The Crossed Pond

So I never did end up writing about the Pittsburgh rally. Nothing kills the writing bug quite like coming off a long hiatus (in this case, a monastic stay), and promising that you’re not going to write anything until you write your One Big Thing. The net effect is that you just get overwhelmed and don’t write anything at all, so to break through it I just started blogging again. Which means I have yet to write anything substantive on either the Pittsburgh rally, or my monastic stay, though I still mean to.

But I’ve had some thoughts I’ve been meaning to post. Rojas preempted many of them in his excellent post yesterday, so maybe I’ll just echo what he’s already said, and briefly add some of my own perspective on the matter.

What’s been framing my thinking on the Ron Paul Revolution, in part, has been, weirdly, Hunter S. Thompson. Hunter gave us a great word, meant generally, but which he also applied freely to a certain class of political activist. Funhogs.

He wrote about most succinctly it in 2004, in an article for Rolling Stone about the anti-Bush vote for Kerry, and though his predictions for that election turned out to be rather grimly and spectacularly wrong, I don’t think the facet I’m going to pull out is. But I’ll let him say it:

The genetically vicious nature of presidential campaigns in America is too obvious to argue with, but some people call it fun, and I am one of them. Election Day — especially a presidential election — is always a wild and terrifying time for politics junkies, and I am one of those, too. We look forward to major election days like sex addicts look forward to orgies. We are slaves to it.
[...]

Even the Fun-hog vote has started to swing…and that is a hard bloc to move. Only a fool would try to run for president without the enthusiastic support of the Fun-hog vote. It is huge, and always available, but they will never be lured into a voting booth unless voting carries a promise of Fun.

At least thirty-three percent of all eligible voters in this country are confessed Fun-hogs, who will cave into any temptation they stumble on. They have always hated George Bush…

The Fun-hogs are starving for anything they can laugh with, instead of at.

In 2004 Dr. Thompson was speaking of the anti-Bush, anti-war vote (and he was two years too early on seeing the real impact of that). In 2008, I think it’s obvious who he’s talking about. Right now, the Funhogs have found a movement they can get down with, a movement they can sign on to, that they can sweat for, and that they mean to carry, on their own backs if they have to, as far as humanly possible. The Ron Paul Revolution.

And, as Dr. Thompson points out, you discount the Funhog Vote at your own peril.

The Funhog vote, I believe, put Jesse Ventura in the governor’s mansion of Minnesota, and probably Schwarzenegger too (the whole Recall Election stunk of Funhogs). The Funhog Vote made Howard Dean a contender for the Democratic nomination, and though pundits love nothing more than to poo-poo his eventual flame-out, the fact of the matter is Dean re-energized an entire generation of the liberal base, and has fundamentally changed the face of the party. The Funhog vote, counter-intuitively, was what allowed the Republicans to win their landslide election in 1994, after having turned on a certain type of person to the inherent “coolness” of conservatism, and it was largely the Funhogs, in 2006, who kicked them right back out again. The Funhogs, by and large, run the blogosphere, and have been trolling it since the 90s–Funhogs are the backbone of the internet, and have been since it’s earliest days. The Funhog Vote has stormed conventions, has dragged–sometimes kicking and screaming–outsider candidacies into legitimacy, and almost all those political movements that reshape the political landscape of America but are on precisely nobody’s radar (but other Funhogs) until almost the day after, when it suddenly seems completely obvious and quickly becomes incorporated almost as something inevitable, like a weather system, are driven by the engine of Funhogs. It’s smoky backroom deals, maybe, between corporate interests, political establishments, and other parasites that change the face of policy in this country, but whenever an electoral revolution happens, it’s almost always on the backs of something that began as a Funhog movement. The Funhogs are less a constituency and more a force of nature.

