“ If the Ron Paul Campaign had been competent would we still have taken back America?”

They may hold conferences to consider the points, assay the individuals involved; there will be no disagreement that it was through the candidacy of Ron Paul that the world of political campaigns changed forever, moving into networking, as opposed to hierarchy; The real question will be the motives of those in charge of the official campaign. That is natural; the Ron Paul Campaign overturned that political hierarchy first.

Could the Campaign HQ in Arlington, Virginia have held politics on its previous course if it had been run competently, as the other presidential campaigns were run? What if they had possessed some modicum of experience? What if they had known that the media uses a Day Book, into which all campaigns enter their events? What if they had had a steering committee, standard for presidential campaigns? Lots of what ifs to be discussed by historians. We can be sure they will be.

Did those entrusted by Ron understand that for revolution to take place they must force activists to react against authority?

The formal campaign in Arlington, Virginia was from the first instance unable to do anything much but antagonize activists, forcing volunteers to work on their own. They refused to put up the Congressman's schedule; they refused to pay so Ron could participate in what proved to be the pivotal South Carolina debate until activists inundated them.

The historians will debate if those failures were intentional or sheer incompetence. Those details will interest only historians.

Those failures made it necessary for individual activists, moved by the words and principles of Ron Paul, to look about them and use what had been made available through the Internet to take the campaign into their own hands.

And so a new world of governance through persuasion and consensus was born.

The Internet erupted. Signs in yards, on the highways, and in the sky appeared from the pocketbooks and work of ordinary people. Graphics produced and shared online, with requests filled by volunteers became routine. Ron Paulists began monitoring ballot access; they learned how to conduct registration drives, how to do videos, how to organize; how to fund raise. They had to and they did so unburdened by anything but the need to promote their candidate.

Through its absolute failure, therefore the corporatized, official campaign made it necessary to reinvent the forms for political action to which we had become accustomed. As Jefferson said in the Declaration, “...all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

The campaign flowed past Arlington, Virginia to make history by forging new tools of human action. That, history will note. The people had had enough of regular government and those who acted like one.

When you build new tools that work those tools get used.

Those same tools, decentralized strategies for broad social cooperation that lower the cost for accomplishing rapid change, are now being applied to all human action. The CorporaState will feel the impact like a sledge hammer to the side of the head.

Not to say it is going to be easy; but now it is impossible to stop. The people know how to do it. A taste of their own, individual power was all they needed.

Forget Blackwater; Erik Prince will return to playing with toy soldiers and conducting seminars for hunters once he gets out of prison. The War in Iraq will sputter to a halt. The debates on whether we should have gone will cease. Revolution is happening.

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