The Tea Party as a Leaderless Movement

September 15, 2010
The Tea Party as a Leaderless Movement
Posted by Lew Rockwell on September 15, 2010 10:16 AM

This morning on NPR, Jonathan Rauch of the National Journal was analyzing the Tea Party as a deliberately leaderless, non-hierarchical movement. Its people are not interested in political power as such,  he said, but in changing people's minds about big government. This, I thought, is the libertarian revolution. But as long as the Tea Party is mired in Republican abstractions like the budget deficit, while accepting and even promoting the empire and the police state, it will not bother those in power. Still, the heart of the Tea Party is libertarian, in concert with its leaderless, ultra-decentralized organizational principles. Broadly speaking, the Tea Party is split between the Palinites and the Paulians. Indeed, the first Tea Parties, anti-tax like the original, were held by Ron Paul in 2007, and he has influenced nany subsequent developments by his example. As a real libertarian, he has never sought to be a top-down controller of a movement, or a country. Instead, he has put the ideas of libertarianism and Austrian economics in the lead.

Rauch reported on a sociologist who predicted the leaderless structure cannot last, and either the Tea Party would go out of existence, or it would end up having offices, a leader, and a staff in the DC graveyard of principle. A Tea Party activist responded, "He would say that, wouldn't he? He's a traditionalist." Certainly that taming the leaderless opposition is what the regime desperately wants. But the Tea Party should have a leader, said Rauch, so if some nut waves an ugly sign at a rally, the leader can say, "'That man does not represent us,' and ex-communicate him." Such wavers are often agents provocateur, of course. And as Rauch in effect confirmed, the regime  much misses CIA agent Bill Buckley, who controlled the then-monolithic right wing. A dissident? Expel him! And indeed Buckley expelled such ideological tendencies as the Birchers, the Randians, and the Rothbardians. Especially, anyone who questioned the national security state, perpetual cold and hot war, the morality of nuclear war, and  global hegemony for the US government  was to be crushed. Maximum Leader Buckley was successful for a time, but along with the others demonized, Murray Rothbard more than survived, and today his ideas–anti-Fed, anti-empire, anti-power elite, pro-capitalist–shape the Paulian part of the Tea Party. Palin's mentor Bill Kristol, on the other hand, seeks to enforce the CIA-Pentagon line, in the Buckleyite tradition.

In this fight, the election of candidates is largely a distraction. It is our formerly suppressed ideas, inculcated in such men as Murray and Ron, that matter. Many other intellectuals like Hans Hoppe, Walter Block, Tom DiLorenzo, Tom Woods, and David Gordon have taken up the banner. We even have a TV star-intellectual, Andrew Napolitano. With their help, and despite the neocons, the leaderless, non-violent resistance to DC, is roiling the regime. More and more of us are withdrawing our consent, the one deadly,non-violent threat they face. It is the role of LRC to stoke this rebellion. Thanks to all of you who make that possible. And what a great time to be alive! We have much work to do, but so much to look forward to. Fighting the bad guys by changing hearts and minds is not only essential to all we believe in, indeed to the future of our freedom, prosperity, and civilization, it is a heck of a lot of fun. Let's roll.