American politics has never seen anything quite like the Tea Parties, though few appreciate the revolutionary organizational principle powering the movement. A major reason why the Tea Parties have been so successful, why the political establishment has found them so difficult to combat (and one that explains, among other things, why I've chosen to use the plural in referring to them), lies in their organization.
The Tea Parties comprise a distributed network -- a non-hierarchical system of autonomous nodes with no central control point, and with all nodes possessing the same value and freedom to act independently. A distributed network can be compared to a beehive. All the bees know their particular task and complete it autonomously, without directions from a central authority. If a threat appears, the bees overwhelm it not by direct confrontation, but by swarming, driving it away with sheer force of numbers.
How will such an informal network convert to a formal political system to replace the innately corrupt kleptocracy that we have today? This, it seems to me, is a necessary evolution to assure that upcoming reforms are not simply shoved aside or undermined once the national political situation returns to normal. This may well turn out to be one of the most profound political questions of our era. It's not one that's going to be answered in a single essay.
Or is it conceivable that the distributed network embodied by the Tea Parties could become a political system in and of itself? This is a tantalizing possibility. In ancient Athens, the citizenry met as a whole to decide critical questions. Could such a system return in our day, with the net and Twitter and Facebook replacing the Athenian agora? How would this function in relation to established constitutional principles? How, under such circumstances, do we preserve the safeguards of representative government?
