The gift of Ron Paul, America’s Gray Champion

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/23/11

Generally when countries surge to become rich and powerful, as America did after victory in Europe and Asia, after Germany did during the Bismarck period, it recedes or retires naturally to new generations and new cultural forms. If left alone they are usually more creative, more peaceful times. But more often countries rage against the return to balance, yield to fascism, as Germany did at the end of the Bismarck period, and die in a primal scream. We are much in the same position today as was Bismarck’s Germany at the end, with stronger competitors, notably China, on the horizon, and the childish and hubristic claims of “exceptionalism” are chronic symptoms. But it will not happen here in America because of one person, Ron Paul. And he is what I am thankful for this Thanksgiving.

Ron Paul is the Gray Champion, the aging veteran who stands in the middle of the road at the end and the beginning and says, NO MORE. He alone makes the future possible. Historians Neil Howe and William Strauss describe the Gray Champion as the singular figure who cuts through the lies, illusions and deceits, but more important, gives the people the courage and awakens them from their moral slumber for it is that which enables the beast. From their text, “The Fourth Turning”:

"Who was this Gray Champion?" Nathaniel Hawthorne asked near the end of this story in his Twice-Told Tales. No one knew, except that he had been among the fire-hearted young Puritans who had first settled New England more than a half century earlier... Would the Gray Champion ever return? "I have heard," added Hawthorne, "that whenever the descendants of the Puritans are to show the spirit of their sires, the old man appears again." Posterity had to wait a while before seeing him again - the length of an entire human life, in fact. "When eighty years has passed," wrote Hawthorne, the Gray Champion reappeared.

As Strauss and Howe’s excellent text indicates, we now especially, rising into 2012, are at the classic end of a post-war cycle and the beginning of a historic transition. Ron Paul alone offers direction in seeing America as Jefferson did of healthy, heartland states, and seeing a world ahead breaking the globalist, world-destroying competition of Marx v. Keynes, both philosophies of conquest, to one of Hayek and the Austrian economists.

Questions can be raised now as never before and thanks to Paul and are raised nightly on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. Questions like, what again is the purpose of federal government? Why does a fully developed and mature country need one at all?