Originally published on June 9, 2008.
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were once our countrymen.
~ Samuel Adams
It had been forty-four years since I last attended a political convention. I was part of my state’s delegation to the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, an experience that helped push me over the threshold in my abandonment of political action. But last week I found myself headed to Rochester to sit in — as an observer — on the Minnesota Republican State Convention. My Minnesota daughter and her husband have been very active Ron Paul supporters, with her husband serving as a delegate to this convention. Perhaps for the same reason that leads people to visit the site of a train-wreck, I decided to attend.
My initial impression of this convention was that the atmosphere was so unlike those in which I had participated decades before. It was not that the Ron Paul delegates were outvoted by the McCain supporters: that’s just part of the convention process as it was, in 1964, when we Goldwater supporters greatly outnumbered the competing Bill Scranton contingent. But there was a civility and respect for procedural regularities that governed earlier conventions, unlike what I witnessed in Rochester last week. The contrast could be stated, metaphorically, as the difference between eating in a French restaurant and a twenty-four-hour truck stop.
While I felt a good deal of sympathy for the Ron Paul supporters — who presented the only solid base of decency I saw exhibited — I do think that if these people want to participate in politics, they need to become adept at playing the procedural and tactical games that go with it without, in the process, becoming a part of the problem. I noticed, for instance, that there were three-floor microphones from which delegates could address the chair. Around each of these microphones were some ten to twelve apparent McCain supporters not waiting to ask any questions, but to block access by any of the Paulists. As I watched this, I was reminded of visits I had made to China where I observed how effectively the Chinese were able to get through crowds with a pair of sharp elbows, a tactic the Paul supporters might have adopted.
One of the most dehumanizing sights at this convention — one I trust libertarians would never emulate — occurred when a vote was to be taken. McCain supporters — with their identifiable red hats — went up and down the aisles holding up signs that read either “yes” or “no” depending upon their desired outcome. To treat one’s own supporters like Pavlovian subjects was disgusting, although I did not see any yummy snacks handed out to the delegates to reinforce their conditioned reflexes.
The GOP paranoia over the Ron Paul contingent got the best of the convention chairman who, even prior to the agenda item “other business” being taken up, moved to adjourn the convention! The fear that the Paulists might use this period to further terrify the delegates with the specter of moral and philosophical integrity was not enough to overcome the concern for practitioners of parliamentary procedure, and the motion to adjourn was withdrawn.
Perhaps my greatest sympathy, however, went out to a man who wasn’t even in attendance: Jesus. I am not a religious person, but I do believe a man like this deserved far better treatment than he got from this crowd. Speaker after speaker expressed his or her love and devotion to Jesus, at the same time cheering on any and every expression of pro-war sentiment. When one delegate — presumably of Ron Paul’s persuasion — made a motion to allow those who opposed the Iraq War to be heard, he was greeted with a thunderous chorus of boos. I imagined what might have transpired had Jesus been a delegate and asked to address the convention on the essence of his message: love and peace. After the boos had subsided, I suspect the sergeant-at-arms would have been instructed to go to a hardware store for a box of nails!
It was telling that I did not once hear the word “peace” expressed at this convention.
In the course of my numerous trips around the sun, I don’t know when I have previously witnessed such a collective insistence upon dishonesty, contradiction, and unprincipled direction, all held together by empty rhetoric. A group of people lusting for nothing greater than a pro-rata share of the power they envisioned trickling down to them was pathetic. That the convention ended on an address by Karl Rove — one of the principal architects of the catastrophe with which the GOP and the Democrats have infected America — is a testimony to a party in a terminal state.
Various speakers told the delegates “we must get the Republican message out!” Here is a party that professes love for Jesus and respect for life even as it insists upon present and future wars that have thus far killed more than a million innocents; that babbles its bromides about “liberty” even as it expands police powers, surveillance, imprisonment without trial, and the use of torture; that speaks of the dangers of runaway government spending while pouring billions of dollars into war machinery and the pockets of corporations supplying it; and which, at one of its own state conventions, insists upon a disparate application of rules applicable to others in order to give preferential treatment to established officials. This is the “Republican message” — as well as the Democratic one — and the young adults who throng to Ron Paul in search of a different message are evidence that, among a growing number, it is being received and rejected.
June 9, 2008
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