Ron Paul’s Rally: Not the End, Just a Continuation of His Revolution

Ron Paul rallied 8,000 or so of his supporters from around the
country to Tampa’s Sundome the day before the planned official
start of the Republican National Convention. After a week in which
the Republican Party seemed less eager to welcome Paul supporters
and delegates than Paul supporters were eager to help shape the
GOP, the event seemed designed in equal parts to both remind the
Paul troops that they have been and are winning important victories
within the establishment, and to steel them for a continued fight
for respect and influence that was never going to be easy.

Ron Paul's rEVOLution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired

Paul advisor Doug Wead kept up a steady stream of references to
the Paul delegations’ grievances against the RNC insiders even as
the event, whose theme was “We are the Future” debuted a
detournement of the grassroots “Ron Paul rEVOLution” stencil logo
reading: “Ron Paul RepubliCAN.”

This was the divide the event danced around: Are they a full
service independent revolution or a faction of the Republican
Party? The only solid answer that arose from the rally was: both.

The speakers at the rally were all selected by Paul himself to
make a point: that while the movement around him arose in the
context of a Republican presidential run, the liberty cause for
which he has fought for nearly 40 years is about more than
electoral politics or politics at all.

Thus, Paul invited libertarian Austrian economist Walter Block
to give an ill-received talk thinking through the proper
libertarian ethical position on abortion (which is, Block figures,
“evictionism”—roughly, as I understand it, that it’s morally
permissible to eject a fetus from the womb if it’s unwanted, but
you are obligated to try to keep it alive outside your body if
possible.) It was the only speech to be (mildly) heckled, I think
for confusing people more than for being about a hot-button topic.
Even Sen. Rand Paul and his co-author and Paul campaign blogger
Jack Hunter, reviled by many in the grassroots for perceived sins
of being too quick to assimilate to the Republican Party (see:
Rand’s early Romney endorsement), got through unscathed. It was
overwhelmingly a feel-good crowd.

South Carolina State Senator Tom Davis gave a very angry
peroration against the “traitor” Ben Bernanke and called for
advance support in his plan to unseat Sen. Lindsay Graham in 2014.
While Davis’ style was very un-Ron Paul in its intense shouty anger
bordering on rage, many attendees told me it was their favorite
non-Paul part of the day. Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), the man
considered most likely to be the next Ron Paul in congress when
Paul is gone after January, humbly said there will be no next Ron
Paul and got laughs by calling out, “Audit the RNC!” and advised
Paul politicos and activists to learn how to not be at each other’s
throats when they disagree, and slyly commented on Davis’ tone with
a reference to how Davis had “spoken eloquently—and sometimes not
so eloquently….”

From the lower levels of grassroots and Party activism, Ashley
Ryan, the youngest member of the RNC, from Maine, bragged about the
Paul people’s victories at the state level and noted that in these
internal party votes, tiny numbers of people can and do make the
difference. She spoke openly of the Paulites need to “restore the
Republican Party” to the values of liberty, a living example of the
balancing act of being in the Republican Party but not necessarily
of it that Paul politicos will have to perform for the foreseeable
future.

Marianne Stebbins, who ran Paul’s campaign in Minnesota (and
succeeded in getting Paul control of the delegation, hooked her
speech somewhat ironically around the image of Paul fans as a gang
of underground basement-dwelling radical weirdos, grants that she
gets many Paul activists don’t want to do electoral politics (this
sort of respect for the individuals will, and understanding that
politics is awful, is one of the most refreshing parts of the Paul
political movement writ large) and  called political power the
“one ring” that they want to destroy, “in the fire of the
Constitution.” She also advised the liberty movement to have no set
loyalty to specific politicians, but just to the principles of
liberty.

Donna Holt of Campaign for Liberty told the story of the rise of
her group from the last big Ron Paul rally counterprogrammed
against the GOP in 2008 in Minneapolis, crowed that they had been
more effective in four years (especially on anti-Federal Reserve
activism) than many other grassroots political pressure groups ever
are.  Successful state-level Paul supporters who rose to power
in their respective Republican Party’s, Carl Bunce of Nevada (Clark
County party chair) an d A.J. Spiker (state party chair) were
living examples of the possible successes for Paul activists.

Rand Paul, in what was technically merely an introduction to his
dad (after the traditional introduction of Paul’s huge extended
family, grandchild 19 about to be born, and many members absent for
the perfectly American reason of having important sports games to
play this weekend), did a great job of giving this particular crowd
what it wanted and needed to hear from him, the presumptive heir to
the political movement his dad created and shaped: kill the TSA,
audit the Fed and the Pentagon, the Beatitudes do
not say “blessed are the warmakers” (maybe Rand can
successfully sell pacifism to the Religious Right where his father
failed), praising his dad for talking about foreign policy
blowback, and repeating Ron’s foreign policy admonition: we marched
right in to these foreign entanglements, and we can just march
out.

Paul’s speech was typical Paul; while many were amazed at its
1:17 minute length, that was not unusually unusual for Paul; nor
was its lack of a single unifying theme other than “liberty is
good.” He joked about the RNC promising him an “anything goes”
floor speech—the punchline (which took an awkwardly long time to
get to) was: “tomorrow night” (the night the convention would be
postponed because of hurricane threats.) He believes liberty ideas
have a huge constituency outside the Republican Party’s primary
voters. He continued to be both apocalyptic and hopeful, and
unrepentant about the foreign policy positions that he knows
alienate so many Republicans. So they say if we listened to Ron
Paul Osama bin Laden would still be alive? (Though Paul was the guy
talking up targeted efforts on specific criminals over wars.) Well,
if they listened to Ron Paul, the thousands who died on 9/11 would
still be alive too, Paul said.

Paul kept being Paul, the man equally against financial
regulations and drug laws, the man steadfastly opposed to income
redistribution who stresses that existing corporate capitalism
redistributes money upward to the rich and well-connected. He’s for
Julian Assange and Bradley Manning (as is the crowd) and continued
a trend I’ve noted in his speeches as the campaign wound down: a
thick philosophical conception of liberty as the key to life well
lived, or virtue and excellence as the things that make a human
life entire and only possible with liberty. He was more explicitly
Ayn Randian than usual, noting that the so-called sacrifices of his
public career were in fact in his own self-interest: he did it
because he enjoyed it and thought it was worth doing, and also in a
Randian vein noting that true self-esteem only comes from
production.

His speech had some bits that felt valedictory or torch-passing;
but if in the end it felt anti-climactic, and I think it did,
that’s because for Paul and most of his fans this was not a climax
at all, but merely one more step in a long, long march through the
institutions of the Republican Party and American politics and
culture to make them more amenable to the ideas of liberty.

Despite all the talk of “Ron Paul’s last hurrah,” it was really
just one more Ron Paul rally. And most of the people there are
going to continue to follow the spirit that led them to get
themselves to Tampa in the face of hurricane threats and keep on
pushing the ideas, whether it be by (all specific examples from
attendees I spoke to) driving around the country with liberty
messages on signs, running for public office, running for internal
Republican Party office, protesting the TSA by going through
scanners in a bikini, leading campaigns to read and compare and
contrast liberty classics with socialist ones, studying and
teaching Austrian economics, or campaigning for Gary Johnson.

Even after the rally, long after the voting, the corners at the
major intersections surrounding the University of South Florida had
squads of Ron Paul for President 2012 sign wavers; for some, the
Paul campaign is eternal.