I disagree with Sanders on everything, but I love him still. He is the opposite of Ron Paul in a sense. He sticks to his convictions.
Switch Sanders's and Paul's names there and I agree verbatim. If somebody like Paul could start some robust and electable paleocon (or even actually prinicipled neocon) outfit in Texas or somewhere that was anything like what Sanders did for Vermont when he helped found the Liberty Union Party (now doing business as the Vermont Progressive Party in all but name), I think that the political discourse would benefit tremendously.
Why doesn't the Progressive Party try and expand nationwide? I know many Democrats wouldn't want it to since they share some similar positions, but it would be better for the country if there was a viable third party. Plus the Progressive Party has in the past had success winning with Republicans like TR and La Follette did.
It's because Vermont is too small a base for the VPP to expand nationwide from. The Liberty Union Party was an outfit founded in 1970 by former Congressman William H. Meyer (the only Democratic Congressman from Vermont, ever, until 2007) which Sanders joined within the first year of its existence and almost immediately became the face of. It never won any statewide elections but it managed to elect a lot of local candidates during a period of immense social change in the state. Sanders resigned from the party leadership before his first election as Mayor of Burlington in 1981, after which it entered a period of decline and lost ballot access in the nineties. At that point Sanders, who was in the House of Representatives by that point, founded the VPP, along with a bunch of rural-working-class Republicans who felt alienated by the national party (think Jim Jeffords, though he himself wasn't involved). Right now there are I think five Progressives in the Vermont House, and their chief function is to introduce radical-seeming concepts that Democratic majorities end up passing years later (gay marriage and the nascent public option in Vermont started this way). This would definitely be a good idea at the national level, but it's so far been impossible to export even to New Hampshire and Massachusetts except on a very limited local level (Franklin, Hampshire, and Berkshire Counties in Massachusetts have a lot of these sorts of people, who tend to run in the Green-Rainbow Party there), because the conditions that created this coalition of leftist indies and alienated ancestrally-Republican farmers really don't exist outside the region. tl;dr
The gods of the valley are not the gods of the hills, and you shall understand it.
