And what is underlying this respect for human rights? Paul rightfully says it’s tolerance, “…liberty is liberty and it’s your life and you have a right to use it as you see fit.” In other words, the driving factor of a belief in non-aggression is being tolerant of others’ choices.

Writing in 1929, Mises understood this well, “…only tolerance can create and preserve the condition of social peace without which humanity must relapse into the barbarism and penury of centuries long past.”

Explaining why non-aggression necessarily involves other beliefs, Lew Rockwell writes, “…no political philosophy exists in a cultural vacuum, and for most people political identity is only an abstraction from a broader cultural view. The two are separate only at the theoretical level; in practice, they are inextricably linked.”

What Paul, Mises, and Rockwell understand is what Charles Johnson describes as “strategic thickness.” Strategic thickness is the view that certain ideas and values are useful for promoting, implementing, and maintaining the morality of non-aggression in the real world. After all, there are obviously going to be some ideas that are more complementary to non-aggression than others.

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Paul went on to point out that many want to embrace liberty up to the point of allowing something they disapprove of. But this obviously isn’t the libertarian attitude that affirms liberty is a fundamental human right not up to debate. Each person deserves the freedom to choose – just because you disapprove of their practices, be it doing drugs or practicing a different religion, doesn’t give you the right to use force against them.

However this doesn’t imply some sort of cultural or moral relativism. “Just because you allow somebody to have a lifestyle you disapprove of doesn’t mean you have to endorse it,” Paul explains. So while I may not agree with your choice to do heroin everyday, I should let you be. I can’t let my moral preferences morph into rights violations. If everyone understood this and didn’t let their own opinions and biases lead to creating systems of coercion, the world would be a much freer place.

And what is underlying this respect for human rights? Paul rightfully says it’s tolerance, “…liberty is liberty and it’s your life and you have a right to use it as you see fit.” In other words, the driving factor of a belief in non-aggression is being tolerant of others’ choices.

Writing in 1929, Mises understood this well, “…only tolerance can create and preserve the condition of social peace without which humanity must relapse into the barbarism and penury of centuries long past.”

Explaining why non-aggression necessarily involves other beliefs, Lew Rockwell writes, “…no political philosophy exists in a cultural vacuum, and for most people political identity is only an abstraction from a broader cultural view. The two are separate only at the theoretical level; in practice, they are inextricably linked.”

What Paul, Mises, and Rockwell understand is what Charles Johnson describes as “strategic thickness.” Strategic thickness is the view that certain ideas and values are useful for promoting, implementing, and maintaining the morality of non-aggression in the real world. After all, there are obviously going to be some ideas that are more complementary to non-aggression than others.

Sheldon Richman points out one of the values that complements non-aggression is anti-racism (Paul has done so as well), which is, after all, just a form of the tolerance that Paul and Mises refer to. I’ve gone even further and argued libertarians ought to be proponents of feminism, gay and trans liberation, and worker empowerment. Now even if these values, for one reason or another, turn out to not be complementary to non-aggression, the reason, if we are agreeing with Mises’ and Paul’s conception of liberty, it can’t be because the philosophy is only concerned with that single idea: for non-aggression is going to inevitably bring along other ideas with it.

For reasons that Paul, Mises, and Rockwell have shown, non-aggression can and does involve, even benefit from, complementary values. They have embraced “strategic thickness” and rightfully so.

Hopefully, you can now see that Ron Paul is not going to restore the old American republic and lead you to liberty. Hopefully, you can see now that not only is it not going to happen, but that it never was going to happen.

The deck was thoroughly stacked. Against Paul, against you, against any threat to a status quo which has calcified over the last 120 years (starting with the introduction of “ballot access” laws to narrow the November choice to two, and the evolution of primaries and conventions toward a process that inevitably produces two look-alikes).

That status quo may break or crumble under external pressure, but it will never soften to internal re-shaping of the type that a Republican presidential campaign proposes.

Where to go from here? That is the question.

As a first step, I propose that you examine the two Paul presidential campaigns, with the benefit of hindsight and an eye toward identifying their essentials. You’ll find that much of what you held dear back then can be jettisoned — the partisan and political compromises bolted onto the campaign’s libertarian superstructure as armor or camouflage for the purpose of “working within the system.” Now that you’re about to abandon politics, you won’t need those things any more.

