Though
headless, the
tea
party movement is not mindless.
Its collective brain meets every Monday night.
More than 200 leaders of local tea parties
coordinators, as they usually call themselves join
a conference call organized by an umbrella group
called the
Tea
Party
Patriots, the largest national tea
party organization. Organizers estimate that
membership totals about 15 million.
On one Monday recently, three national coordinators
began the session with a rundown on plans for
upcoming rallies. The group was polled on whether to
hold a second round of house parties throughout the
country. A coordinator gave an update on an iPhone
app for tea partiers who will be going door to door
this fall to talk to voters.
The floor was then opened. Rick, from Albuquerque,
N.M., asks if the national agenda includes
investigating voter-roll irregularities, something
his group is concerned about.
Mark
Meckler, a Tea Party Patriots
coordinator and co-founder, weighed in. Newcomers
"often don't understand how badly we need you to
lead the way," he says. "If this is an area of
concern to you," he admonishes, "the way the Tea
Party Patriots works is that you guys really lead
the organization.
"Essentially what we're doing is crowd-sourcing,"
says Meckler, whose vocabulary betrays his
background as a lawyer specializing in Internet law.
"I use the term open-source politics. This is an
open-source movement." Every day, anyone and
everyone is modifying the code. "The movement as a
whole is smart."
[A Guide To The Six Major Tea Party Groups]
And, as was apparent in Delaware on Tuesday, the
movement is gaining power. Christine ODonnells
upset victory in the Republican primary for the U.S.
Senate, coming on the heels of insurgent candidates
backed by the tea party winning in GOP Senate
primaries in Alaska, Kentucky,
Nevada and Utah, has made the tea
party movement a force.
The question now is whether a grassroots movement
that is, by design, leaderless can sustain itself
after this election cycle.
In American politics, radical decentralization has
never been tried on so large a scale.
Tea
party
activists believe that their
hivelike structure is their signal innovation and
secret weapon, the key to outlasting and
outmaneuvering traditional political organizations
and interest groups. They intend to rewrite the rule
book for political organizing, turning decades of
established practice upside down. If they succeed,
or even half succeed, the tea party's most important
legacy may be organizational, not political.
[Complete Coverage: The Tea Party Movement]
From Washington's who's-in-charge-here
perspective, the tea party model seems downright
bizarre. Perplexed journalists keep looking for the
movement's
leaders, which is like asking to
meet the boss of the Internet. Baffled politicians
and lobbyists can't find anyone to negotiate with.
"There's such a uniqueness to every one of these
groups, just as there's an individuality to every
person," says Dawn Wildman, a national coordinator
based in San Diego. "It has this bizarre organic
flow, a little bit like lava. It heats up in some
places and catches on fire; it moves more slowly in
other places."
Lava is a pretty good analogy. Ask the activists to
characterize their organizational structure,
however, and usually they will say it is a starfish.
"The Starfish and the Spider," a business book by
Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, was published in
2006 to no attention at all in the political world.
The subtitle, however, explains its relevance to the
tea party model: "The Unstoppable Power of
Leaderless Organizations."
Traditional thinking, the book contends, holds that
hierarchies are most efficient at getting things
done. Hierarchies, such as corporations, have
leaders who can make decisions and set priorities
and chains of command to hold everyone accountable.
This type of system has a central command, like a
spider's brain. Like the spider, it dies if you
thump it on the head.
The rise of the Internet and other forms of
instantaneous, interpersonal interaction, however,
has broken the spider monopoly, Brafman and
Beckstrom argue. Radically decentralized networks
everything from illicit music-sharing systems to
Wikipedia can direct resources and adapt
("mutate") far faster than corporations can. "The
absence of structure, leadership, and formal
organization, once considered a weakness, has become
a major asset," the authors write. "Seemingly
chaotic groups have challenged and defeated
established institutions. The rules of the game have
changed."
In decentralized networks, knowledge and power are
distributed throughout the system. As a result, the
network is impervious to decapitation. No foolish or
self-serving boss can wreck it, because it has no
boss. Fragmentation, the bane of traditional
organizations, actually makes the network stronger.
It is like a starfish: Cut off an arm, and it grows
(in some species) into a new starfish. Result: two
starfish, where before there was just one.
"We're a starfish organization," says Scott Boston,
the Tea Party Patriots' educational coordinator, and
a rare paid staffer.
[What Does The Tea Party Have In Common With A Starfish?]
Will it work?
Answering the skeptics, tea partiers point out that
bygone efforts at radical decentralization lacked
Internet-age networking and communications
technologies without which, of course, the tea
party movement could not have arisen in the first
place. The Tea Party Patriots' very existence
suggests that something new is afoot. One
coordinator notes that Facebook alone allows the
movement to communicate with up to 2 million people
simultaneously.
Listening to tea partiers talk about their
ambitions, one hears echoes of leftist movements.
Raise consciousness. Change hearts, not just votes.
Attack corruption in society, not just on Capitol
Hill. In America, right-wing movements have tended
to focus on taking over politics, left-wing ones on
changing the culture. Like its leftist precursors,
the Tea Party Patriots thinks of itself as a social
movement, not a political one.
[Next
Electoral Target For Tea Party: Democrats]
Centerless swarms are bad at deal-making practical
politics. But they may be pretty good at cultural
reform. In any case, the experiment begins.
Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer for National Journal.
To read an extended version of this story, click here.