Ron Paul

Sizable minorities on both the left and the right want America to intervene in fewer foreign conflicts and to exercise more restraint in foreign policy. In the 2006 midterm elections, antiwar voters contributed to the Republicans’ loss of both houses of Congress. They also helped defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary contest and the Republican nominee, John McCain, at that year’s general election. While McCain styled himself a “maverick,” the label could be more accurately bestowed upon the anti-interventionist Republican Ron Paul, who shocked the GOP establishment by showing that an unstinting critic of the Iraq War could mount an insurgency within the party of George W. Bush.

Thomas Massie’s predicament, as he fends off a Trump-backed challenger – and Trump himself – in the Republican primary for his seat in Congress, is symbolic of the vexed relationship libertarians have with the right these days. Massie was not only a Tea Party Republican when he was first elected in 2012, he was a Ron Paul Republican, inspired by the longtime, philosophically libertarian Texas congressman who made his second bid for the GOP presidential nomination that year. The Commonwealth of Kentucky had sent Paul’s son, Rand, to the US Senate two years before, and its 4th congressional district put Massie in the House. Libertarians are natural junior partners in someone else’s enterprise ​Now Trump is trying to take him out.

Texas Ron Paul celebrated his 90th birthday on Saturday at a freshly-built college events center in Southeast Texas. More accurately, hundreds of beaming Ron Paul fans and various libertarian podcast influencers celebrated Ron Paul’s birthday, and Ron Paul showed up to give a speech at the end. But everyone, Cockburn included, had a delightful time, full of amiable conversations, mostly modest self-promotion, and, of course, endless discussions about smashing the US financial system. “I’m so enraged by the corruption I see around me, I would have dropped dead of a heart attack by now without the influence of Ron Paul,” Clint Russell of the Liberty Lockdown podcast was saying during an afternoon of speeches and Ron Paul testimonials.

As Elon Musk feuds with Donald Trump and looks to launch a political party of his own – the America party – he should stop to consider the lessons of Ron Paul. The former Republican congressman, who turns 90 on August 20, is best known as the leader of the GOP’s libertarian wing – which for years was practically a one-man faction. In 2008, however, Paul ran for the Republican presidential nomination and touched off a grassroots insurgency. It wasn’t enough to win him any primaries, but it laid the groundwork for the GOP’s populist turn, leading directly to the Tea Party movement and lighting the way for Trump’s arrival a few years later. Dr.

Welcome, DC Diary readers, to the last edition of this newsletter before Tuesday night’s election. Most polls still have the presidential race at a dead heat between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. Pennsylvania remains the lynchpin, as the paths for the respective candidates appears to be the Rust Belt and Pennsylvania for Harris, and the Sun Belt and Pennsylvania for Trump. Each campaign is pointing to data that they think gives them an advantage tomorrow.Trump’s team published a memo Monday, for example, pointing out that early vote numbers suggest turnout among urban voters and women is down significantly in the seven swing states compared to 2020.

Kissimmee, Florida On Thursday morning as I boarded my plane at Reagan National Airport to fly to Orlando, I managed to drop an entire Dunkin iced coffee all over the floor near the cockpit. The unfortunate incident was a harbinger of things to come on my trip to a Young Americans for Liberty conference, the first since the start of the pandemic. I'm still not sure how, exactly, I was chosen to go to this conference, which was allegedly 'invitation-only'.  A 'deputy regional director' with the organization slid into my Instagram DMs offering to cover half of my travel expenses to attend. She assured me that the conference was not just for college students, and I am never one to pass up a cheap trip to the Free State of Florida.

Every Democrat’s favorite ex-Republican has just announced he’s going to seek the Libertarian Party nomination for president. If he gets it, Justin Amash will be the third ex-Republican in a row to be the LP’s standard bearer, tracing the footsteps of former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr (2008) and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson (2012 and 2016). Neither of those two had an appreciable impact on the Obama-McCain, Obama-Romney, or Clinton-Trump contests, and the odds are not good that Amash will be any more significant. So why is he running? The immediate explanation is probably that he concluded he couldn’t win his race for re-election to Congress.

Sometimes in politics you win without actually winning. Barry Goldwater and George McGovern, two candidates who lost in blow-out landslides to Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, are the obvious examples. Johnson won in 1964, but it was Goldwater’s campaign that indicated where American politics was heading in the next 20 years. McGovern lost in 1972, but the 'acid, amnesty, and abortion' ideology that held him back at the time became, in only slightly diluted form, the regnant social orientation of the Democratic party from his day to our own.More recently, Ron Paul lost his two campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination — in 2008 and 2012 — but won anyway.