Remember when the Tsunami hit Thailand a few years ago? We saw tragic images of children playing on the beach just moments before the wave overcame and engulfed them. With regards to the Tea Party movement and politics in America, the elite media and the establishment political class (both Democrat and Republican) remind me of those children.
So we see Democrat strategists crafting messages for political gain. We see the likes of Karl Rove and Charles Krauthammer wringing their hands over who will hold committee chairmanships in the Senate.
Such chitter chatter reminds me of those poor children who may have been arguing over who gets to place the flag on the top of the sand castle not realizing that 1/4 mile off shore there was a 15 foot wall of water that was about to completely overwhelm them. And then they wonder why we don’t pay them any mind.
The establishment is a power hoarding structure. It uses Creativity and Information (CI). It will try to consolidate its power as it crashes. The tea party is a power distributing structure. It uses Creativity, Information and Communication. It will continue to expand. The Communication component is both its method and message to distribute power.
That is not the only difference. The CI political establishment is centralized while the tea party is decentralized. This is a critical difference when it comes to robustness and power. See CIC and Complexity: The Tea Party as a Complex System.
The establishment and the tea party manifest their impacts on different scales. A complex system like the tea party operates on the individual person level but effects of the system can occur at a much higher level. This is called emergence. Emergent properties are not visible at lower scale (i.e. by looking at individual members of the tea party) and are not predictable by looking at the members of a system. Examples of an unexpected and unpredictable emergent property include the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts and the primary losses of eight national office incumbents. I expect the results of November 2 will also be surprising.
More than November 2, I expect incumbent losses to accelerate in 2012 and 2014. Even before the 2012 election, expect to see pro-term limit activism increase. Pay attention to 10th amendment movements next year, especially in the context of the Health Care lawsuit. Finally, I believe we will see the tea party adopted in other countries as the effectiveness, impact and message are demonstrated.
The political and media elites will continue to be confounded by tea party success because they view things through a CI lens and seek answers at the wrong scale. That will not change until they understand that the tea party structure is decentralized power distributor.