Harper's Magazine: The Awakening - Ron Paul's Generational Movement

[jct74]

[edit] Here is a really long cover story about Ron Paul in the April edition of Harper's Magazine, I've only skimmed through it so far but it looks to be pretty favorable and good read, check it out here:

http://www.michael-ames.com/wp-content/uploads/THE-AWAKENING.pdf



http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Harpers1304AD302x410.gif

[sailingaway]

http://harpers.org/archive/2013/04/the-awakening-2/

unfortunately I'm not a subscriber so can only post this.... but will have the hard copy soon.


Almost half a year later, the postmortems continue. After an election in which Republicans failed to capture the White House and lost several seemingly winnable Senate seats, in which their tenuous majority in the House was retained more by way of redistricting than by the will of the voting public, everyone within and without the G.O.P. agrees it has a big problem.

Some insist that the critical failure of 2012 was one of messaging, that the party will return to power not by changing its beliefs but by finding the right tone — and the right candidate — to articulate its current ones. “The Republican Party does not need to change our principles,” Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal — already positioning himself to be that candidate — told a meeting of the Republican National Committee in Charlotte, North Carolina, in January. “But we might need to change just about everything else we do.” Lest it seem he was taking the problem too lightly, Jindal continued: “We must stop being the stupid party. It’s time for a new Republican party that talks like adults.”

Chainspell created this video of the same name "The Awakening of a Generation" just BEFORE the big rallies, using older footage:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Muf23Rc7HV8

then this one when the rallies were ongoing, "Witness the Power of an Idea":


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgsg7a-Ok8Q

[Inkblots]

there is also a long article about Ron Paul in the April edition but the online article only allows you to read the first 2 paragraphs without paying a subscription fee

guess you have to pay 20 bucks if you want to read it or check out the print edition somewhere. it's probably pretty good judging from the above article and since it is also a cover story.


I suppose you could do that, but wouldn't it be easier just to read it on the authors website?
hxxp://www.michael-ames.com/wp-content/uploads/THE-AWAKENING.pdf

;)

[jct74]

I suppose you could do that, but wouldn't it be easier just to read it on the authors website?
hxxp://www.michael-ames.com/wp-content/uploads/THE-AWAKENING.pdf

;)

hey great find man. I tried googling some text to find the whole article but no wonder search came up empty, its in a pdf file.

Moved these posts from the existing thread in Rand's forum and made into new thread in Ron's forum.

[Inkblots]

It's an interesting article. Not entirely flattering, but I would say almost entirely fair. I'll post some of the passages that stuck with me below.


Nevertheless, the Ron Paul Revolution, as his campaign has been called, was fueled by a young, anti-war base when he first ran for president as a Republican, in 2007. That was the year the first guerrilla signs went up along highways, the year an online “money bomb” raised a record $6 million in small donations in one day and supporters launched a 200-foot blimp that encouraged confused onlookers to "Google Ron Paul". It was the Right’s first serious youth movement since Goldwater. In early 2009, Hillary Clinton, newly confirmed as secretary of state, went off script at a congressional hearing to remark on the phenomenon. “I mean, my goodness,” she said to Paul, “everywhere I went, they were literally running down highways holding your signs.”

Paul’s ardent young apostles can be righteous, but their code is our eternal American lore. To them, Ron Paul is John Quincy Adams warning that America ought not go "abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” He is Henry David Thoreau insisting that “that government is best which governs least” and Woody Guthrie announcing his suspicion that folks “been robbing each other... with fountain pens.”

I found this to be one of the most compelling passages in the entire article:

Paul’s followers are millennials raised on The Daily Show and wary of partisan bullshit. They are far more concerned about bankrolling the baby-boomer pension plan than about whether their lesbian neighbors are allowed to get married. They represent this country’s only concentration of young conservative enthusiasm and, paradoxically, the only remaining organized political resistance to what we used to call the System [They are also active military. During the 2012 primaries, members of the armed forces donated almost twice as much money to Ron Paul as they did to President Obama, and more than seven times what they gave Mitt Romney]. The Paulites are the bridge that connects the two great camps of populist discontent—Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. Moderate libertarian independents are the largest untapped market in American politics, one that grows larger every year. The G.O.P. establishment has no clue how to reach them and, inexplicably, shows no intention of even trying.
. . .

