There is a very good analysis? of the tea party movement in today’s Wall St. Journal by former Congressman Dick Army and Matt Kibbe, President and CEO of Freedomworks. I think one of the more interesting points they make relates to the spontaneous and unplanned nature of the movement and how this speaks to its effectiveness. Army and Kibbe note that:
The tea party movement has blossomed into a powerful social
phenomenon because it is leaderless?not directed by any one mind,
political party or parochial agenda...The
many branches of the tea party movement have created a virtual
marketplace for new ideas, effective innovations and creative tactics.
Best practices come from the ground up, around kitchen tables, from
Facebook friends, at weekly book clubs, or on Twitter feeds. This is
beautiful chaos?or, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek put
it, “spontaneous order.”
Decentralization,
not top-down hierarchy, is the best way to maximize the contributions
of people and their personal knowledge. Let the leaders be the activists
who have the best knowledge of local personalities and issues.
It is the leaderless and spontaneous nature of the movement that frustrates its opponents the most. It cannot be destroyed by cutting off its head. This is because the movement has evolved completely independent of any leader or any George Soros type pot of gold. It is united by ideas not by personalities. And it is the battleground of ideas that the left is most uncomfortable with. This is why they are always asking “who’s funding them” or searching for personalities to discredit. What they don’t understand is that, because of the movement’s decentralized and spontaneous nature, these are tools that can’t work. My concern is that their frustration will lead lead them to use raw power and coercion, most likely through the political process, to shut down their opponents. There is one lesson that progressives have learned well–state power can work quite effectively when goals can’t be accomplished by voluntary persuasion and argumentation. Opponents, decentralized or not, can be snuffed out by the use of raw political power.
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