For those who religiously follow my work, I rarely ever heap praise on politicians. A political mentor once told me the following: If you don’t have anything negative to say about a politician, don’t say it all.
That makes perfect sense. Politicians receive copious amounts of undeserved praise and attention from sycophantic media outlets and naive voters. Unsurprisingly, the constant stream of praise politicians receive incentivizes them to routinely engage in bad political behavior.
This is particularly relevant when observing the Republican Party’s political trajectory since the end of World War II. What was initially a party founded on protectionism and an emphasis on domestic infrastructure investment in the middle of the 19th century, the GOP has embraced so-called “free trade”, perpetual foreign policy intervention abroad, and slavish devotion to mega-corporations.
Every now and then, there would be movements like the Reagan Revolution, the Buchanan Brigades, the Ron Paul Revolution, and Donald Trump’s America First movement the try to shake things up and move the Republican Party in a markedly anti-establishment direction whether it be nationalism in the cases of Buchanan and Trump or a return to limited government republicanism in the cases of Reagan and Trump.
In each of these cases, energized disgruntled voters took to the campaign trails and the polls, thinking they would be the vanguard of a revolutionary class that would upturn politics. Endorphins ran high and dreams of overturning a corrupt political order were on the minds of these firebrands. However, such optimistic thinking would be dashed once it became clear their efforts would be all for naught.
Within a decade or so they would become jaded by the whole political process. The very politicians they admired would either be assimilated into the establishment Borg or failed to build a viable anti-establishment coalition in government capable of exerting credible political power. The latter point held particularly true with the Ron Paul movement where the former Texas Congressman was quite literally the sole dissenting vote on many of the critical foreign policy and spending issues. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) finds himself on a similar legislative island in the present.
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