufacturing, and more well-paid factory workers who are afraid that their jobs will be shipped to China. The movement to China has started at the bottom, with the cheapest kind of work, and proceeded upwards. Beyond the autoworkers, there are people who make various kinds of expensive industrial goods, eg. railroad locomotives. This is where Romney started to do comparatively well. He has been described as "an empty suit," and he easily made the requisite promises-- whether or not he had any intention of keeping them. McCain is a hereditary admiral-- an aristocrat of sorts. He has never had to learn to lie with anything like as much fluency as the average politician. Still, he managed to take second place in this region, or in such parts of it as have voted. However, he may well be provoked to say things which will bring millions of factory workers into opposition. He might, for example, point out the inevitability of their being displaced by Chinese, and advise the male factory workers to enter poorly paid, traditionally feminine occupations.
Beyond Minnesota, manufacturing gives way to farmland, and to vast empty stretches of land. This is the world of Custer and the Little Big Horn. It is also the world of "The Children's Blizzard," back in 1888. As Garrison Keillor put it in _WLT: A Radio Romance_, every January, nature makes a serious effort to kill you. There is a communitarian value system, based on the understanding that failing to pick up a stranded motorist, or, more traditionally, to offer shelter to a wayfarer, might very well be murder by omission. You might also read Rolvaag's _Giants in the Earth_, to get a feel for the texture of the land, and of the settler culture. This region runs all the way to the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountains, a hundred or two hundred miles from the Pacific coast. The Sierra Nevadas, incidentally, were the locale of the Donner Party, the most notorious case of starvation-induced cannibalism in American history. There are anomalies of course. The areas immediately around Las Vegas and Denver are essentially population overflows from California, with little connection to the traditional life of their states. The region's thin population is counterbalanced by the Republican delegate allocation system. This region is where Huckabee began to pick up second place after Romney. The wilderness folk looked at Huckabee, and decided that while he might have some odd ideas as a Baptist, at least he did not believe in that ultimate libertarian heresy that every man is an island. It is simply too egalitarian a region for McCain to flourish.
I believe that what will happen at the republican convention will be that Romney's delegates will vote for him on the first, perfunctory, ballot, and afterwards, they will be free to make their own choices. However, they will be few in number, and they will be intensively lobbied by higher authority in a way which the voters could not be. They will be approached by people who are obviously much wealthier than themselves, and who give them an inferiority complex. It is in this climate that they might make decisions their constituents back home would not be happy with. Often, McCain's problem is not so much what he says, as how he says it. He tends to reveal that he does not see any essential difference between an American workingman and a Chinese peasant or a Mexican peasant. This is a kind of essentially emotional response which, while real, is hard to articulate in debate.
David T. Beito -
2/9/2008
I still hold out a slim hope for former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson. He appears to be the perfect libertarian/antiwar/civil liberties candidate straight from central casting:
C'est la vie. Paul is a politician, after all, & must protect his Congressional seat. It will be a fight between McCain & Huckabee, of course.
Sudha Shenoy -
2/9/2008
Thank you for the trouble. Let me try to expand a little.
1. I know I have a limited understanding of things American: but it is based on more than half a century's worth of stays, visits, contd observation, contd contacts with American friends.
It is well-known that religious sentiment is far stronger & more widespread in America than in other DCs.
2. Yes, 'hardcore' American libertarians are very few in number. But Ron Paul has brought out & consolidated political sentiments that are far wider & deeper -- there are Ron Paul groups in some 26 countries. These beliefs are at the root of the socioeconomic arrangements that created the DCs over the last few centuries. (Obviously I cannot expand on this here.)
3. I went by the delegate numbers on CNN. McCain has the largest number, collected in Republican contests across the country, so he seems to have _some_ country-wide support. I assume he will collect a few more in contests where delegates are awarded proportionately.
Huckabee is, at present, well behind McCain in terms of delegates. I assume he will certainly collect more, now that he faces only McCain. The question is, how many more?
I do not know if Romney's delegates are required to go as a bloc to another candidate. I assume they will divide, in whatever proportion, between McCain & Huckabee; some might even go to Paul.