Think of it this way. The regular voting public of American politics is a pretty stuffed shirt, reliable group. You can parse them a million different ways, into a million different interest or demographic groups and you can predict, with some success, how they’ll break given this or that contingency. And, in regular elections where only steadfast, countable voters turn out, the bean-counting has some validity. But every cycle there’s a race, and every generation there’s a cycle, where the barbarians storm the gates. Where the math has utterly no use because people in this or that group jump ship en masse, and where the people who don’t regularly vote–themselves a majority in this country–find something that time drawing them out, and rendering all the normal bean-counting useless. It’s the difference between an electoral coalition (something a candidate or party pieces together based on a dizzying amount of mundane political calculations), and a movement (which candidates or parties don’t create so much as, if they’re lucky and/or savvy, harness, or more accurately, ride).

You can’t predict that sort of thing, but when you have your finger on the pulse, you can feel it. Regular politics more or less trudges forward. Movements–Funhogs–crackle and pop. It’s the difference between a party and a happening. You can’t predict it, but it’s unmistakable when you see it, when you find yourself plopped in the middle of it, or the day after, when all the regular soapboxes are punch-drunk and mussed and scratching their heads to find an appropriate frame for what the hell just happened.

The downside, of course, is that Funhogs are infamously unreliable. Whenever you hear stuffed shirts trying to predict something based on the “youth vote”, or people coming out to vote who don’t normally, run and hide. But when something is starting to crackle and pop, and when those same stuffed shirts laugh nervously and seem to oscillate between angrily dismissive and bemusedly confused, it’s usually worth taking note.

I say all this because, at this point, the Ron Paul campaign has the unmistakable stink of being a true Funhog movement, one of the most pure I’ve seen in my lifetime. It may come to nothing, of course–if we’re honest with ourselves we recognize that possibility, the forces convening against us are just too numerous and powerful to discount entirely–but if anything is capable of overturning the apple cart, at this point in American politics, it’s the Ron Paul campaign. No other political happening has remotely the same urgency, energy, and enthusiasm. You can identify mundane shifts, but if you’re searching for the first signs of a true movement, there’s only one place to look right now.

We’ve alluded to it a lot on this site, but the article by Thomas Woods called “Having Fun Doing Good”, gets at it, if obliquely:

On the Internet he wins poll after poll – provoking accusations that Paul supporters are spamming them. Leaving aside the difficulty of doing such a thing (in some polls) or managing to do it without being detected (in others), this objection misses the point. Check out the raw numbers rather than the percentages the next time you see one of these polls. The real question, it seems to me, isn’t why Ron Paul gets thousands of votes, but why only a few hundred people can be bothered to turn on their computers and make a single click on behalf of the clones in the race.

Why are there only 150 John McCain supporters willing to take the time to vote for him? That is the question we should ask.

[...]

I have received more emails than I can count from people around the world who write to say that they wish they could be American citizens in order to have the privilege of voting for Ron Paul.

Now can you imagine someone – anyone – saying, “I wish I could be an American citizen in order to have the unspeakable privilege of voting for Mitt Romney?”

The sense of urgency on the part of Paul’s supporters comes not just from his message, and not just from his honesty and integrity – qualities even his opponents usually concede. It comes from a sense that this may be our last chance. After Ron Paul there is only a line of hacks as far as the eye can see. We may never see his like again, and we may never have such an opportunity again.

All of this is a way of prefacing my impression of the rally we held here in Pittsburgh for the Ron Paul campaign on August 3rd, which is a similar impression to what Rojas thought of the Iowa Straw poll. The crowd probably numbered between 1200 and 1500 (nobody thought to count), making it the largest Ron Paul rally to date (the straw poll might have outdone it). I showed up early to help out (the campaign took care of the venue and the candidate, but all the peripheral organizing more or less fell to Western PA for Paul, what began as our Meetup Group (proudly, I was the first member)), but when I arrived (two hours early), Tom Kawczynski, our head, and at 26 the most savvy and omnicompetent political organizer and strategist I’ve ever come across (and I’ve been involved with two presidential campaigns and three congressional races) had everything under control (if future campaigns are smart, though he doesn’t have the professional resume, somebody will snatch him up–he’ll make a fucking mean campaign manager someday), so I just hung out and watched.