On the ride over, Schottenheimer told us that he is a Christian conservative, that gay marriage is wrong, and that abortion is murder. White nodded emphatically and said, “That’s cool, dude. Liberty entitles everyone to live according to his beliefs.” As he stepped out of the car, Schottenheimer shook his head and grimaced. He took off his hat and rubbed his face and looked through the greasy convenience-store windows at the racks of Hostess cakes, the menthol cigarettes and instant-lotto tickets and porno mags. These things “are wrong,” he said, “and they are moral issues. But I don’t believe the government can tell people what to do.”

Ron Paul insists that he is the only true small-government conservative on the national stage. But listening to Schottenheimer and White, I had the disorienting thought that the man Jon Stewart once diagnosed as “Tea Party patient zero” might also be the only compelling liberal among recent presidential candidates, or at least the only one who seems genuinely interested in pushing certain causes that progressives hold dear.


One last observation I found interesting:

Some anarchist notions—like the worry that America’s police forces are being gradually militarized—are grounded in facts that go underreported. Some are baseless paranoia. Then there’s the case of Brandon Raub, the outspoken former Marine who was taken into involuntary FBI custody after he posted inflammatory content on his Facebook page, including violent song lyrics and theories about the U.S. government having orchestrated the attacks of 9/11. Though Raub was never charged with a crime, he spent a week in custody before a judge ordered his release.

For someone like Amanda White, Raub’s case is both frightening and reaffirming: If you spend your days crowing in the public commons about chem-trails and FEMA death camps and how the government is going to come get you—well, it turns out that thanks to the anti-terrorism laws you protest against so tirelessly, the government might actually come to get you.
. . .

When activists in Tampa talked to me in ways that would in other settings sound crazy, I kept an open mind. Why, one man asked me sotto voce, did the Department of Homeland Security purchase more than a billion rounds of ammunition in one six-month period last year? “Maybe the Forest Service needs them,” I said. “You know, for shooting bears?” He arched an eyebrow.

Back at my hotel, I searched online for an answer to his question. But aside from a story on Infowars.com, the website of the popular libertarian conspiracist Alex Jones, I couldn’t find any coverage. When I contacted the Department of Homeland Security, I received an email explaining that the bullets are part of a “strategic sourcing effort to combine multiple previous contracts in order to leverage the purchasing power of the entire Department”—in other words, they were buying in bulk to save money. The five-year supply, I was told, will be distributed to the 135,000 or so gun-carrying personnel who fall under the department’s jurisdiction.

This might strike the average American as government waste. But to a suspicious libertarian, and to Ron Paul himself, every armed federal agent is a tool of violent tyranny; each bullet represents a potential dead American.

And a bit of poignancy from the end:

Days later, after Isaac had side-swiped the Gulf Coast and Paul and his family had flown back to Texas, I noticed a crude little cardboard sign sticking out of the ground on a Tampa byway, miles from anywhere. SAVE US RON PAUL, it said. Establishment Republicans write it all off as a cult of personality, and with the endless chanting and uncomfortable messianism, that’s an easy charge to make. But Ron Paul did not go from congressional outlier to latter-day Jesus by being charismatic. People don’t go to a Ron Paul speech to witness great oratory. They go to hear something they can’t find anywhere else.
. . .

After three losing presidential campaigns and decades of not getting his way in Congress, Ron Paul the man is finally gone. Four months into his political afterlife, the Ron Paul movement is here to stay.

[sailingaway]

thanks for the pdf:


It may seem strange to suggest that a seventy-seven-year-old man, retired this year from his perch in Congress, where he had served for most of the past thirty-seven years, might represent the future of anything. But the critical thing to understand about Ron Paul is that his campaign will never end. Since leaving Washington in January, he has committed even more time and attention to returning the Republican Party to its humble, small-government roots. For the wider public, Ron Paul remains the eccentric old man at the far end of the primary-debate stage, rambling about the Federal Reserve, the balance of power, and the dangers of an expanding American empire. Before that, Paul spent decades in Congress casting lonely votes against seemingly innocuous bills.....

