This was a comment in the Ron Paul LJ community which I meant to be much shorter but which spiraled off; it may be worth saving. And then after that was another comment on why I felt the campaign didn't win, which may also be worth saving.
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I think the war of ideas is pretty much determined by who has the ability to transmit and disseminate those ideas.
RP took advantage of the current strength of informal media -- blogs, sites like digg.com and reddit.com and facebook.com and myspace.com, web 2.0 and social networking in general, even livejournal.com -- but the current strength of informal, secondary media relative to mainstream, primary media is an anomaly and in all likelihood won't last very long, perhaps not even the four years until the next election after this one. It certainly wasn't anywhere near as strong four years ago.
This election cycle was also very weird because it actually had a few politicians who were principled and on the people's side running for president (Gravel, Paul, Kucinich to some degree), but this probably won't be the case most of the time.
It was a constellation of unlikely factors which caused the RP campaign to progress even as far as it did. I realistically don't see that constellation repeating in the next 10,000 years. So it's unfortunate that we lost, because the chance of winning this time was higher than it ever was before.
That isn't to say things are hopeless -- the chance of a billionaire or someone of great wealth, fame, or power clandestinely gaining power and then acting on loyalties to principles and the people rather than the power structure is becoming increasingly likely. It used to happen fairly often during the age of monarchy and empires, due to the untrustworthiness of loyalties through hereditary dynasties, but it's still possible now. The Founding Fathers fell under this category to some degree, so were a few of the so-called benevolent dictators (Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, Peter the Great).
But it's just as likely today, because of a decrease in the ability to control people's thoughts as effectively as was once the case, ironically through the increased ability for anyone anywhere to control the thoughts of others, as seen in cults, leading to confusion as minds are pulled in many directions at once and forced to adapt. And because no minds are more controlled than those in the power structure itself, this weakening of the ability to control minds may lead to anomalies like people in power caring more about normal people than about maintaining their power.
Normally what happens currently when an anomaly appears within the power structure is that that person is identified and pushed out of it by the others. So what really needs to happen is that a network of them develop and keep themselves hidden within it. That too is becoming increasingly possible (and may even exist right now, for all we know).
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I think the biggest reasons the campaign didn't win are:
- Most everyone focused on putting up signs and building airships and almost nobody focused on face to face interaction and convincing friends and family members one on one, when the second is easily ten-thousand times as important and effective. Most often my experience is the average RP supporter had not convinced a single member of their family or a single one of their friends, if they even had any, to vote for him.
- The RP campaign staff itself was surprisingly ineffectual, as described in good detail an article I linked to from this community a few months back. He really should have hired the greatest talent he could, rather than relying on his personal friends and the Lew Rockwell crowd, or worse.
- RP worship, which led to relying on him to do everything because of a mistaken premise that he's superhuman and that all that was required was cheering him or chanting his name like a mantra, despite his repeated claims that he was just a messenger and that it was up to us.
- RP himself failed to be as convincing or as charming as he could have been when the opportunity arose. Another reason was his earlier personal immoralities, particularly the issue with letting bad stuff be published under his name -- even if it was without his knowledge, it's pretty inexcusable to not have knowledge of things done by your own ghostwriters and such. Some slack should be given to him in the articulate department because he's like 73 of course, he did a good and occasionally a great job during most of his interviews and the debates, but it still could have been far better.
- Resistance from the other campaigns, including infiltrators, and resistance from the power structure, including mainstream media. But those resistances were expected and should have been taken for granted.
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rinku) wrote,