Auditing the Fed, resurrecting “states rights,” attempting to appeal to a base of social conservative voters who fear freedom so deeply that they’ll swallow anything the GOP establishment feeds them … those tactics did not serve you well where you were, and you won’t need them where you’re going.

Did I say you’re about to abandon politics? Yes, I did. Six years, $70 million, numerous lawless actions on the part of the Republican establishment and two heart-breaking failures to penetrate the GOP’s national convention, with a candidate eminently qualified for the presidency by what you thought were the relevant standards, should be enough to convince you that “working within the system” isn’t going to get the job done. Welcome to the real world.

The good news is that in that real world, you’re part of the majority. Most Americans either won’t or can’t participate in the state’s quadrennial “election” ritual. President Barack Obama took office with the express consent of less than one in four Americans. Nearly as many voted for someone else. More than twice as many voted for no one at all.

While it’s true that most of those non-voters are at best only marginally conscious of the significance of their abstention, neither are they fully invested in the system you sought to reform and now understand you must abolish. Even if they haven’t joined your army, they’re bona fide potential recruits, unlike the diehard Republican voters you’ve spent the last six years hectoring for support.

The first step, of course, is to become one of those non-voters.

The second step? Status esse delendam: The state must be destroyed.

If not now, when? If not you, who?

The R3VOLution is dead. Long live the revolution.

Manning is the US Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking (to Wikileaks) classified information: Evidence of corruption and underhanded tactics in promoting US global dominance, as well as video footage of a US helicopter crew murdering two Reuters journalists and shooting up a van with kids in it after its driver attempted to evacuate wounded victims of that attack.

Manning spent eleven months — before his trial even began — in punitive solitary confinement, typically confined to his cell for 23 hours a day and forced to strip naked at night. The Guardian reports that Mendez “could not reach a definitive conclusion on whether Manning had been tortured” because the US military has consistently denied him permission to meet with Manning privately.

US President Barack Obama, who campaigned on change and offered transparency, bears direct responsibility for the abuse, and possibly the torture, of Manning.

Not surprising: This is the same president who signed indefinite detention without trial officially into US law, and who claims the authority to order the murder of anyone anywhere on his personal assertion that they are “enemy combatants.”

This is the President Obama who, as commander in chief of the US military and chief executive of the US government bears direct responsibility for murderous drone attacks, in which powerful missiles mutilate bystanders, then return to rain death on people who come to the scene of previous attacks.

This is the same President Obama who has shown almost complete indifference to voices from the massive populist Occupy movement, or to the violence used against them.

Obama is doing his thing as top politician. In order to make the impact he wants to make he needs to be in power, bending toward whichever interests prop him up. That means picking up where George W. Bush left off, and making deals with other arms of power: The warlords of the American military-industrial complex, the financial executives, the bureaucracy, and so on.

The Republican Party is falling all over itself to show that it can find candidates who would be worse than Obama. They talk about “getting tough,” appealing to people who think doing bad things to people the government says to hate makes them tough.

Anyone else? Ron Paul might at least scale back some of the government’s worst excesses or encourage other politicians to become temporarily less evil to undercut his support. However, it’s doubtful he’ll win because the Republican establishment would rather lose the top post for four years than risk permanent reductions in their power and privilege. In the end Paul is a politician with a shady past; putting a lot of hope in him would be silly anyway. Third Parties have the deck stacked against them on everything from ballot access to exclusion from public debate.

The power structure tends to reward people who are best at climbing over others to reach its top. What they are willing to do for those already on top keeps them in good standing with the ruling club.

Sure, politicians can be more or less evil, but we don’t have to invest our political efforts in helping a lesser evil come to power. We can work independently of politicians, in the short term pressuring them from outside and in the long term dispensing with them altogether.

Abolishing power structures and dispersing power as widely as possible is the ultimate democratic project of bringing power to the people. It is a project of fostering community based in respect for individual liberty and autonomy.

If it sounds like anarchy, that means you are on the right track. Ask what makes the word anarchy scarier than politicians who claim the right to kill anyone anywhere, put those who challenge them in solitary confinement for months, and instruct police to attack people occupying public space instead of upsetting the bankers and bosses that are so important to keeping them in power.