There were a hundred or so people who had arrived before I got there. And, while I was there, a thousand more came in. Mostly in small groups of 2-6, almost like they were wandering in off the street (though they came from New York, New Hampshire, many from Ohio, from Philly, I eave met one from Maine). They came in homemade T-shirts, bearing homemade signs and other knick-knacks, and wandered in with their eyes dancing, because they had gotten the same vibe I was nursing. It’s weird, sitting behind a computer, writing for months about this thing, and feeling like you’re the only person in the world (besides some other faceless internet geeks). You feel like you’re a part of something, but only in theory. In practical terms, you feel like one person fighting against the world. So to show up and see hundreds upon hundreds of these other people, who each of them, to a man, had felt the same thing, but had now come out and seen so many others, was surreal. It was awing, humbling.

And, I think, that’s largely what we were there for. Of course, Dr. Paul gave a long speech, and we all wanted to see it, but more than that, I think there was an overpowering sense that we were coming together to pinch ourselves. To make sure this was real. And, to our guilty glee, it was.

What’s more, you couldn’t put a name to it, you couldn’t pigeon-hole it outside of “The Ron Paul Revolution”. It wasn’t a Libertarian convention, or young Democrats, or old conservatives, but this giant mass of people who had absolutely NOTHING in come outside of the candidate and his message. For the speech itself, I sat next to an elderly couple, probably in their late 70s, who looked like old skool Republican voters and never cheered or whooped with the rest of us and seemed almost frightened for being around all these Funhogs but who, when Ron Paul was speaking, couldn’t help themselves. When he started talking (particularly about foreign policy), they would nod, self-consciously at first, but then more and more vigorously. About halfway through, they started talking to each other in whispers after applause lines, “he’s right” being their most common refrain. On the other side of me was a couple forty years younger, two dyed-in-the-wool Libertarian activists who were inundating the young man next to them, who had a legal pad, about the military-industrial complex (to put it mildly). Behind me were a half-dozen smokin’ hot college-age girls. In front of me was a veteran in a wheelchair adorned with buttons. During the evening, I had conversations with people ranging from a conservative Christian lady from New Hampshire (who was really into Latin Mass and who I helped carry a 30 foot sign she had bought there to her car (she lived next to a highway, she explained)), to some old codger Constitution Party ham radio operators from Ohio, to a group of local Republican politicians in fancy suits who seemed dazed to be there, to a young musician from Rochester, New York (where I grew up in my early years), to a guy with a crazy beard wearing a “Dennis Kucinich 2004″ shirt with Ron Paul buttons over it, to a beautiful young waitress, there with her mother, who lives on the South Side and works three jobs to get by, and on and on like that. As soon as I’d say to myself “Oh, these are ___ people”, trying to put a name to it, I’d turn around and meet some other person who was the polar opposite.

The speech itself was boilerplate Ron Paul, which by then we all received almost as much with affection as with inspiration. The campaign showed a video beforehand (to the tune of “A Little Less Conversation” by Elvis) showing previous events and the massive enthusiasm behind them. Dr. Paul was in town for a family reunion, so all his brothers were there (one of whom, a pastor, gave a beautiful impromptu prayer at the beginning and end of the event, which everyone bowed their heads for). Ron, when he finally took the stage and after a five-minute standing ovation, spoke without notes, more or less just winging it, and expounding on the themes with which we’re all, by now, familiar. But, for me anyway, the candidate and the campaign were eclipsed by the sheer force of Funhogness that coalesced around it. Our group held an after party in a nearby bar/steakhouse, and Dr. Paul put in an appearance, but most interesting for me was simply hanging out until bar close with all the various supporters that were there (hundreds), getting to know them, talking to them, finding out their stories. I probably had in-depth conversations with more than 50 people that night, and every single one was riveting. I’ve devoted a disproportionate amount of my life to politics in some fashion, I’ve been to many political rallies, but this just existed in another sphere entirely. This wasn’t a button-up crowd of professional hacks and volunteers coming together briefly, forming a crowd, applauding at the right times, and then dispersing. This was something else entirely. These were people who, in some form or another, had been led their entire political lives to this single moment, this single campaign. It was palatable. Also obvious was the fact that these were not people who were going to melt away. This was their moment. And they responded with not just the appropriate level of enthusiasm, but with the vigor and gaiety of people who had been lost in the wild for years, finally having found their cause, their candidate. And the thing that really blew my mind about the rally is that they–we–are not alone.

