Please explain why some liberals support Ron Paul...

[napoleon_in_rags]

79. Yeah, let me explain it.

First of all, one very simple up front thing you need to see right now is that the only political game in town is THE REPUBLICAN PRIMARY. So the question is not yet whether Ron Paul is the best guy to lead the country, the question people are talking about now is who among the Republican candidates is the best to lead the country should he get elected. Its fine, as a progressive, to disagree with Paul - but you should be willing to say, in this context, which candidate you prefer: Newt? Perry?

So the next question is why are people from a broad section of political backgrounds supporting Paul in the context of this question? The answer is twofold:

1) A recent poll shows that 50% of self identified American leftists say they fear "big government" as the biggest threat, while 30 something percent fear "big business". This has been twisted in the media to say that OWS is out of touch, but deeper polling would show those same Americans who fear "big government" support OWS. So what's it about? I'll tell you one thing, their focus isn't on Frank-Dodd or anything like that, its about CIVIL LIBERTIES. Americans aren't afraid of congress passing legislature to ban insider trading amongst its members, they are afraid of of legislation like [a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization_Act_for_Fiscal_Year_2012"]
National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012[/a], which
"codifies[5] the President's authority to indefinitely detain terrorism suspects, including American citizens, without trial as defined in Title X" Violating Habeus Corpus, and codifying into law the cartoonish situation where Americans who see missing children on milk cartons must wonder if they were disappeared by criminals or the military, because in the end there is no way to tell them apart, no way to verify who has been detained. The [a href="http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=112&session=1&vote=00218#top"]voting record[/a] tells a familiar story, the majority of Dems voting for it, and in that handful of names in nay, "Paul (R-KY)", the son asserting the father's civil liberties values. So it feels good to stand up for him in that regard.

2) A growing number of Americans, right and left, are sick of pundit culture. We know America is now, and has been for awhile, teetering on the brink and we see it all around us. But except for a few sources, all we get when we turn on TV looking for information is pundits opining about how Ron Paul is the "crazy uncle" at Thanksgiving dinner who says things that make people uncomfortable, and other feel-good reductions. Yet we are increasingly aware that the situation America is facing is in fact quite uncomfortable, with almost nobody willing to talk about it. Instead, we see people opining about the so called "intelligence" of people who are "politically adept" enough to tell us what we want to hear, totally disregarding the fact that when they are alone in a room full of lobbyists they will do the same, and use their intelligence to happily abandon us for the money they are offered. There is a growing sense that it is only real men and women of unwavering principle who can get anything done, despite how the punditry despises them for saying "akward" things. This sense has started in the grassroots right, but is spreading to the left as well. In fact Newt Gingrich's recent rise to leadership can be directly attributed to his immigration comments, carefully calculated to defy conservative orthodoxy after he observed the positive crowd responses to Ron Paul defying conservative orthodoxy on ending the war on drugs. People are sick of being told what somebody thinks they want to hear, they want to somebody who stands by their own beliefs, to the extent they can't be bought or sold by pressure in Washington. Its been the great mistake of the Democratic party that they have let their men of strong emotion and principle, like Grayson, like Kucinich, (surpised Sanders isn't in this list) be abandoned to attacks while they exult the "intelligence" of people who deftly avoid the horrible burden of principled action. Had they defended these men more strongly, perhaps members of the left who value unwavering commitment to principles wouldn't be looking across the isle to find an example of it in a man with different principles than their own.