Untitled Document
“The founding fathers warned you!”
proclaims the 16-by-8-foot sign that Garret Jordan has erected in his yard
on Sixth Street, just south of Springfield Clinic’s construction
site. The sign lists some of what Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and
Madison warned against: Foreign entanglements. Enslaving taxation.
Mainstream media. Open borders. Government secrecy. “The price of
liberty is eternal vigilance,” the message concludes, hoping to jolt
sunshine patriots into joining the Ron Paul for President campaign. Jordan, a middle-aged store worker
and real-estate investor, has found meaning in the hard-right message of
Paul’s supporters. In the past six weeks he’s given up
following sports, instead taking up religion and politics to sound the
alarm about what’s really going on in the United States. “Most
Americans don’t realize how many rights George Bush has taken away
from us,” Jordan says. “He’s not upholding any of the
Constitution.”
In late September he was among the
12 Paul supporters sitting under a pavilion at Southern View Community
Park, talking about how to get their candidate’s name on the ballot
in Illinois. Election laws and petition rules seem daunting, but these
political neophytes are determined not only to get Paul on the ballot but
also to spread the message of their mostly unknown candidate, a soft-spoken
Republican congressman from Texas. “That’s why the elite have
taken over this country, because ordinary Americans are intimidated by all
the rules,” says the meeting’s leader, 24-year-old Greg Bishop,
who hosts a radio program on WMAY (970 AM). “People don’t know
they have a true conservative alternative. We plan to tell them.”
Currently there are 41 members in the Springfield-based Ron Paul online
“meetup group,” the beginnings of a movement. This is as grassroots as politics
gets. The meeting proceeds with plans for a Nov. 3 cookout and rally that
those in attendance first call “Ronvemberfest” before deciding
to change the name to “Patriots’ Picnic.” They discuss
campaigning door to door in the small towns around Springfield, like
Southern View, Riverton, Chatham, Virden, and Pawnee. Someone suggests
getting Paul literature to every gun show in central Illinois. There is a
reminder to keep in touch through ronpaul.meetup.com/528, the group’s
Web site. They talk about how to ask for money. “Won’t you
donate $100 today?” is the preferred phrasing. “It’s an
investment in our children’s future. Help Ron Paul take back the
country while there’s still time for America.”
The most striking difference
between Paul’s “true conservative” supporters and
today’s mainstream Republicans is opposition to the war in Iraq.
“We believe in national defense, but we don’t believe in
preemptive war,” says one of the leaders of the Springfield group.
“There’s no need for us to meddle in other people’s
affairs,” says another. “We’re not the police of the
world. We do better trading with people rather than invading them.” A
quiet participant in the organizing meeting explains, “The current
administration wants to spread democracy with a gun. Historically
that’s a Democratic platform. Republicans are traditionally the ones
who say isolationism is a good thing. Republicans were elected to get us
out of wars.”
Paul supporters teach newcomers that
their banner is the Constitution and its idea of limited government. They
say that much of the power asserted by modern presidents has been usurped
from Congress, and much of the power asserted by Congress has been usurped
from the states. It is on the Constitution that Paul and his supporters
base their opposition to gun control and foreign-policy adventures and
their support of state sovereignty. They oppose the Patriot Act as
government snooping and warn against national ID cards as an invasion of
privacy. This brand of conservatism has the neatness and patriotic decency,
anchored in principle and idealism, that I found so appealing when I read
Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative in the early 1960s. Supporters say that Paul is its
first real champion since Goldwater. Conspiracy theories swirl through
the Paul campaign, giving it a dark side. True believers claim that the
Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington think tank, has a secret plan to
form a North American Union by abolishing the U.S. borders between Canada
and Mexico. Bankers and the elite are out to make us their slaves. The
dropping of the Twin Towers was an inside job. Yet much of the message is American
love of liberty, distrust of government, and wariness of concentrated
power, old-fashioned conservative values shared by many who identify
themselves as liberal. At the Paul gathering, discussion ranged from
getting the U.S. out of Iraq to abolishing the World Trade Organization and
not trusting the mainstream media. I went directly from there to another
meeting in Springfield that night, where a nationally known peace advocate
exhorted his audience of liberal activists to help get the U.S. out of
Iraq, abolish the World Trade Organization, and not trust the mainstream
media. On the meeting ground of discontent, the far right almost joins the
far left.
This article appears in Sep 27 – Oct 3, 2007.
