How Ron Paul is Injecting Principle into the GOP

This column by Ron Paul activist and delegate Craig Westover in Minnesota’s Star Tribune is a response to accusations that our movement is somehow “fringe” and meaningless. Anybody who truly believes this simply hasn’t been paying attention to American politics for the last four years. Westover makes interesting comparisons, to both religious conservatives and the gay rights movement, and finishes by explaining how we’re injecting genuine limited government principles into the Republican Party:
First, let’s understand what a “movement” or a “revolution” is. All movements — the Pat Robertson Republican coup in the 1980s, gay rights, women’s suffrage, civil rights and, yes, the Ron Paul movement — follow a common pattern.
Movements all begin at the margins with people who have little or nothing to lose. Unsuccessful movements never expand beyond the sloganeering fringe. Successful movements — those with an intellectual and moral basis — mature to attract a mainstream following.
The gay-rights movement is a great example. Shirtless hunks in leather tutus and motorcycling “Dykes on Bikes” are no longer the point of the gay-rights spear. It’s the gay lawyer/gay accountant, lesbian legislator/lesbian physician — same-sex couples with kids and fundamental concerns about faith, family and freedom — who are now the face of the movement.
Focusing commentary on the remnants of the gay-rights fringe is something the media would never do. But focusing on the fringe of the Ron Paul movement is exactly what the Strib and WaPo commentaries actually do.
Libertarians today are on that cusp between being all about the T-shirt and all about ideas. I was a libertarian before it was cool and a Republican when it wasn’t cool.
As a political force in the 1970s, libertarians had little to lose… Times have changed…
Libertarians today are less about provocative issues and more about reversing the expanding scope of government. Government expansion is bad in itself, but the future consequences are worse: Without defined limits on government, our liberties, our American republic, are truly at risk…
The power of an idea, personal freedom, doesn’t lie in manufactured popularity.
What about that Paul-inspired “wacky,” “nutty” “constitutional fundamentalism” found in Republican Party platforms?
Sure, abolishing the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Reserve is not going to happen even under a President Paul. But a political party that seriously considers abolishing cabinet-level departments and unaccountable government entities is a political party that probably won’t advocate for a new cabinet-level “Department of the Internet” and is serious about monetary policy.
It’s a party that stands for something.
That brings us to the WaPo admonition that “Paulites” learn to compromise…
One does not compromise principle. It’s a cliché and a fallacy that, given two diametrically opposed points of view, the “truth” must necessarily lie somewhere in the middle.
The Republican problem is buying into the “compromise is good” argument and declaring victory for every move to the left that “could have been so much worse.”
Paulites won’t make that compromise.
Ron Paul delegates to the RNC will support the nominee. However, integral to that support is holding the candidate and the party to the fundamental principles of limited government and personal and economic freedom. Constancy to principle is the ultimate loyalty.

All that said, I urge our media friends to examine the default position that government is good and invite them to think for themselves. The Ron Paul revolution offers the media, the Republican Party and America that opportunity. Take it.