ARTICLE SYNOPSIS: According to John Derbyshire, Ron Paul's biggest challenge will be overcoming Big Government. The real story is that this is a challenge that faces all Americans. Follow this link to the original source: "That Old Time Religion"
COMMENTARY:
Why aren't conservatives — supposedly the mainline central core of the Republican Party — flocking to Ron Paul? That's the question asked recently by John Derbyshire in a column for National Review Online. Candidate Paul is, after all, quintessentially conservative. Reading through Paul's policy positions, Derbyshire notes, "an American conservative can hear the mystic chords of memory sounding in the distance, and hear the call of ancestral voices wafted on the breeze: Hayek, von Mises, Rothbard, Nock, Kirk, John Chamberlain... Unlike the product in that automobile commercial, this is your father's conservatism — the Old-Time Religion."
In other words, for conservatives, Ron Paul should be a slam dunk. So what's the problem? According to Derbyshire, it is the nature of American government that is the problem. Washington D.C., he says, "is a vast megalopolis, every nook and cranny stuffed with lobbyists, lawyers, and a hundred thousand species of tax-eater. The sleepy old boulevards of the 1920s are now shadowed between great glittering ziggurats of glass and marble, where millions of administrative assistants to the Department of Administrative Assistance toil away at sending memos to each other." And this towering edifice of bureaucracy, to which so many functionaries of the regime have attached themselves in the pursuit of personal aggrandizement rather than in service to the citizens, will not admit any kind of change of the sort represented by the elemental conservatism of Ron Paul.
In this, Derbyshire has hit upon a subject that is bigger than the candidacy of one man, however admirable that man, like Ron Paul, may be. Whatever happens with Ron Paul — win or lose — the American government will continue to lumber forward, an imperial bureaucracy more bloated and more Byzantine than even the Byzantine Empire, the adjective's namesake, could have imagined.
Because of this, says Derbyshire, conservatives are not flocking to Ron Paul because they realize the futility of railing against the federal leviathan. To make any real changes would take a revolution, he says, and conservatives are by nature not revolutionaries.
That's hogwash, and dangerous hogwash at that. It gives credence to the idea that anyone who opposes the growth and expansion of federal power is, perhaps, disloyal, i.e., a revolutionary. In fact, opposition to the growth and expansion of government is singular fidelity to the founding ideals of the nation. It is patriotism in its purist form.
Consequently, it is the task of all patriotic citizens to work for a return to Constitutional government. This will not take a revolution of the sort envisioned by Derbyshire. Instead, it will take grassroots citizen activism aimed at supporting adherents of limited, Constitutional government at the Congressional level — where the laws that govern this republic originate.
To that end, concerned Americans who want to see a return to Constitutional government could best accomplish that objective by electing a congressional majority of 218 Constitutionalists in Congress, rather than just focusing solely on elevating one Constitutionalist to the White House.
Dennis Behreandt Dennis is Web Editor for the John Birch Society, and a regular contributor to The New American magazine.
Poster Comment:
Consequently, it is the task of all patriotic citizens to work for a return to Constitutional government. This will not take a revolution of the sort envisioned by Derbyshire...but just grassroots activism....
I respectfully disagree. The very premise of the article, the Leviathan that Dr. Paul alledgedly won't be able to handle, makes grassroots activism impossible.
Another article that denies itself, although there are some truths in it, they are twisted to create a false conclusion.