The Tea Party: A New Organizational Model

What makes the Tea Party unique, argues Jonathon Rauch in the National Journal, is not its politics, but its leaderless organizational style.  Its model is based not on a political tract but on a business book called The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. The spider, like almost organizations, has a head; crush the head and you kill the spider. The starfish has no head; its arms have their own minds. Almost all organizations have heads. The Tea Party does not — and in that lies its strength.

Organizers in Dallas are setting up a tea party in every ZIP code. “If the beauty of the tea party is decentralization,” says Ken Emanuelson, a member of the Dallas steering committee, “in large metro areas like Dallas, the decentralization needs to go well below the metro area. It needs to go down into the neighborhoods. We go to our neighborhood groups, and we get our agenda from them.” Asked how many neighborhood tea parties exist in the Dallas area, another citywide coordinator replied, “I don’t even know.”

What makes the Tea Party so befuddling to politicians, lobbyists, and operatives like Karl Rove, Rauch writes, is that there is nobody to negotiate with.  So it is hard to figure out how to co-opt it. Moreover, it is a harbinger of things to come — in politics, in business, in social networking. 

I think we are just beginning to understand how radically the internet is changing the norms of society. This is going to be fascinating to watch.