I’ll be bluntly honest, and apocryphal, and say that I don’t know that Ron Paul will win. I didn’t get into this because I thought he would win. Frankly, I don’t care. I find myself only partially interested in if he can win or not (though I will also say I think he can, it’s just a pretty staggeringly long shot).

What interests me is here is a candidate I will never have to feel bad about having supported. Here is a movement that DESERVES, demands my support, longshot or no. And here is, I believe, the best chance that conservatism, real conservatism, has to reassert itself in American politics. The liberty message will survive, even the nominations of Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton, should that happen. But, as Woods remarked, perhaps never will I–we–see a candidate we can advocate so purely, who is such a vanguard of all those things that have been shuffled away and swept under the rug, such a bright light for the movement. He’s not perfect, of course–which we’re not afraid to point out where we have reason to do so–and neither are we. But the message, what we’re really committing ourselves too, is something that I’m humbled and proud to get behind. Something I feel privileged, honored, to be able to devote myself to.

In my entire political life, I’ve never felt something quite like it.

And, win lose or draw, I think we’ve already accomplished something. For the rest of my life, I can say “I’m a Ron Paul Republican”. If Ron Paul accomplishes nothing more than that, if he achieves nothing more than going back to Congress and spending his remaining days as he has all previous, laboring away to insert an ounce of purity and respect for principle into the political conversation, and if this campaign allows him to do that with just a little more respect, a little more visibility, and if even the party, the candidates, and the country has to see it just a little more than they would without him–us–than none of this is for naught. If the only thing we accomplish is what we have so far–and it won’t be–we can hang our heads high.

And, the hope. Political campaigns live or die, succeed or fail. But movements push.

Sitting in a room with 1500 people punch-drunk to at last have a voice, to finally have a man, a campaign, a cause, they’re not just willing but ecstatic to work for, I think that hope is real.

The Funhogs have come to roost. And there’s no question where they are.

I agree with precisely nothing in David Weigel’s article in Reason about the Ron Paul Revolution, save the last sentence.

But what a sentence.

Paul’s campaign isn’t comparable to that because, unlike Dean’s, it’s not positioned to win a nomination. There are people who sign up for “the Revolution” fully aware they aren’t electing a president. Paul’s shifting focus onto social issues or his stabs at real ground organizing don’t matter to these voters. They’re looking for a social network and a traveling carnival, and some chances to wave the middle finger at reporters or the rest of the Republican Party.

This is counterproductive, it’s silly, and it’s easily laughed off by the leading Republican campaigns. It’s also the most fun these people have had in years.

Finally, I want to quote Tom, the aforementioned organizer of my local Ron Paul group, without his permission, from part of an email he sent to the group the day after the rally, because I think he gets at it better than Weigel or Woods.

I am not in the habit of sharing personal stories in my e-mails, but I will tell you what I enjoyed most about the rally, because it gives me great hope and it should do the same for you also. While you were all watching Dr. Paul give his excellent speech (and I was listening, of course), I found my eyes scanning the room looking to see how people reacted. You could just tell everyone actually believed, and they had such commitment to spread the message of restoring the Constitution. The message is better than good; it’s good enough to win.

It won’t be easy. We have factors arrayed against us. We have an unsympathetic media. We have an ambivalent party. We have time, but not time enough. And, our opponents will outspend us, because they are bankrolled by interests who have a vested interest in perpetuating the status quo. It is a formidable challenge, no doubt. But, we have something they don’t: belief.