The Ron Paul Beacon

Today I received an Acknowledgment Notice from the Boston Election Department via the US Postal Service. It was a standard, unassuming, laser-printed form letter informing me that they received my affidavit of voter registration. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Nothing, that is, except for one phrase which gave me a sudden mental shock and made me gasp every time I looked at it: “Your party affiliation has been changed from DEMOCRAT to REPUBLICAN.”

This was not a mistake. This was a decision I made after a long, excruciating deliberation with myself. Which is exactly why it was so shocking to me.

I grew up in an upper-middle class area of New Jersey and attended a highly regarded private school there for nine years. Though I hardly appreciated it at the time, the education I received was excellent and I am thankful for it. In fact I didn’t appreciate the breadth and depth of my learning until I went away to college (unlike nearly half of my private school classmates, I did not attend an Ivy). Yet I have also come to understand that the education I so highly value came with its own biases, not unlike the regional biases that came with growing up in the Garden State.

Most people in my little part of New Jersey didn’t like country music, for example. So I too, by default, grew up believing that I didn’t like it without ever questioning why. I’d complain when the bus driver played it without ever giving it a chance. Later in life, while attending a small liberal arts college located in the poorest county in New York state, country suddenly became cool. Nearly all of my friends and acquaintances (most of them being preppy kids from prosperous New England towns) instantly and without warning embraced this seemingly alien genre of music. I too grew to love it, and it soon dawned on me that perhaps I was more a product of my environment than I liked to believe.

I experienced a similar epiphany with politics recently. Many of my private school classmates (despite their wealthy and often Republican parents), and nearly all of my teachers, held very liberal views. Even our graduation speaker was an outspoken critic of the death penalty. And so it was that I grew up proud to hail from an environment that seemed to care so deeply about social justice.

My outspoken Republican classmates, which I could count on one one hand, were acknowledged by the rest of us to be either sociopaths or unassuming victims of brainwashing by their parents. Their attitude toward the underprivileged was hardly empathetic, and we felt justified in demonizing them for this reason alone. And if Republicans were the enemy of the underprivileged, it seemed to follow that their Democratic counterparts were their saviors. Of course this conclusion was based on fallacious logic, but this did not occur to me until much later in life. I did not realize at the time that good intentions do not automatically lead to good results (in fact, they rarely do).

When I discovered Ron Paul last year, I was forced to rethink my world view. It was a painful experience, but I slowly learned that the traditional Republican values of small government (which have since been abandoned by the Grand Old Party) and low taxation do in fact have merit. They are not, as I used to believe, merely a rationalization that the privileged use to justify their grip on money and power at the expense of the lower and middle classes. In fact, I would learn that some of the Federal institutions we don’t often think about, such as the Federal Reserve, play a far more important role in increasing the gap between the rich and the poor than the rich do themselves.

I was also forced to consider the possibility that most federal programs and departments, no matter how well-intended, do not benefit The People. More often than not, in fact, they are money pits which exacerbate the very problems they were intended to address. I was shocked to learn that prior to 1913 there was no national income tax (nor was there inflation), and that we did just fine without it. And when I learned that the Founding Fathers warned us against the very dangers we face today as a result of an increasingly centralized and powerful Federal government, I came face-to-face with my liberal biases and realized that I could no longer justify my old views. But I wasn’t ready to embrace Republicans of the Giuliani and Romney variety either. They were not true conservatives. So where did the small-government Republicans go?

The problem with our two party system is that is forces each party to take a side on one issue. This results in parties which have arbitrary values that are often inconsistent. How, for example, can you justify a pro-life view when your party also promotes the death penalty? It comes down to the same thing–state sanctioned death is either right or wrong. To endorse one form of death but not the other means that you either hold a double standard or that you are a hypocrite. In fact, most people do not side completely with one party or the other but feel compelled to choose the closest fit or simply go with the party that supports the issue that is most important to them. This allows politicians with ulterior motives to exploit the resulting gap between personal and party values, or worse, allow themselves to be bribed by lobbyists that seek to exploit this gap.

This has resulted in a worrisome shift in party values. The small-government Republicans disappeared because they were of no use to the lobbyists, who depend on a strong Federal government with a healthy source of revenue. Thus in the modern Republican Party, greed has usurped values.

I see only two solutions: we either need to get beyond this two-sizes fit all model and provide some competition to the existing parties (which would unfortunately require some dangerous tinkering with our Constitution), or we can simply change the parties from the inside out with our votes. The good news is that the GOP in its current manifestation has been so damaged by the Bush Administration that it must change or it will cease to exist. This isn’t the first time a party’s values would change drastically. The Republican party of today would be hardly recognizable to a Republican from 1854 (the year the GOP was founded) or even 1954 (prior to the Civil Rights movement).

We have a chance to help change the Republican Party change for the better and I intend to do so; the Democrats are stuck in the status quo to such an extent that they are not seizing a golden opportunity to regain power by taking the bold anti-war stance which voters are demanding. Since neither party is giving the American people what they want, we will see some radical changes in party politics very soon. This is indeed a rare moment in history: we have an opportunity to restore values to politics.

It will take some time for me to get used to calling myself a Republican. The ick factor isn’t likely to go away soon. But I know it is the right thing to do, because here is what I have learned about our two-party system:

Democrats have the right motives (social justice) but the wrong approach (central government). Republicans have the right approach (free market) but the wrong motives (maintaining a plutocracy).

Ron Paul is unique because he has the right motive and the right approach. He really does care about the middle class, and it would benefit greatly from his Presidency. I also happen to believe that Ron Paul represents the future of the Republican Party, whether he wins the primaries or not. He is in the right place at the right time, delivering a message that Americans are hungry for. I feel lucky to be a part of it.

I sincerely believe that Ron Paul represents our best hope for a better future, but to me its more personal that that; Ron Paul represents my own hope to proudly call myself a Republican.