{"id":16453,"date":"2012-08-14T08:36:06","date_gmt":"2012-08-14T13:36:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=16453"},"modified":"2012-08-14T08:36:06","modified_gmt":"2012-08-14T13:36:06","slug":"brian-doherty-on-the-ron-paul-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/08\/14\/brian-doherty-on-the-ron-paul-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Brian Doherty on the Ron Paul Revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

An excerpt from Brian Doherty’s new book<\/a> Ron Paul’s Revolution<\/em> in the National Post<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Paul is a remarkably successful politician made of contradictions. Though a longtime Republican congressman, he\u2019s built his reputation on such wildly liberal stances as ending the drug war, halting wars in the Middle East and scuttling the Patriot Act. Despite this, in 2010 and 2011 he\u2019s won the presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the seedbed of young right-wing activists.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s got traditional conservative bona fides, too. He\u2019s for ending the income tax and killing the Internal Revenue Service, and for stopping illegal immigration; he also thinks abortion should be illegal. Despite this, right-wing politicians and thought leaders from Giuliani to Bill O\u2019Reilly to the Weekly Standard<\/em>\u2019s William Kristol deride and despise him.<\/p>\n

Paul\u2019s appeal is a curious mixture of populist and intellectual. He attacks the elite masters of money, banking and high finance at the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. But his philosophy on politics and economics was forged through decades of self-driven study of abstruse libertarian economists such as Ludwig von Mises and the Nobel Prize\u2013winning F. A. Hayek.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s a staggeringly successful politician by some measures \u2014 the only congressman to win a seat as a nonincumbent three separate times. He continues to be re-elected to the House election after election, almost always by a higher margin than the time before. He does this while violating most traditional rules of politics. He doesn\u2019t strive to bring home the bacon. His 14th District in Texas is highly agricultural, rife with rice and cattle farmers, but he always votes against federal agriculture subsidies. In a district with 675 miles of coastline, struck violently in 2008 by Hurricane Ike, he votes against flood aid and the Federal Emergency Management Agency \u2014 even calling for the latter\u2019s abolition on national TV. He vows to never vote for any bill for which he doesn\u2019t see clear constitutional justification. Yet by some people\u2019s standards of a \u201csuccessful legislator\u201d he\u2019s a bust \u2014 nearly every bill he introduces never even makes it out of committee.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An excerpt from Brian Doherty’s new book Ron Paul’s Revolution in the National Post: Paul is a remarkably successful politician made of contradictions. Though a longtime Republican congressman, he\u2019s built his reputation on such wildly liberal stances as ending the drug war, halting wars in the Middle East and scuttling the Patriot Act. Despite this, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,10,28,53,13],"tags":[188,550,517,419],"class_list":["post-16453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-liberty","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-electionwatch","tag-libertarianism","tag-republican","tag-ronpaul"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4hn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16453"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16454,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16453\/revisions\/16454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}