I assume that after this, McCain will still have a substantial number of delegates -- obtained from around the country -- so he will continue as he has started.
Thank you again.
David T. Beito -
2/9/2008
He can under the law but the problem is, so I am told, that the Republicans would then retaliate by running an independent conservative candidate againt him in the general election to split the vote.
Anthony Gregory -
2/9/2008
I don't believe that reason makes sense. He can keep his Congressional seat and run for president as a Libertarian, as I understand the law.
Andrew D. Todd -
2/8/2008
I hope you will not be offended if I point out that, as a foreigner, you are liable to certain errors in understanding America. I realize that you have taught in Ohio, but university towns are a bit different. Libertarianism per se has essentially no traction in America. Libertarians have essentially the same kind of marginal position as Communists (orthodox, Maoist, or Trotskyite). These ideologies are classically the politics of highly educated, but insecure young men. Occasionally, a complete outsider can exploit a protest vote, but that depends on both of the parties in power being stupid enough to persist. Ron Paul never had a chance. Libertarians managed to work themselves up into a state of collective hysteria, the way the Communists did in 1969-71, but that merely detached them from reality.
Americans do not object to the kind of moderate socialism which exists at present. For all but the richest tenth, the uncertainty of whether they would win or lose in the new dispensation makes them Kirkean conservatives, lovers of existing ills. George W. Bush found that out when he tried to reform Social Security in the name of ideological purity, just as Hillary Clinton found out when she tried to re-invent health insurance. We muddle through, in approved Anglo-Saxon fashion, as long as we can. We work up various kinds of subventions for people with grievances. Things very like school tuition vouchers are popping up in the federal tax code, and the states are all adopting "high risk health insurance" programs which function rather like national health insurance.
Libertarians seem to have taken over the Communist dogma about religion being rural idiocy. To do so is to discount the sheer force of religion in American life, especially in American rural life. Mike Huckabee represents an insurgency within the Republican Party. I doubt he really expects to win the general election, and his policy positions are not very coherent, because he isn't going to have to act on them. He does, however, have a reasonable chance of winning the Republican nomination, now that Romney is out of the way. The Republican Party's delegate allocation system is heavily biased in favor of small rural states which traditionally vote Republican. The states of Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee, taken together, have about half the population of California, but slightly more delegates. Huckabee has won three of the four states, and will very likely win the Mississippi primary when it is held. Precisely because his focus is so essentially rural, Huckabee may very well be able to win the Republican nomination with the votes of as little as an eighth of the American population. He represents people who cannot go and vote Democratic because the Democratic party is a party without God, and who are therefore forced to stand and fight for the soul of the Republican Party.
There are certain people who have already voted for Romney, who depending on what their delegates do at the convention, might take the view that John McCain has stolen their votes under false pretenses, and might decide to retaliate by voting for Ron Paul in the general election. This would only yield a few million votes however, not enough to win, but possibly enough to insure the election of the Democratic candidate, and it would be a one-time thing, like Ralph Nader in 2000, John Anderson in 1980, or George Wallace in 1968. John McCain has no hard-core supporters, save those who have political or business ambitions of their own, at least, not outside of Arizona. You cannot build a party on the basis of "all chiefs and no [American] indians." McCain is moderately popular with people who might very well vote Democratic, but they will leave him in a ditch under the right circumstances.
I don't know what your religious beliefs are like. Back in the 1960's, my father the philosophy professor had a graduate student from India, a Brahman from Mumbai. She promptly taught my mother to make vegetarian curry from what would have seemed the most unpromising ingredients, and we have been eating it ever since. When it was suggested to Rajam, by way of casuistry, that she might eat fish, "because it was not really an animal," she said something which has become a byword in my family: "What do you mean, a fish isn't an animal. It swims. It looks at you!" On the other hand, I have known Indians, Brahmans at that, who took to eating beef quite naturally once they were in America. It certainly wasn't an ethical principle with them.
David T. Beito -
2/8/2008
The latest news is that, apparently, Ron Paul has ruled out running as third party in no uncertain terms:
