After Obama wins, Romney will be a nobody. But Ron Paul with 25% of the vote will be more influential than ever. With any luck, he should be able to keep Republicans out of the White House for several more election cycles and then his son can take over that role when Ron retires.

As for any third “choice” effort, it is almost impossible to have anyone taken seriously when the pundits of every stripe take their charge to do mortal damage seriously. I’m certain the Roman media didn’t do the Christians as much damage as we see today.

Regarding the “state” argument Issodhos, it seems that the govt has long been outrun by those who wield its power for themselves. They no longer need its support, just its inattention.

Even the political parties are becoming aware that they have been had… have become impotent… the confluence of money with ruthless ideology and gamesmanship now the chosen modus operandi. Parties are mere pawns.

The globalization of this phenomenon is sweeping “statism” into the dustbin of history, just as the rise of state power enucleated individuals from estimations of sociopolitical value.

Thus, it’s no wonder that someone who preaches liberty and individual rights, in opposition to socialist and statist solutions, is regarded as an extremist. Ditto for groups of such individuals, who must be seriously deranged… don’t you know.

Anyone with half a brain knows clearly that the same thing was said of the founders, who persevered anyway. And thank God they did.

Can we save ourselves again?

Sound familiar?

Ultimately the blame lies squarely on the American People.

If you voted Republican or Democrat in the last fifty years, stop complaining! Immediltely. You got what you asked for. You got what you voted for.

Here at Capitol Hill Blue, we don’t see much difference between the two political parties. Both serve hidden agendas that have little to do with what they say in public. Both pander entirely too much to the special interests that control those agendas. Both offer pabulum as candidates. Leadership is a lost art, honesty an archaic concept and individualism a missing ingredient. [/quote]
Wow. If I was to go on about that stuff at Readers Rant I think I might get banned. Wait a minute! I did. And I was!:-))

But, actually, I think Donna Cass’s claim that we should blame it on the two cautious candidates is quite simplistic, at best. No candidate that is not simply a replacement cog is going to easily get past the guardians of the established order. The system is just not rigged that way. We have two utterly corrupt parties (wings of a single party, for all practical purposes) whose function it is to use government to serve the interests of the state. In exchange the pols get to enjoy the trappings of power while tossing social bones to their base of special interest groups.

As Nock observed, and I agree, state and government are not the say thing. Government is used to support those for whom the state is structured to benefit. In out history the state has been a monarchal, then, with the Revolution, a merchant state which has evolved into a corporate state (actually, to be more specific, a financial state). I think the financial state began its ascendancy in the late 19th to early 20th century and now reigns supreme as the state. Kind of a bummer, but it is what it is.

I have come to think that as long as we have a party system in which “winner takes all” is the default, we are stuck with a system in which regardless of which worthless cog gets put into the White House by hoi polloi (us), the one winner will be those for whom the state is structured to benefit.

As you point out, possibly a change that is not feasible from within and too destructive to do from without — unless times get really, really bad. As Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”.:-)
Yours,
Issodhos

It may be that a constitutional amendment to establish