Problem is that the only thing that fires up today's GOP base is hating some "other", Muslims and Mexicans being the popular choices, and sometimes blacks or Russians or Chinese or Norks.
The GOP that wanted low taxes and personal liberty is dead as a doornail. Anyone else been around the movement long enough to remember when they called us "one percenters"? It appears that we haven't really made too many converts in the final tally.
As I've said for years, we have to change the default
framework and the resulting
emotions of the voters, and that can't be done with reason alone. Ron Paul kept losing the war issue in the past primaries not because he was wrong about blowback (he wasn't), but because most people are centrally oriented (or hypnotized) around the fear mindset that "we have to defend ourselves against the threat from the terrorists/radicals," to which any other consideration is viewed as minor or irrelevant.
No amount of reason was ever going to prevail unless Paul attacked that fear framework, such as through waking people up about false flags/covert ops, to show the "threat" was basically manufactured, but Ron (and Rand) declined to go there. Rand's use of hawkish rhetoric and gestures gained him an opening to better dialogue with hypnotized voters, but he hasn't used it to wake them up. What happens when you talk to people who are asleep? They tend to stay asleep.
Notice by contrast, how fast Trump (perhaps accidently) created a new default framework for addressing illegal immigration. He didn't take time quietly "making a case," he directly attacked the controlling elite mindset
that there was no problem, other than we were taking too long to give them amnesty. This involved him bluntly attacking the MSM and establishment for not raising the issue, and this is what energized supporters to get behind him. Until liberty candidates address changing the demagogic framework that is controlling policy debates head on, our articulate words will continue to fall on effectively deaf ears.
