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Originally Posted by .Alex.
Maybe the supporters are the same (they have always been around long before Ron Paul), but the policies would have been very different.
If you can channel all the racists and crazies into getting behind a guy who is pretty staunchly anti-police and anti-military, that sounds like a win in my book.
Ron Paul would probably be significantly better than Trump but the whole RP project failed because of the libertarian apostasies against white supremacy. It's one of the important things to remember in this story here: the Ron Paul movement was fueled in large part by angry paranoid racist idiots who pivoted to Trump quickly; the actual principled small government libertarians were a niche. A sideshow. The crazy racist uncle talk was the real product Ron Paul fans thought they were buying.
I mean my goodness I have no interest in re-ligtating all the way back to 2008 but when those newsletters came out, plenty of us were trying to get the RP types to admit that the newsletters weren't some accident. Principled libertarianism isn't a thing in American politics except at the very far margins. Ron Paul, assuming the newsletters were him cozying up to the paleoconservative wing for political reasons and not a statement of his sincere beliefs -- they existed because principled libertarianism doesn't have an audience. There's no political faction behind it. Pamphleteering about MLK's philandering and basketball riots is where the money are and where the people are.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...ublican-party/
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“This isn’t the most artful way to say it, but it’s like, where do you go when the only people who seem to agree with you on taxes hate black people?” Howe laughed ruefully.
Really the Ron Paul movement was essentially a microcosm of the GOP elites writ large; a microcosm of the old-establishment-GOP's problem: what do you do when you run out of customers for your old model products?
Trump marries up demand with supply. There's no market, so to speak, for free-market orthodox tax-cuts and deregulation only type voters. There's no market for principled libertarianism. Church attendance is down even in the south; they couldn't even rely on the old gin-em'-up with the Bible tactics.
The demand is for paranoid racist fantasies. GOP provides that product now.
White supremacy and white resentments are literally the only animating force the whole ideology can unify on. The entire party from hucksters like RP to the old guard elites like McConnel and Ryan are hip to this now. "Channeling all the racists and crazies" into this and that are so 1994. So 2004. Now they are mad and want things, and they've been reinforced for a generation or two that this is their rightful social inheritance. See Ron Paul's newsletters.
So I suppose in the end what I would say is that the whole "bait and switch racist morons" is kind of how we got here. Now we just have a really well oiled machine of marketers whose decades-long experience of ginning up racist agitation have created tens of millions of angry whites with restive energy and revenge on the brain and all you want to tell us is how glorious it could have been if we had just let Ron Paul lead all these racist idiots to dismantle Bretton Woods. I mean maybe but this is what happens when that fails.
Last edited by DVaut1; 02-28-2017 at 02:48 PM.