Tag: trans-partisan

( cross posted at ronpaulforums.com)

An encouraging video with Ralph Nader and Ron Paul, showing the considerable overlap on MULTIPLE, MAJOR issues, was posted some months ago at youtube, and recently written about here at MyFDL.

Now, while I would expect him to avoid being too upfront about it, I have to believe that Ron Paul knows that he’s extremely unlikely to win the Presidency in 2012. So, why is he running? I believe he’s running because he’s a patriotic American who wants to alter the political climate in America, and he realizes that a run for Presidecy gives his ideas a large forum, from which those ideas can germinate and further grow in the American mind. Such a calculus is not totally unlike the efforts of the New Progressive Alliance (NPA) to run a challenger against Obama in the Democratic Primary. Beating Obama isn’t the point. Fighting back against Obama’s corporatism and banksterism is.

Good on Ron Paul. However, I want to make a couple of suggestions that, I believe, would both help maximize Ron Paul’s efforts to build up a libertarian-ish Republican faction, but that would also help make the sort of coalition that Ron Paul calls for, in Congress, larger and more effective. As an added bonus, these suggestions might help prepare the groundwork for a fusion party.

(I will be cross-posting at OpenLeft and thomhartmann.com)

I.e., a set of national demonstrations by which people will demonstrate not on any one or two particular issues which serves as a theme, but rather on any issue for which they believe that neither the Democrats nor Republicans represent them. Another way to think of this is: the protests are jointly directed at the Democratic and Republican parties, themselves. I’ve never heard of such a thing, so the novelty, alone, might make it significant.

I’ve already thought up my sign’s slogan: “Down with the Dumbos, and down with the Jackasses! (If I want clowns running things, I can go to a circus.)”

Besides the Demonstration-As-Free-Speech-Expression aspect, and the (probably vain) hope that Congressional D’s and R’s will change course, such a demonstration COULD HELP FOSTER COOPERATION BETWEEN GROUPS THAT, THOUGH HAVING UNBRIDGEABLE GAPS IN SOME OF THEIR POSITIONS, WOULD DO WELL TO COLLABORATE IN THROWING OUT CORPORATIST SCOUNDRELS, OF BOTH PARTIES.

Voting bloc technology is going to make this more practical than it is, right now, but getting rid of UNECESSARY polarization could help us get a jump start on bottom-up, collaborative processes.

Another benefit is that it’ll help Independents to realize their collective power.

Yet another benefit: I’ll bet you could make an entertaining book and movie out of the demonstrations. Hopefully including a friendly competition of skits wherein the hypocrisy and apparent incompetence of members of the government (especially Presidents) is the subject – but the audience will not be told, ahead of time, the ideological orientation of the actors (if any). Think of political skits on “Saturday Night Live”, but with more of a bite, and with an implicit motive of actually doing something about the situation. The idea here is educational as much as entertaining – instead of wallowing in the “aren’t they stupid?” mudhole, Democrats can see that Republican voters aren’t happy with Republican politicos, and vice versa, and often for some of the same reasons. Such a video and book might prove seminal as the public moves to an e-democracy.