"It’s like really waking up.” That’s how Ashley Ryan describes the day she found Ron Paul. She first heard him speak five years ago, when she was sixteen, and has since spent countless hours as an activist not for Ron Paul the man, she says, but for his beliefs. The speech that drew her in was one of Paul’s staples, a folksy homily on the evils of the modern war-making corporate nation-state, but it sparked moral outrage. The petite, mildmannered Maine teenager was electrified, and she took up Ron Paul’s mission. “Once you wake up,” she told me, “you can’t go back to sleep.”

I met Ryan last August in Tampa, where she was sworn in at the Republican National Convention as Maine’s committeewoman, possibly the youngest person from any state ever to hold the title. Ryan had spent the previous weekend at the PAUL (People Awakening
and Uniting for Liberty) Festival,the grassroots libertarian shadow convention that served as the Paulite operating base in Tampa. (Having refused to endorse Romney, Paul was denied a speaking slot at the real thing.) Ryan told me about being “bitten by the liberty
bug” and said that she was taking off her fall semester at college to concentrate on her political activities. When she talked about nonpolitical topics, such as the painted beads she wears in her tongue (“I take them out when I go to Republican things”), she seemed like an average upbeat young woman. But when she talked about Liberty, her voice dropped and gathered like a fist.

The day before she took on her establishment role, Ryan gave the biggest speech of her life, to a crowd of 10,000 fellow subversives. As the outer bands of Tropical Storm Isaac lashed the palm trees on the University of South Florida campus, the Paul campaign filled the
Sun Dome for a six-hour extravagance they called the We Are the Future Rally. To many on the outside, it looked like a preening swan song for Paul, who would be leaving Congress at the end of the year. But inside, the retirement party escalated into a declaration of
intraparty war. The dark arena washed with strobes and boomed with chants of “President Paul!” When her turn came, Ashley Ryan had the screaming crowd on its feet before she had uttered a single word. As rally emcee and senior Paul campaign adviser Doug Wead put it when he introduced her, “[RNC rules-committee chair] John Sununu is here today, but he’ll be gone tomorrow. And this young lady, she will still be here.”



and regarding the quote above about Ron Paul the man being gone, I suspect the rumors of his being 'gone' are greatly exagerated -- or they wouldn't work so hard to ignore him.

[sailingaway]

More:


Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign was better organized and funded than his 2008 attempt. (Among Republicans,
only Mitt Romney raised more money last year.) Paul didn’t win a single state primary, but, unlike his rivals, he kept his polling numbers steady, and his campaign worked methodically to take over the party from within. While Newt Gingrich was out spending money he didn’t have for votes he wouldn’t get, Ron Paul continued laying the foundation for a generational movement. Today, Republicans affiliated with his so-called Liberty Movement control the state parties in Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Nevada and are ascendant in more than a dozen other states. These gains came amid a sustained media blackout. In mid-January, just as Paul began to rise in the polls and vie with Gingrich and Rick Santorum as Romney’s main challenger, coverage of his campaign in the press disappeared. That month, the public editor of the New York Times wrote that early in the campaign the paper had “decided to remain low key in its coverage of Ron Paul.” In response to the brazen and widespread treatment, Jon Stewart asked on The Daily Show, “How did libertarian Ron Paul become the thirteenth floor in a hotel?” [me: this was why, in February when Ron surged to second place with 21% nationally in even GOP only poll by Rueters, it was NOT covered by media as every other candidate's surges were. Most don't even know it happened.] But it wasn’t a new phenomenon; the pattern dated from 2008, says Doug Wead, when MSNBC’s Chris Matthews personally apologized to Paul for not calling on him when he signaled to speak in a presidential debate Matthews had moderated. According to Wead, Matthews said, “The voice in my
earplug said, ‘Don’t go to Ron Paul. Don’t go to Ron Paul.’”

