They may come across as a bizarre collection of cranks and extremists, but the emergence of The Team Party movement has important implications for students of consumer behaviour. It started in early 2009 as a largely spontaneous, grassroots protest against the US government’s $787 billion economic stimulus package and Obama’s healthcare plans. Despite its name, it isn’t really a political party, but more of an informal movement, without leadership, structure, coherent narrative or any real discipline. Writing in The New Yorker, Ben McGrath described how “The amateur nature of the operation was a matter of pride to all those who were taking an active interest, in many cases for the first time in their lives, in the cause of governance.”
In many ways The Tea Party is similar in structure, if not in political philosophy, to the anti-globalisation movement, which also embraces a broad range of (often extreme) causes and interests and operates without defined leadership or formal structure. Both are typical of the type of decentralised networks described by Clay Shirky in his book Here Comes Everybody. Shirky talks about how historically we haven’t been able to achieve organisation without some form of institutional structure, typically one built around a hierarchy of authority. The double meaning of the word ‘organisation’ to describe both the means and the outcome – we need an ‘organisation’ to achieve ‘organisation’ – was beyond challenge. Shirky argues that this traditional way of thinking has been subverted by the emergence of online networks which are “enabling novel forms of collective action, enabling the creation of collaborative groups that are larger and more distributed than at any other time in history. The scope of work that can be done by non institutional groups is a profound challenge to the status quo.”
Social media evangelists, such as Shirky, like to depict this type of collective behaviour as largely a byproduct of new media technologies, but I would argue that we are dealing with something far more profound and deep-rooted. For a start, it isn’t simply confined to the internet. It is all too easy to think of consumer empowerment as simply a web based phenomenon, but something interesting is also happening beyond the world of social media: public meetings are suddenly all the rage. Not content with simply meeting in a virtual capacity, people increasingly see value in coming together as a physical community – from single issue protest groups to neighbourhood action groups and residents’ associations. The trend was spotted by The Times Magazine, with Alan Franks, commenting that: “Just when you thought everything had gone virtual and we’d lost our ability to communicate except by Facebook, back comes the public meeting. Suddenly we’re talking again. There are more open gatherings now than 30 years ago, convened for reasons as diverse as the philosophy of Heidegger and the flowering cherry on the corner of Park Crescent that sadly has to go.”
This is potentially even more interesting than the rise of social media. Becoming involved in an online protest movement is relatively easy – you don’t have to move from the computer or mobile keyboard. As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in a recent article in The New Yorker, which attracted a huge amount of unfair criticism from social media commentators, this form of activism hardly compares with the political battles of the 1960s, when people literally risked their lives in the cause of civil rights. I love the use of the term “slacktivism” to describe this low risk, low involvement form of protest.
In contrast, getting off your backside and attending a public meeting requires a genuine commitment. The people prepared to do this are likely to be the real change agents within society. In the final months of the Labour administration, Hazel Blears – in a thinly disguised attack on Gordon Brown’s clumsy appearance on YouTube – described how using social media was no substitute for real, grassroots political campaigning , such as knocking on doors, setting up a stall in a town centre or debating issues at public meetings. Her comments were seized on by some commentators as an example of political Ludditism, but Blears wasn’t really attacking the party’s use of social media, but making the point that political arguments cannot simply be expressed through digital or virtual channels: sometimes, even the most wired, digitally-savvy politicians have to go face-to-face with the electorate.
This is something that The Tea Party most definitely understands. Its political power and influence has been built on meetings in community halls across the heartland of America, rather than a sophisticated use of new technology, and its use of simple messages – appealing to many Americans’ visceral hatred of central government – has been highly effective at cutting through the media clutter. Obama’s more sober and nuanced analysis of issues may be more appealing to European ears, but the simple rhetoric and tactics deployed by The Tea Party appears to be far more effective in shaping opinion and influencing behaviour.
