NPR: “Who Is The Tea Party? There’s No Short Answer.”

Plus, how the Tea Party organizes without leaders.

In American politics, radical decentralization has never been tried on so large a scale. Tea party activists believe that their hivelike, “organized but not organized” (as one calls it) structure is their signal innovation and secret weapon, the key to outlasting and outmaneuvering traditional political organizations and interest groups. They intend to rewrite the rule book for political organizing, turning decades of established practice upside down. If they succeed, or even half succeed, the tea party’s most important legacy may be organizational, not political.

What an amazing phenomenon. Someone should write a book on it.

It’s like there’s some kind of a Third Great Awakening going on. . . .