Originally published on June 9, 2008.

If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were once our countrymen.

~ Samuel Adams

It had been forty-four years since I last attended a political convention. I was part of my state's delegation to the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, an experience that helped push me over the threshold in my abandonment of political action. But last week I found myself headed to Rochester to sit in — as an observer — on the Minnesota Republican State Convention. My Minnesota daughter and her husband have been very active Ron Paul supporters, with her husband serving as a delegate to this convention. Perhaps for the same reason that leads people to visit the site of a train-wreck, I decided to attend.

My initial impression of this convention was that the atmosphere was so unlike those in which I had participated decades before. It was not that the Ron Paul delegates were outvoted by the McCain supporters: that's just part of the convention process as it was, in 1964, when we Goldwater supporters greatly outnumbered the competing Bill Scranton contingent. But there was a civility and respect for procedural regularities that governed earlier conventions, unlike what I witnessed in Rochester last week. The contrast could be stated, metaphorically, as the difference between eating in a French restaurant and a twenty-four-hour truck stop.

The carnival began, rudely enough, when Ron Paul was denied access to a convention center room he had reserved for a speech. At about 7:30 Saturday morning, several hundred Paul supporters — many of them delegates — gathered in a park area next to the convention center to listen to their candidate. His impassioned and focused appeal to reason and principle was in sharp contrast to the plethora of vacuous and contradictory platitudes to be voiced at the convention by party leaders and their loyalists.

If there was one sentiment that dominated this convention, it was the stark fear, by the party faithful, that Ron Paul's message might actually be heard by the delegates. It was not so much, I think, that the GOP establishment feared the kind of conversion that would lead the convention to select a slate of Paul delegates to attend the national convention in September. The concern, rather, was that Paul's message might remind Republicans of the importance of policies driven by moral principles; that ideas do have consequences; and that the party and its officials now languish in a lifeless cesspool. While it was clear to all that John McCain would become the party's nominee, it was also evident that the party regulars did not want to be reminded of just how morally and intellectually bankrupt they had become. In place of the principled behavior advocated by Ron Paul and his supporters, the GOP regulars offered the flimsy substitute for "common sense," an amorphous standard that can be used to rationalize anything a speaker favors.

Just how far the conventioneers would go to suppress any Paulist sentiment was demonstrated quite early. The party had enacted a rule requiring anyone who wished to be considered as a potential delegate to the national convention to go to Rochester, before the convention even began, to meet with a nominating committee. Many of the Paul delegates were not aware of this rule and, as a consequence, did not meet with this committee.