Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders: Political Outsiders and Their Legacies
Recently, someone interviewed Ron Paul. The interview covered a lot of ground. This caught my attention:
Hopefully I can energize young people, a new generation, to say that the role of government has to be different than this. You can't run a welfare state and you shouldn't be in all these wars. And they have to decide what the role should be. And whether or not the government should just be there to protect liberty or is it supposed to regulate your life and regulate the economy and police the world? If they want that they'll just change dictators and it'll be miserable. But I'm hopeful that--I see signs, you know, because of what's happening on the internet and different places, I see positive signs, but it's not gonna be easy."
This pretty much summarizes my position. That's why he agreed with me when I suggested creating the Ron Paul Curriculum.
Compared to what it was like in the summer of 1976, when I was on his staff in Congress, things are vastly better inside the camps of those who oppose big government. The federal government continues to grow, although as I have said repeatedly, the actual tax revenues collected by the federal government are still in the range of 20% of GDP, which is slightly below where they were in 1945. With respect to federal taxes collected, things are a little better than they were 70 years ago. Conservatives fail to understand this. So, when we talk about the expansion of the federal government since 1945, we are talking mainly about the expansion of the money supply -- the Federal Reserve System -- and the expansion of federal regulation: The Federal Register.
What the Ron Paul Curriculum does today, a rich capitalist could have done in 1976. He could have hired an academic to put together a comprehensive, textbook-based curriculum that was decent. But it was not done in 1976, or 1996, or 2006, because rich industrialists have had no idea that it needed to be done. They would not have known how to do it.
I was able to assemble a staff of competent instructors who have a vision about the future. They were willing to do the curriculum on the basis of revenue sharing: course royalties. In other words, they are entrepreneurs. Because they had a vision of what could be done with digital technology, and because I acted as a coordinator in the initial phases, the Ron Paul Curriculum now has over 6,000 video-based lessons. I have had to do almost nothing in terms of supervision.
This is the key to all successful ventures. You articulate a vision. You have a basic outline of what needs to be done. You use available technology to do it. Then you go out and recruit people who share the vision, and who see the advantages of revenue sharing. They don't want upfront money; they want a piece of the action on the backside. This is the way that entrepreneurs think.
This is not the way most academics think. This is surely not the way politicians think. This is why ideologically motivated people have an advantage. We can build the foundations of a social transformation, and we can do it inexpensively because of the technology.
THE DEMOCRATS' DEBATE
Now let's shift the discussion to the debates among Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and some other men nobody knows. If you want to talk about competence, Jim Webb is the most competent person running for office today. He is an Annapolis graduate. He is a successful nonfiction book author: a book on the influence of the Scots-Irish in American history. He is a movie screenwriter. He was the Secretary of the Navy. He was a United States Senator. I don't believe anybody like him has run for President in my lifetime. But he is not going to win the nomination.
Bernie Sanders is a socialist. He has always been a socialist. Nobody else that far to the Left that I can think of has ever been elected to the U.S. Senate and then reelected. He articulates a position that nobody else in national politics is willing to articulate. But he is on the far side of the socialist phenomenon. That always dubious economic philosophy has been put to the test over the last century, and it has failed in every case. Its last two monuments are North Korea and Cuba. This is not the wave of the future.
If you look at Ron Paul's quest for the nomination and Sanders' quest, they are superficially similar. Sanders is a political independent, and Ron Paul was as close to a political independent as there was in the United States House of Representatives. They are truly outsiders. They both articulate a hard-core position. Neither of them has been involved in any kind of political scandal. Both of them have been respected by their colleagues, although both have been regarded as political eccentrics, which of course they are. They didn't threaten anybody because their voter bases were too small, and because they were outside the mainstream.
Both of them have messages that appeal to young people. Both of them appeal to independents. You can pretty well predict how each of them will line up on certain issues. They don't blow in the wind. They don't bend for the sake of votes. They also don't bend for the sake of donations from political action committees. They both can accurately say: "What you hear is what you get."
This is how to build the future. But Sanders is not going to build the future, because he is coming in at the tail end of a failed experiment. This is not the case with Ron Paul's position. Not since Grover Cleveland have we had anybody in the White House who held views on spending and the gold standard like Ron Paul's. Cleveland left office in 1897.
It may look as though Ron Paul's position is dead and buried, but there is this difference: he has the Federal Reserve system working day and night to prove that he is right about monetary policy. He also has all the other central banks doing the same thing. His views on government debt are going to be validated during the Great Default, which is statistically inevitable.
So, he can lay foundations now, and he does so by articulating his position over and over. Sanders is doing the same thing.
There is no Bernie Sanders Curriculum. He hasn't written any books. While he appeals to a lot of young people, he is doing nothing to instruct them in the basics of his worldview. He will get a lot of them into the precincts before he ends his campaign in 2016. When you are the political equivalent of Don Quixote, you need to focus on education, not politics. If you are going to have a legacy, it has to come after you have dropped out of the race. Ron Paul understood this. I don't think Bernie Sanders does.
Most Americans think of politics as being the final steppingstone. You lay all the other steps, and at the top of the staircase is the presidency. Ron Paul never made this mistake. He understood that the steppingstone of the nomination was valuable in terms of education, not political mobilization. He understood the limits of politics. He understood the difference between a bully pulpit and the Oval Office.
Ronald Reagan did seem to understand that the Oval Office was a means of promoting his philosophy. He was a great speaker. His rhetoric has persevered. He allowed gigantic deficits in the federal budget. He vetoed almost nothing. But he articulated a vision. He also got Congress to agree to a dramatic lowering of the top income tax rates. For that, I am personally grateful. But what we remember most about him is his optimism, and his one-liners for liberty. Rhetoric matters. It is not peripheral. But we should not mistake rhetoric for reality.
CONCLUSIONS
We have to build toward the future.
If you're building toward the future, you must leave a legacy beyond your own generation. Ron Paul understands this. I think Bernie Sanders does, too, but from an institutional standpoint, at age 73, his legacy will be a failed campaign to get nominated for President. I don't think he has a fallback position. I don't think he has a plan to build a long-term educational legacy on the political steps that he has taken, which got a lot of publicity, but which I don't think will prove to extend in the future.
We must not confuse ends and means. Politics is at best a means, not an end. Modern political philosophy and modern political movements do not believe this, for they see politics as an end: the good society and the good life. They regard voting as a sacrament of salvation. This is why the modern world is entering a period of political gridlock, fiscal bankruptcy, and smashed dreams.