In-depth discussion of the Tea Party as a non-hierarchical organization, by Jonathan Rauch:

Excerpts:

“The tea party began as a network, not an organization, and that is what it mostly remains. Disillusioned with President Bush’s Republicans and disheartened by President Obama’s election, in late 2008 several dozen conservatives began chattering on social-networking sites such as Top Conservatives on Twitter and Smart Girl Politics. Using those resources and frequent conference calls (the movement probably could not have arisen before the advent of free conference calling), they began to talk about doing something. What they didn’t realize was that they were already doing something. In the very act of networking, they were printing the circuitry for a national jolt of electricity.

The spark came on February 19, 2009, when a CNBC journalist named Rick Santelli aired a diatribe against the bank bailout. “That,” Meckler says, “was our source code.” The next day, the networkers held a conference call and decided to stage protests in a few cities just a week later. No one was more astonished than the organizers when the network produced rallies in about 50 cities, organized virtually overnight by amateurs. Realizing that they had opened a vein, they launched a second round of rallies that April, this time turning out perhaps 600,000 people at more than 600 events.

Experienced political operatives were blown away. “It was inconceivable in the past” to stage so many rallies so quickly, in so many places, without big budgets for organizers and entertainment, says Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform and a longtime political organizer. Without a hook such as a musical show, he says, “I can’t think of anything on the right or the left that mimics those numbers on a local level.”

By the summer of 2009, tea parties were springing up all over. Multitudes of activists, operatives, and groups were claiming the tea party mantle, many of them at odds with or suspicious of each other. Believing that coordination was needed, an ad hoc committee emerged from among the core group and, by August of last year, had opened a bank account under the spontaneously chosen name of the Tea Party Patriots.

Today, the Tea Party Patriots is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit group. It has seven national coordinators, five or so of whom draw salaries, which they decline to disclose but say are modest. Three other people get paychecks, according to Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder and national coordinator.

The organization has no offices, dwelling instead in activists’ homes and laptops. Martin says it has raised just over $1 million in the past year, a trivial amount by the standards of national political organizers. About 75 percent of the group’s funding comes from small donations, $20 or less, she says.

By conventional measures such as staff and budget, then, the Tea Party Patriots is minuscule. Viewed another way, however, it is, to use Martin’s expression, “gi-normous.” Lacking dues or bylaws, the network’s closest thing to a membership roll is the list of groups that have registered with its website, now approaching 3,000 and spanning the country. The website, teapartypatriots.org, lists almost 200 tea parties in California alone.

Many states and localities have their own coordinators. Dawn Wildman, a national coordinator based in San Diego, doubles as a California state coordinator, hosting two weekly conference calls that typically include about 40 of 180 or so local coordinators. 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.”

Strange though it may seem, this is a coordinated network, not a hierarchy. There is no chain of command. No group or person is subordinate to any other. The tea parties are jealously independent and suspicious of any efforts at central control, which they see as a sure path to domination by outside interests. “There’s such a uniqueness to every one of these groups, just as there’s an individuality to every person,” Wildman says. “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.

…

“We’re a starfish organization,” says Scott Boston, the Tea Party Patriots’ educational coordinator, and a rare paid staffer. He started a tea party group in Bowling Green, Ohio, but then let it slide when he went to school. Filling the gap, another group popped up; now there are two. Groups fuse as well as split. In Dallas, Emanuelson says, if a coordinator burns out, “sometimes another coordinator picks up the reins, but if not, a group can get involved with a nearby group.” No one else even needs to know about it.

From Washington’s who’s-in-charge-here perspective, the tea party model seems, to use Wildman’s word, 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. “We can be hard to work with, because we’re confusing,” Meckler acknowledges. “We’re constantly fighting against the traditional societal pressure to become a top-down organization.” So why would anyone want to form this kind of group, or network, or hive, or starfish, or lava flow, or whatever it is?

First, radical decentralization embodies and expresses tea partiers’ mistrust of overcentralized authority, which is the very problem they set out to solve. They worry that external co-option, internal corruption, and gradual calcification — the viruses they believe ruined Washington — might in time infect them. Decentralization, they say, is inherently resistant to all three diseases.

Second, the system is self-propelling and self-guiding. “People seem to know what the right thing to do is at the right time,” Dallas’s Emanuelson says. “As times change, then our focus will change, because we’re so bottom-up driven. As everyone decides there’s a different agenda, that’s where things will go.”

If a good or popular idea surfaces in Dallas, activists talk it up and other groups copy it. Bad and unpopular ideas, on the other hand, just fizzle. Better yet, the movement lives on even as people come and go. “The message is important,” Wildman says, “but people are expendable.”

Third, the network is unbelievably cheap. With only a handful of exceptions, everyone is a volunteer. Local groups bring their own resources. Coordinators provide support and communication, but they make a point of pushing most projects back down to the grassroots.

Finally, localism means that there is no waiting for someone up the chain to give a green light. Groups can act fast and capitalize on spontaneity. Equally important, the network is self-scaling. The network never outgrows the infrastructure, because each tea party is self-reliant. And the groups make it their business to seed more groups, producing sometimes dizzying growth.”