The GOP’s last best hope: The Ron Paul revolution

Okay, look, there are some aspects of Ron Paul’s platform I’d like, and I’d love to better integrate those areas into the Republican platform. Specifically I’m referring to the smaller government platform, as well as Ron Paul’s monetary policy and generally more libertarian approach to most social issues.

Mainstream GOP candidates, well, many of them do seem to want to shrink government, but they want to do it by an extremely incremental approach. This isn’t, inherently flawed, but it renders whatever progress you do make somewhat fragile, and makes it harder to differentiate yourself from your opponents.

The approach favored by the Ron Paul followers, however, is unrealistic. In the long term it may not be, but in the short term they’re asking us to go from 120MPH to 0 in five seconds. I agree that this is what we’re eventually going to need, but while mainstream GOP candidates are too incremental Ron Paul’s platform isn’t incremental enough. Simply put, no matter how big a political victory we manage, it’s unlikely we’ll have the power to immediately push through such changes. It might be a good idea to start out with such a dramatic reduction for negotiation purposes, but anybody expecting that sort of reduction would end up sadly disappointed.

My general thought is to find some sort of middle ground, something more bold than the typical mainstream Repulican selling point of using small cuts and growth to reduce deficits and the government, but something more achievable than Ron Pauls, “I’m gonna get absolutely everything I want immediately,” notion.

Now, the one issue I simply cannot get behind, is Ron Paul’s foreign policy. While I would agree that we do need to be less aggressive in our foreign policy, I still feel we need a powerful enough military to meet the following needs. 1: To offer significant protection to key allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Isreal, 2: to maintain enough presence to prevent a power vacuum, or at least an abrupt power vacuum, and 3: To maintain the troop and equipment necessary to hold out in major engagements, at least long enough to be able to ramp up to handle said engagements.

Basically, protect the people we’ve promised to protect, don’t allow despots to abruptly pop up, and keep enough forces around that we wouldn’t be immediately trampled in a WW3 style engagement.

That’s probably a lot more military than most Ron Paul backers want, but I’d focus on making largely a preventative force. Our mistake in the past ten years hasn’t been having a military, its been that we were over eager to use it, at least once.

WolvenOne on November 16, 2012 at 8:30 PM

MelonCollie on November 16, 2012 at 8:37 PM

Agreed, and this is at least in part what has all but destroyed Europe these past three decades. Playing the part of the worlds policeman has allowed most EU countries to get by with little to no military force of their own. This has made it a lot easier for socialist welfare states to spring up; when you don’t have that sort of expense on your back its a lot easier to justify paying for these sorts of things.

This in turn has hurt America’s capitalist foundations. Chances are we never would have been tempted to try welfare state policies, if so many European countries hadn’t tried it.

As for Isreal, Japan, and South Korea, not only are they allies we’ve promised to protect, but they serve as proxies to keep regional opponents in check. For example, chances are China would influence that Pacific a lot more easily if it weren’t for Japan, and Middle Eastern nations would come after us a lot more if it weren’t for Isreal.

So, keeping them backed up is, kinda important.

WolvenOne on November 16, 2012 at 8:52 PM

Watch what they do (once elected, vis-a-vis shrinking government, at most “slow the growth”), not what they say they’re going to do … and you might reconsider your premise here.

ShainS on November 16, 2012 at 9:02 PM

In terms of tax dollars, slowing the growth would shrink the overall size of the government, eventually. While I’d take that over what we’re doing now, this approach is too reliant upon maintaining power. You don’t really see the benefits until a decade or more down the line, but there are always lobbyists pushing for increased spending. Actual, real time spending cuts, are more painful and politically more difficult in the short term, but you also see the benefits within a few years, rather than decades.

The fallacy of the Ron Paul acolytes, is that they want to do things such as, taking ten government agencies and cutting them down to one. While that would certainly go a long long, looong way towards balancing the budget, and shrinking the government, it’d require those that believe in this platform to capture unrealistic amounts of political power.

To be honest, I’d be ecstatic at this point if we could get rid of even one federal organization. I also think that’s quite a bit more plausible. Getting rid of one or two organizations under the pretense of combining their functions would sound moderate enough to somebody in the center that you could plausibly sell it. You’d simply have to, slowly close down many of those combined functions in the following years to truly get rid of them.

WolvenOne on November 16, 2012 at 10:11 PM

Mimzey on November 16, 2012 at 10:19 PM

This is part of why I’m a big advocate of, “Thou Shalt Not Attack Your Fellow Republicans.” Regardless of whether they’re from the libertarian side of the party like Ron Paul, or from the more moderate wing like Mitt Romney.

Fact of the matter is, to different degrees they’re almost all better than the Democrats are now, and by criticizing people on our own side we provide legitimacy to attacks coming from outside of our party. Additionally, since we’re already being demonized from the outside, forming a circular firing squad only makes matters worse.

There are some exceptions though. I haven’t been very quiet in my criticism of politicians like Akin and to a much lesser extent Santorum. The reason for this is because, when somebody is damaging their own party and own cause they probably SHOULD be shut down. Suffice to say, from speaking to people over the summer and fall, the double digit drop in support for the pro-life position doesn’t surprise me at all.

Thankfully, I think from now on we’re going to be more careful about whom we nominate, in this respect at least.

WolvenOne on November 16, 2012 at 10:40 PM