Our Scrambled Politics

A reader writes:

Actually, everyone under 40 is not voting for Obama. I live in Austin, Texas, and your reader's email about support for Hillary in Sugar Land prompted me to write to you.

I consider myself far-left, and am having serious difficulty choosing between Edwards and Obama, as are many of my far-left friends. But what's even more shocking to me is the amount of support for Ron Paul among liberals in this town. I see it daily: the bumper stickers, the t-shirts.  Among some of my friends, but mostly at my school. I'm an older (30) undergraduate attending a private, Catholic institution here in Austin (but being Austin, the fact that the school is Catholic doesn't mean it's conservative - far from it!), and the kids there are crazy about Ron Paul. He's everywhere.

I can't for the life of me figure out why; maybe it's that old college reactionary radicalism among the young (although a couple of my lefty friends in their 30's are huge Ron Paul supporters).  Once he doesn't get the nomination, I suspect their allegiance will shift to whoever does (unless it's Hillary, though she's not nearly as despised as you seem to think she is, at least not among liberals in Texas), but we'll see. It's an interesting race.

My feeling about this election is that it reminds me very much of 1991 in its restlessness. But it's more interesting than that. Traditional liberalism is moribund; and Bush and Rove have destroyed conservatism as a coherent governing philosophy. It's obvious from this blog that I too find Ron Paul and Barack Obama by far the most interesting candidates. Not because I agree with them on everything. But because they alone represent the courage to move past the past. The rest seems exhausted to me.