Writes Mark Grannis in the Washington Times: “Most presidential campaign books come at the beginning of the campaign season. This gives even a bad campaign book undeserved relevance. But the increased relevance is generally offset by discernable reductions in candor and specificity, so as not to provide one’s opponent with too many inviting targets.
Ron Paul’s The Revolution: A Manifesto defies this convention. Writing at the end of his campaign, and therefore knowing he will not be the next president, Mr. Paul forcefully articulates our bedrock constitutional principles and energetically advances his argument that these principles can restore American greatness for years to come ,if we will only return to them now.
And although Mr. Paul’s presidential campaign is over, this is indeed a manifesto, not a memoir. These are political principles for our future, things Mr. Paul wants us to remember after he has left the rostrum.
Mr. Paul’s central thesis is that we have departed from the principles of our nation’s Founding in ways that systematically make us less free. Consequently, we now have a much larger, more powerful national government, one our Founders would not recognize – or might recognize as an empire doomed to the fate of all previous empires.
Such a thesis could easily become unbearably dark and tedious. But Mr. Paul, a medical doctor, makes his diagnosis in seven concise and lucid chapters that never lose the thread of hope for recovery.
Five of these chapters correspond to broad substantive areas of national policy: Our role in foreign affairs (too imperial); the scope of federal power (too broad); fiscal and regulatory interference with free enterprise (too heavily distorted by ‘looting’); recent incursions on civil liberties and personal freedom (too lawless and/or utopian); and the foundations of our monetary system (too shaky).” Read the rest.