[sailingaway]

this has really good stuff in it, although it is a look through alien eyes, so to speak.

[XTreat]

Chainspell created this video of the same name "The Awakening of a Generation" just BEFORE the big rallies, using older footage:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Muf23Rc7HV8



The awakening video was my favorite of the whole campaign. It makes me so sad and angry.

[affa]

mixed feelings on the article. it felt like the author was resisting 'getting it' at times, swaying from convert to condescending outsider at times. That said, the condescension was light even at its worst, and generally the article was solid. And certainly, you can't expect an insider article at Harper's anyway. But focusing on outlier issues like chem trails to radicalize Paul followers and endlessly trying to imply we're a cult felt a bit offputting.

[sailingaway]

mixed feelings on the article. it felt like the author was resisting 'getting it' at times, swaying from convert to condescending outsider at times. That said, the condescension was light even at its worst, and generally the article was solid. And certainly, you can't expect an insider article at Harper's anyway. But focusing on outlier issues like chem trails to radicalize Paul followers and endlessly trying to imply we're a cult felt a bit offputting.

Yeah, but it seemed to me he was being defensive and TRYING not to 'get it' with that 'but with Ron Paul you can't pick and choose which parts to cut...' and the few off comments by supporters, because, yeah, you can't CHOOSE which parts of the Constitution to enforce or the whole thing becomes unenforceable. That is the POINT. You have to stand for EVERYONE's rights.

regardless, decent article.

Of course they wouldn't publish it during the campaign.... :mad:

[sailingaway]

Off twitter today:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BGY1FVLCMAAPL2K.jpg:large

[twomp]

Great read! Thanks for sharing!

[sailingaway]

Great read! Thanks for sharing!

It really is good!

[sailingaway]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BHHmmZjCYAET0Py.jpg:large

[sailingaway]

I follow one of the people interviewed in this article on twitter, and we've been discussing this article.

[TomtheTinker]

The last organized resistance to the system and we are here to stay.

[sailingaway]

It is a good article, given it was by someone who is not one of us.

[sailingaway]

bump

[Inkblots]

I follow one of the people interviewed in this article on twitter, and we've been discussing this article.

Who's that, Sailing?

[sailingaway]

Who's that, Sailing?

Amanda White. She was very active on twitter and elsewhere during the campaign. She just moved to join the Free State.

[sailingaway]

Here is her twitter profile: https://twitter.com/search?q=%40ooooo_aahhh%20&src=typd

[sailingaway]

Sunday night bump

[dusman]

hey great find man. I tried googling some text to find the whole article but no wonder search came up empty, its in a pdf file.

Moved these posts from the existing thread in Rand's forum and made into new thread in Ron's forum.

Random reply... you can search Google for JUST PDFs (or any file type) by searing like...

The Awakening: Ron Paul's Generational Movement filetype.pdf

Pretty cool search method that I use all the time. :)

[Koz]

Interesting article. The only thing is that the author clearly has no clue what isolationism means. Other than that, a pretty reasonable article.

[goRPaul]

I've been away from the forums for a long time. I've been paying attention to Rand, but I really gave up on Ron after the media blacked him out after the 2nd place Ames Straw Poll finish that I worked nearly two months on. I've sinced joined the Marine Corps where even though plenty of people like Ron Paul, it is very rare to find a Paulite. This article was great to remember the spirit of rEVOLutionaries and the movements' classic moments. It is well written, very personal, and brought me a sense of closure when I finished it. At 26, I'm feeling a lifetime older than when I joined the movement at the age of 20.

I'm optimistic about and extremely excited by what Rand has been doing and what the movement's future has to offer. In every sense, this movement has only just begun.

[sailingaway]

bump for those who didn't see a great article!

[scottditzen]

bump for those who didn't see a great article!

Thanks this was a tremendous article and it really made my day.

[PierzStyx]

Interesting article. The only thing is that the author clearly has no clue what isolationism means. Other than that, a pretty reasonable article.

This was my only real complaint about the article as well.