The newest and fastest growing political grouping in the U.S. is driven by the idea that the problems that are facing the nation today have been caused not just by the left wing or the right wing, but by the mainstream of both parties, which have for years been eliminating our civil rights, sponsoring and benefiting from a crony corporatist economic system, and operating a militaristic foreign policy, seemingly to the benefit of a military industrial complex more than that to the benefit of the nation.
This growing group of anti-Republicrats are mostly young people who've been educating themselves about their nation and its workings -- rather than relying on the typically dull mainstream media that continue to filter events through the mistaken ideas that the Democrats and Republicans have fundamentally different political perspectives, and that on any particular issue, one of the parties will know the best political direction for the nation.
In 2012, most of these post-partisan Americans who say to America's political duopoly, "Pox on both your houses", are supporting Ron Paul for president, even though very many of them have never before identified Republican.
Now their influence is beginning to be felt outside the Republican party -- and not just in the presidential election.
In the 10th District of New Jersey, a candidate for the Democratic nomination to represent his district in Congress, is finally asking the question that hundreds of thousands of young American liberals have already asked -- and whose answer has caused them to leave his party.
The candidate is Dennis Flynn, and his campaign video begins by asking, "Where Have Our Liberal Values Gone?"
The voiceover proceeds to provide the motivation for the question ...
The following is a quote from the most outspoken voice for liberal values currently serving in the U.S. House of Representatives.
'... it is with the complicity of Congress that we have become a nation of pre-emptive war, secret military tribunals, torture, rejection of habeas corpus, warrantless searches, undue government secrecy, extraordinary renditions, and uncontrolled spying on the American people. Fighting over there has nothing to do with preserving freedoms here at home. More likely, the opposite is true.'
Cutting to pictures of stadiums filled with literally thousands of people, the voiceover continues,
Here are some recent examples of this Congressman's speaking events. Crowds of young liberals who want to end the wars and protect civil rights are passionately participating in a wave of political action [that is] sweeping across the country.
So what's wrong with this picture? The congressman they are supporting is a Republican.
Those young liberals are called Blue Republicans, and that congressman is called Ron Paul.
The values that have driven the Blue Republicans out of the Democratic party and toward a conservative septuagenarian Republican are a preference for peace over war, a belief in the Bill of Rights and a desire to put an end to a government-sponsored crony corporatist economic and monetary system.
What strange bedfellows true principles make!
Whereas a Blue Republican can most simply be defined as a "Democrat or Independent who is registering Republican for one year to support Ron Paul," more important is the underlying realization that causes people to make what for many of them is a dramatic political conversion: what is most wrong with the United States is not caused by one or other party, but by what both parties have agreed about, often tacitly or implicitly, and caused together.
Don't like the Patriot Act, the NDAA, or CISPA? Romney and Obama both support them. Don't like bailouts? Romney and Obama both support them. Don't like military intervention without the declaration of war? Romney and Obama both support them. Don't like a secretive central bank and corporations that (under government license) manipulate a fiat currency in a manner that systematically transfers wealth from working Americans to a financial class? Not only do Romney and Obama both support them: they both receive their largest donations from those very corporations.
As Flynn's campaign states, "These are not Democrat issues or Republican issues. These are American issues."
Exactly, Mr. Flynn.
And yet, since Ron Paul -- who stands against all the un-American things just listed, and is unique in consistently voting against the shared assumptions of the two main parties -- is a Republican, the Republicans are gaining registrants as the Democratic party is losing them: not because their track record is any better, but just because the guy who's telling the truth has an (R) after his name.
In New Jersey, Dennis Flynn realizes that it doesn't have to be this way. Democrats can tell the truth about what most matters, too. Moreover, the Democratic Party has for decades talked as if it had a greater claim to these Blue Republican values than the Republican Party, so surely it can stop the bleeding of support by putting its policies -- and its candidates -- where its mouth is?
Flynn appreciates that Ron Paul is being carried by a rising post-partisan live-and-let-live pro-liberty political wave that spans the political spectrum, attracting the independently minded of both liberal and conservative sensibilities. His campaign is both effect and cause of the fact that a cultural and political revolution that is bigger than either party is under way in the United States. And if the rEVOLution is going to take root and then take over, it must start to undo the prevailing self-interested orthodoxies of both of the main parties of this nation.
I am pleased to support Dennis Flynn, the Democrat, as I am to support Ron Paul, the Republican. The purists may hate me for it -- whether they be party-Democrats, party-Republicans or even libertarians. And that is just fine. In politics, "perfection" -- like abandonment of principle -- is nearly always the enemy of the good. Given his running on a Democratic ticket, I suspect that Flynn disagrees with Paul on abortion, has softer views on certain government spending, and has an idea of property rights that may not satisfy a "Human Action"-carrying libertarian. But, finally, a Democrat has recognized that the nation is profoundly losing its way -- and that all those issues about which he may disagree with a principled libertarian are much less important than those (civil rights, peace, crony corporatism) about which they should agree.
Dennis Flynn is making a farsighted attempt to turn one of the nation's most powerful institutions -- the Democratic Party -- toward civil rights and the very values that it has been espousing for decades but long ago forgot to act on. (It was the Democrat, Jim Clyburn, who said only two years ago that most of what Congress does is unconstitutional -- and therefore at odds with the Bill of Rights.)
People who care most about political orthodoxy, a candidate's political experience, their pet government program or whether their candidate is a party-man won't care much for Mr. Flynn; nor will those who just don't like the unfamiliar. However, those who think that perhaps not all blame for America's mess lies with the political opposition, but that their own party (and nation) might benefit from a little honest self-criticism and house-cleaning, will be excited by the truth Flynn tells and the courage with which he is telling it.
Flynn's tagline is "Returning Real Liberal Values to the Democratic Party". Let's see if he can return some of the real liberals to that party, too.