Do all these institutes actually make a difference in changing minds of average people who don’t read much? Did Ron Paul’s campaign succeed in part because of the work done spreading the message by the LvMI? Or was it just because he got on national TV debates?
Policies that come out of the Institutes make their way to the common person in the form of “news.” That is how they are used to affect entire populations opinions/perceptions of things. Most people who don’t read much probably don’t know who Samuel huntington is, let alone have read his paper “The Clash of Civilizations,” but they are more than likely of the precept that there is a jihad waged by the Arab/Islam world aimed at the liberal democracies and their decadence which is the thesis of the paper (or that there will be one in the future; it’s an old paper).
The whole contemporary narrative of international relations is premised on Huntington’s paper and book.
Ron Paul’s influence obviously comes from his television apperances (debates, TV shows, w/e), but the point of Paul’s success that I thought we were debating is how in depth it got. The depth comes from people, in turn, visiting LvMI and/or reading the related material. Ron Paul was only the second or third book I read about contemporary politics (way back in 2007 or 08; Revolution) and it set me in a very different direction that LvMI played a heavy role in.
The depth is compared to the quantity. The quantity I’d represent in shallow political adherence to what Paul promoted (I’d count tea party politicians who cannot be counted on truly, but use the rhetoric. Rand Paul is an example of this and I’ve written much about him on these forums) and the depth is the level of cultural influence (business, media, academia) that he has generated. The cultural influence might not show up in the political world or it may show up in a level of the political world that social/media politics doesn’t reach (i.e., the non-democratic stuff such as bureaucracy, administration, and policy institutes).