Why Ron Paul Must Run Third Party

RE: 

Paul? Or Huckabee?

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.

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.

http://www.amazon.com/Childrens-Blizzard-David-Laskin/dp/0060520752
http://www.amazon.com/WLT-Radio-Romance-Garrison-Keillor/dp/0140103805
http://www.amazon.com/Giants-Earth-Prairie-Perennial-Classics/dp/0060931930

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.

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.