Ron Paul, losing Conservatives

[SoCalbound12]

Originally Posted by Reactionary

silas777 - right on. To those Paul-supporting commenters who disparage the South, AL / MS, and the GOP - bless your little hearts.

Alabama and Mississippi Republicans are "triple conservatives": fiscal, social, and military. Ron Paul is a fiscal conservative and pro-life, beliefs which are supported by right-thinking conservatives. However, Paul is a social libertarian - just like most Democrats. Paul is pro-military in his way, but IMO he is wrong about the dangers faced by the US and wrong in his approach to countering those dangers. Paul is right that the President should get congressional approval for putting Amercian troops in harm's way - something that the Marxist tyrant Obama did not do in Libya (but Bush did get approval for Iraq and Afghanistan).

Democrats aren't social libertarians, they are social liberals. They generally support using the government to encourage and push certain social agendas that they deem as "progress." A social libertarian such as myself doesn't believe it's the proper function of the government push any specific social agenda. The government can't force "progress" on the populace.

For what it's worth, Alabama and Mississippi voted for Rick Santorum who supported Medicare part D, No Child Left Behind, raising the debt ceiling several times, unions, etc. So how exactly does that make them "fiscal conservatives?" Also Alabama, Mississippi, and most of the rest of the south is made up of neocons and chickenhawks who lustily support our imperialist foreign policy of preemptive war. If you look at the roots of interventionist foreign policy it's intimately connected to big government progressivism. Interventionism is a historically liberal position and was advocated by progressive champions like Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt.

To believe that the mainstream GOP and any of the "major" candidates (Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum) represent anything approaching conservatism is to severely misunderstand the historical meaning and context of the idea of conservatism. Mitt Romney is a technocrat who will say or do anything to get elected, I've ran down the list of Rick Santorum's big government positions, and Newt Gingrich has voiced support for FDR and the New Deal. I urge you to research actual conservatism and look at the historical stances of conservative statesmen. A good starting point is Robert Taft. His nickname was "Mr. Republican" and he was a great man. The country would have been much better off had Taft beat out Ike for the GOP nomination in 1952.