Okay, so the voting machines are rigged. Okay, so Romney's team compromised the central tabulator this time around. However, they can only cheat so much; otherwise, Ron Paul would have lost his Congressional seat long ago
He wasn't a threat until we showed up. There was no need to undermine him back then. He was just a gadfly for most of those years. Once millions of people started supporting him, that quickly changed.
Just because there are setbacks, and just because it's an uphill battle, is not a valid argument for saying it's totally futile. We've barely even begun to try, and I'm constantly hearing crap about how we should simply give up.
Give up?
Give up? This fight has barely just begun. We have completed phase 1: the awakening. Politics has served its purpose. We can continue to try to use it to wake up the few left capable of waking up, but for the most part, we have expended the political system's usefulness. We won't get much more out of it.
It's time to start phase 2.
What, do you think the government is going to go away on its own? It won't!
Who said anything about it going away on its own?
I understand you're probably just riding this out and waiting for collapse, but what then? People WILL beg for another government, and likely a more fundamentally compromised one than this. We're not immediately going to go into some voluntaryist paradise from here; that's a lot way off, after the population becomes comfortable enough with years and years of stable minarchy to slowly and methodically dismantle it. Instead, a collapse will bring another state, probably a worse one with "positive rights" codified in its Constitution, unless WE get involved and exert every bit of our influence on its Constitutional Convention.
I couldn't agree more. But you wish to work within the broken system, so that when the system breaks, we're already set up inside the system so that we can convince people to come to our side. However, it's not going to work that way.
What's going to happen, is that when the collapse happens, we're going to point out to them that we saw this coming, explain to them how it happened, and then show them a path to a brighter future. And they're going to tell us to shove that brighter future up our ass, because they want more State. Dr. Paul has predicted nearly everything that has come to pass today, the police state, the economic collapse, the encroachments on our liberty, the endless wars, the insurmountable debt. Noone cares. They want more State, have always wanted more State, and will always want more State. Future generations are not so hopeless, but this current generation absolutely is. They will oppose us. Always.
What does that take? Oh, yeah...political action. Whether you wait for collapse or not, political action is literally unavoidable
Sure. Political action. But that does not necessarily mean that our political actions should be in the framework of
their political system. When this collapse happens, we do want to have an infrastructure. But we
don't want that infrastructure to be inside of
their system. There are simply too many reasons not to do it. They will attempt subterfuge against us, they will undermine us at every turn, and generally just fight us however they can. This makes it very hard for
us to organize.
Any "organization" that we attempt to form inside of their system will not work. Because working within the system implies working with Republicans (or Democrats, or any other party), that means we are working with those people. They will be a part of the conversation. This means that every time we try to have meaningful discourse on how to proceed or what should be done, we have to fight off all of those other people who despise liberty and freedom.
The only positive to working within the system is to try to convert new people. And that's a noble pursuit. However, there's not many left to convert. As things get worse, more people will be willing to come to our side, but for now we have reached a ceiling. We can continue to reach out to these people without needing to be inside of their system. If we have our own infrastructure, and as long as we are welcoming to all who want liberty and freedom, as the saying goes - build it, and they will come.
We need to start building our own infrastructure. A political party, if you like. But the purpose is not to win elections. The purpose should be solely to organize like minded individuals. Only with proper organization can we ever hope to achieve anything, and we won't find that organization by trying to "take over the GOP."
The GOP has nothing to offer us anymore. We need to organize
ourselves and prepare for the coming collapse. When the system collapses, our infrastructure will be in place, and we'll have much better chances of successfully opposing the rest of the country's desire for tyranny.
Quietly disengage if you like
You like many others are living in a false dichotomy. Refusing to participate in their system is not "giving up." In my book, I call it "just getting started."
The massive gains of the Ron Paul movement have been thanks to Ron Paul and his grassroots support (us).
