Ron Paul, Libertarian in Republican garb
My Issue no. 109 commentary giving my predictions for 2008 has prompted some mail from supporters of Ron Paul, the longshot Republican candidate for President. Some Libertarians are concerned that I have slighted Ron Paul because I vowed not to vote for either Republicans or Democrats in the 2008 elections. Ron Paul, they correctly point out, shares my Libertarian beliefs, even though he is a Republican.
So I thought I’d point readers of this blog to a couple of brief newsletter commentaries – click here and click here — I’ve written supporting Ron Paul for President, and explain why I won’t vote for Democrats or Republicans, even though Paul is a Republican. (If you’d like to get a copy of the free newsletter, click here .)
I intend to vote for Ron Paul any time the opportunity arises. But I won’t have that opportunity when the real elections are held in November because Ron Paul won’t be the Republican Presidential candidate. The Republican Party will see to that. Ron Paul is death to the Republican OR Democratic Party. He represents total reform of a corrupt system that keeps a lock on a two-party system to the exclusion of non-Demopublican parties.
Ron Paul is a Republican in name only. He is, in fact, a former Libertarian who switched to the Republican Party with the hope of effecting change from the “inside.” As a Libertarian candidate he routinely got trounced at the polls, as Libertarians always do at the national level. I applaud Paul’s efforts, and I will support him until the inevitable happens, namely, until he fades once more into the background of the Republican Party as an embarrassment to most Republican politicians.
I hope I am totally wrong about Ron Paul’s chances to become the Republican Presidential nominee. I will gladly eat my words and vote for him if he is nominated. I think my chances of being wrong, however, are so low they could only be figured by Quantum Mechanical calculations. Nevertheless I will support him through these primaries and by voting for him in the various online polls and by contributing money to his candidacy.
In the end, however, I believe that the only way the Demopublican lock on political power in America can be broken is by abstaining from the Republican and Democratic Parties and voting for third party candidates. The Libertarians need to form alliances with other third parties, possibly even bringing a coalition of far right and far left parties together. Sounds absurd on the surface, but these disparate groups have one thing in common: a desire to break the Demopublican lock on power. We can argue about our differences after we have achieved that goal.
