My upcoming visit to the Northern Alliance promises to be a little feistier than previous ones, as we’re going to discuss the Republican Party and the Ron Paul Revolution tomorrow:
This Saturday, we will once again welcome Vox Day to the First Team of the Northern Alliance Radio Network airwaves. We’ll discuss his forthcoming book “The Irrational Atheist” and will also likely get into his support for Ron Paul.
Now, I am not a backer of Mr. Paul. His proposed foreign policy solutions are not adequate to deal with the challenges we face in the world today and I don’t believe that they will make America stronger and safer in the long run. I also think that he has done his campaign a disservice by embracing too much of the Left’s rhetoric on Iraq. There is a principled conservative/libertarian argument against the war in Iraq, but Paul has too often strayed from making it. And I don’t share his view that giving more power to Congress at the expense of the Executive branch is necessarily a good idea.
However, all that being said, I find myself appalled at the some of the mainstream conservative/Republican reaction to Paul and his supporters. While Paul’s campaign has no doubt attracted a higher than average percentage of certified kooks, the vast majority of Paul’s followers are solid, rock-ribbed conservatives who simply have lost confidence in the GOP.
They want fiscal constraint, smaller government, and secure borders to be more than campaign buzzwords. And you can’t really blame them for that given the way the Republican Party has abdicated its commitment to these areas in recent years. Ron Paul’s candidacy and some of the policies he proposes may not be realistic, but the values underlying them are legitimate. For the most part, legitimately conservative.
And so, when I hear conservative commentators dismissing Paul and his supporters as a bunch of clowns or even worse accusing them of being anti-Semitic bigots, I get a little ticked. Last night, Hugh Hewitt was doing exactly this on his radio show.
Yes, it certainly is likely that we will get into it… I suspect the only question is whether we’ll manage to get out of it long enough to get around to TIA. Now, I know the NARN crew are good friends with Hugh Hewitt and I have no doubt that Hewitt is a decent and likable guy, but I have to admit that despite reading his WND column for years, I still don’t understand what, if anything, the man’s core political principles are. The idea that a pragmatist who has championed both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Arlen Specter in the past has anything particularly serious to say about either conservative or republican principles doesn’t really add up.
And I have little doubt that I can make a rational case for Ron Paul’s foreign policy, whether the gentlemen of the Northern Alliance find it convincing may prove to be another matter entirely.
For those of you who can’t listen, I’ll post a link to the Fraters Libertas page with the mp3 once they have it up.