Why Ron Paul, in brief

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/29/11

The Euro debt crisis began to spiral out of control when Prime Minister George Papandreou – called a “prince” by Reuters - failed to meet expectations. Papandreou was the third generation of his family to serve in that office. This is connected to the temperament of Greece. The desire to want the same family to run for office again and again is in Jungian terms a "feeling" one. This is good for the Greeks in my opinion provided that they stay out of the EU which is in the same Jung vein is a "thinking" operation; a "greater Germany" if you will as Germany is in these terms a thinking, objectivist place and center of the economic matrix. And so is the US but the sensibility here to default to governance by family members – princes; Bushes, Kennedys and Clintons in particular - in high office shows decline in our case as it presents a shift in sensibilities from the thinking function on which we were founded to a degenerative emotional realm, one not native to American karma. One bad for a new people; one suited to the ancient regime. It is in a word a decline to monarchist instincts, or better, a desire given the size of our country, for an emperor to relieve ourselves of the anguish and transcendence of self governance.

Nowhere has the destruction of this declining function been expressed more than in the illegal and immoral Bush/Cheney period including the arbitrary invasion of Iraq which poisoned the moral pinnings of the American armed forces, the embedded press, the Supreme Court and the accommodating and appeasing Congress. Those who stood against were few: Wes Clark, Russ Feingold, Jim Webb, Colin Powell’s former chief Lawrence Wilkerson, the venerable Senator Robert C. Byrd and Ron Paul. America cannot go forward until it returns and comes to terms with that broken historic moment.

The Ron Paul movement builds on the values awakened on that moment and the first value was this: Courage. Paul was brave when it was time to be brave. So it is a good beginning. Anyone who watched Tim Tebow in the last five minutes of the football game on Sunday will understand that America is still dynamic and beginning and will not default to the ethos and parameters of decline. But both parties today are burdened by the tendency to default to relatives - Clintons, both of whom supported the Bush/Cheney invasion, for Democrats and Bushes for Republicans - and this is symptomatic of parties here, as it is in Greece, unable to adapt to new demographic conditions and circumstances and new generations. But in America, the heartland has risen in population and economy while the same demographics in the northeast decline: America is moving west.

The states have filled out and developed their own characteristics and circumstances. They will not long accept top down one-size-fits-all governance from far away designed for the early days when America was largely a forest. Ron Paul, with sophisticated new and comprehensive thinking on states’ rights, Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek and innovative perspective on foreign policy offers an adaptive political perspective fit to the times today and the times ahead. Surveys show that enlisted Army personal, the touchstone of American will and sympathy, support Ron Paul ahead of all the other Republican candidates.