KEEP IT OPEN, KEEP IT LOSE
TEA-PARTY NEEDS TO BROADEN ITS BASE, NOT ITS BUREAUCRACY

By: Sean Scallon

There have been suggestions made in the media that a lack of overall organization is hampering the Tea Party movement. The same suggestion are being made by would-be "leaders" as well. The self-appointed Judson Phillips wants to hold another so-called "Tea Party" convention this fall in Las Vegas to fleece even more people than he did in his first such "Tea Party" convention in Nashville.

Even though Tea Party activists helped to elect a Republican U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, brought down sitting U.S. Senators and members of the House of Representatives in their respective party primaries and elected their chosen candidates in other such primary elections, apparently the Tea Party Movement is being judged a failure because it doesn’t have regional chairpersons.

Isn’t it amazing there those who call themselves Tea Partiers wish to add layers of bureaucracy to a movement dedicated to removing it? Movements are not supposed to be "organized" at least not to the extent that persons like Phillips and those like him would wish they could do. For movement to have any more success, it cannot lose sight of this point.

There’s no doubt there’s been organization problems. In Virginia for example this election year, multiple candidates calling themselves "Tea Partiers" ran in GOP Congressional primaries, some against sitting incumbents, and yet their numbers only split the anti-incumbent vote and allowed the party establishment to claim victory in several House races in that state.

But are these not problems for those on the state and local level to figure out? Can they not, on their own, figure out which candidate is the best for them to run and support them? Is this not the essence of what the movement was supposed to be about, decentralization?

It seems that persons who want the movement to have disciplines, controls and efficiencies built into it are those who are eagerly looking to take control of the movement for themselves or to deliver it wholesale to the Republican Party or Conservative Inc. Luckily the broader movement has either resisted such attempts or is at least aware such attempts are being made. But the only way it can continue to keep its independence and freedom of action is by broadening the base of the Tea Parties to include all those dissatisfied with the state of the nation, government and general and President Obama regardless of ideology, not just Republicans. Recent polling shows 79 percent of Tea Partiers are GOP supporters, hard or soft. For the movement to last longer than most, that number needs to shrink.

Only a movement that large can keep away the wolves who wish turn the organic into the processed. Movements start of their own accord without direction or organization plans and then take a life of their own. Movements eventually degenerate over time naturally, but often times one of the reasons they do so is because outside forces try control, shape and shift such movements into their own selfish plans and divide the movement accordingly. No doubt the same is happening to the Tea Party, particularly on the Republican side where officials greedily covet their activist base.

Perhaps the best way to resist such attempts by the centralizers to gain control is not to give to their calls for more power to themselves. Perhaps the best way to resist is by adhering to anti-Big Government sentiment supposedly within their own movement. If organization is needed, it needs to be done where it can be most effective, at the state and local level where it can remain close to the grassroots and to the ordinary fellows who make up the bulk of the movement, rather than have decision come from on high from people they don’t know who claim to represent them when they really only represent the few or the one.

Indeed, a successful movement need not only be able to elect candidates, but also be able to stick to what it believes in and stick to what helped them come together in the first place. It doesn’t need membership dues, email lists and fundraising letters. It just needs to be broad-based enough to draw in as many people as it can to its basic principles and allow them the freedom to do what they do best to advance the larger cause. In so doing, the Tea Party movement can set the best example of what it wishes to see from government: No top-down, only from the bottom-up.




"Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact."