Nothing the Ron Paul crowd says is revolutionary at all, aside from stupid ideas like the gold standard. Libertarians seem to be in general nothing but neoliberals, being advocates of free trade and globalization, removal of protection of labor and minorities, giving religion more power and emphasis on the government being about law and order rather than social welfare.
Why can’t they admit they’re not revolutionaries but at best neoliberals and at worst neocons and apologists for plutocracy?
Define “Libertarian”, “Neo-liberal” and “Neocon” and make that the case that Ron Paul is any of those things.
You use a lot of fancy and undefined terms in your OP but the short answer is no for all of them. Libertarians are not neo-cons (they tend to not like them much at all). You might have a better case for the neo-liberal label if you mean ‘liberal’ in the classical sense rather than the current U.S. usage but even that isn’t a straight mapping. It is true that Libertarians have overlapping views with lots of other groups both liberal and conservative and that very few individual libertarian positions are exclusive to them. However, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a unique movement on its own both philosophically and practically.
Libertarians are extremely easy to misunderstand and these types of comments tend to come up a lot here and elsewhere. I do not think libertarians are ‘apologists’ for anything including libertarianism itself. It is a philosophy based political movement which the chief objective of maximizing individual freedom (as defined within the libertarian philisophical framework).
John Mace recently did a series of threads in Great Debates to try and nail down libertarian viewpoints in different categories. You might want to read those to get a better understanding of what libertarians really believe and more importantly, why because I think you have a poor grasp of it at the moment based on your question. That isn’t a knock on you personally, it is a very common misunderstanding.
Missed the edit time…
BTW, I don’t consider Ron Paul to be much of a libertarian because of his anti-abortion and anti-SSM views, but he’s definitely not a neocon (in the usually sense of the term). Remember, he voted against the neocon’s biggest policy issue of the last decade-- the Iraq War. Ron Paul tends to attract libertarian leaning voters because he holds some libertarian ideas, probably the most popular are his views on legalizing drugs. He’s also a strong supporter of “states rights”, but that’s more of a federalism issue, and federalism isn’t necessarily a libertarian issue. Many people who hold libertarian views are also strong anti-federalists.
Also, who is going around claiming to be a revolutionary that they need to renounce that?
And he was all set to do one when the MB got shut down 2 weekends in a row. From what I hear, he hopes to continue them in the next week or so. 