I still have to ask myself how apt his parallels really are. I agree that the country is headed for a paradigm shift, but I'm not sure that 2012 isn't a little early. I don't think Mao Tse Tung is a good parallel at all. That was a war, and the Communists more or less inherited the key power centers from the Japanese. Chiang was essentially forced try to re-conquer the country. But I don't think there was any huge shift in sentiment toward the Communists particularly.
The Churchill parallel is a little closer but Churchill headed a national coalition government that included the Labour Party. Churchill ran the war, but Attlee, as Deputy Prime Minister, ran the country.
I'm hard-pressed to find a parallel in American history. Lincoln won against a divided Democratic Party. FDR claimed that Hoover was too experimental and that he would return to tried and true principles. The McGovern campaign comes to mind but McGovern was basically just the far left of the party. He didn't actually offer a new paradigm. Goldwater won because the South shifted from the establishment to the conservative wing of the party.
I have to go back to William Jennings Bryan in 1896 to find a good parallel. That's when the Populists took over the Democratic Party on a platform of "free coinage of silver" at a time when the sitting Democrat president was a strong champion of gold only as the currency of the realm. But while Bryan won the nomination, he didn't win the presidency.
That said, I must confess that things are going better than I expected. Remember that four years ago at this time, Mitt Romney was still polling nationally in the single digits, and McCain was given up on by most pundits. The nomination of McCain is particularly significant I think. Because it shows for the first times since the Goldwater conservatives took over the party that the conservative movement split. Establishment conservatives went for Romney while ideological conservatives united behind huckabee. This allowed the moderate McCain to win. So in a sense, the old conservative movement simply doesn't exist anymore.
Finally, as Liz Trotta Fox News pointed out, the Ron Paul campaign shows that conservative Republicans are tiring of all these wars. That may be more significant than Ron Paul's economic views which don't really stand out among voters who are not economically literate. Rick Santorum does not appear to be gaining any traction form his confrontation with Ron Paul at the Iowa debate, but Paul has gained substantially against Bachmann and even Romney.
The economic paradigm shift may have to wait until the next election.
On the other hand, we may be headed for yet more economic catastrophe. We could see a bond market collapse or even a dollar collapse well before the primary season is over, and that could shift the debate strongly in Paul's favor.
