This explains why RP fans seem to cater to the speculator class and students, who tend toward the left:

“The Washington Post reports today that Manilow, while impressed by Paul, “loves the president” and plans on pulling the lever for his reelection in 2012.

Paul’s supporters have often wondered why his support seems so strong in the general public discourse but does not translate into support in scientific Republican polls (with Harris Interactive results aside, for reasons I outline in that post).

The answer can be found in Manilow’s flip flop—many of Paul’s most ardent supporters are not Republican primary voters. Often, his supporters are independent, libertarian or soft Democrats that plan to reregister Republican in order to vote for Paul in closed primaries – those voters are not registered in polls of registered Republicans.”

My Comment:

Here we see another illustration of the danger of mass action, whether political or promotional in its aim. It dilutes its message and ends up appealing to people whose aims and interests are perhaps far from yours.

But this no longer matters, because the idea is to be all things to all people. Thus, mass action means you necessarily appeal to the common denominator, omitting some things from your agenda, and elevating others. You begin to adopt slogans, you begin to resist thought too deep for popular approval. You demonize  all foes, all critics, and eventually criticism itself.

Unfortunately, those are just the problems with politics itself.  To become what you fight in order to fight better is absurdity at its very core.

Not that absurd things might not be able to prevail in the short-term.  But such logical and moral contradictions have a knack of ripening into poison.

That has been my own personal experience.  A compromise that seemed a reasonable trade off in the beginning,  reveals itself  soon enough to be a tectonic movement in the moral foundation on which I thought I stood.

For, while I have always tried to follow my own conscience, and while it has been far stricter in certain areas than any demands made by convention or religion, that “in certain things” betrays a crucial problem.

What our perception and intuition sees as the moral imperative of the moment frequently turns out not to be. Some other area of our lives, one we thought we had mastered, or one in which we felt so secure that, like a left-handed Tantrist, we thought we could use “beyond good and evil”, turns out to have resisted our command after all.

One imprudent association leads to another. One compromise makes the next look easier.  Pretty soon, we begin to detest our critics and imagine them motivated by envy or malice or self-hatred, because their vision of our projects does not match the grandiosity of our own.

Especially is this true of those who have fought long, lonely battles, far from center-stage and invariably with the malodorous slanders of frauds and fools ringing in their ear, as RP has.

We feel for him and for his long-term supporters.

We know what it is like to see honest motives disparaged by those who would not recognize truth if it descended, thousand-eyed and many-winged, with a fiery coal at its lips.  In our small way, we know what it is like to have to fight and refight the same intellectual battles over and over, because those who wield the badge of authority also write the official histories. We know what it is like to see something you love – whether your country, your history, or even your own words – turned into its opposite by slippery-tongued opportunists.

But even so, reason, not feeling, must be our guide, because it is feeling, not reason, that is the culprit. It is feeling that drives the masses to demand more and more from their masters and it is feeling that traps them in the vicious cycle of consumption and debt.

Our masters, on the other hand, operate with cold reasoning, moving us like pawns on their chessboard precisely because they stay detached from the panics and deliriums of the moment.

Mass man feels, and his feelings shift with the moment. His masters think, however soullessly, and their thinking builds a vision over centuries that stretches far into the future, into eternity.

Those who seek to undo such far-reaching plans would do well to harness their feelings to their mind and tune their eyes farther than the familiar horizons of national politics.