The Egyptian Tea Party

02-07-2011 • Pajamas Media

Sandmonkey lays out his vision of the way forward in Egypt in his newest post. According to him, the best way forward is to adopt a strategy of getting the Internet-connected youth to take over existing parties and movements from online strongholds. Whether the strategy is workable or not, it is certainly innovative; it represents one of the first actual attempts to exploit the role of modern connectivity in a revolutionary process. “One of the first” and not “the first” because that honor probably belongs to Tea Party USA, which has used online organizing tools to try and take over the Republican Party. Like Sandmonkey’s vision of a leaderless popular revolution, the Tea Party is an example of a political movement that has no rigid organizational structure, no big office building in a great metropolitan area, no television stations. Nancy Pelosi kept looking for the funders of the “Astroturf,” and yet there were none to be found. She could not believe that a real grassroots moveme