How Tea Party Organizes Without Leaders

radical decentralization embodies and expresses tea partiers' mistrust of overcentralized authority, which is the very problem they set out to solve. They worry that external co-option, internal corruption, and gradual calcification -- the viruses they believe ruined Washington -- might in time infect them. Decentralization, they say, is inherently resistant to all three diseases.

It will be interesting to see how much impact they have.

Headless organizations have other problems. They are much better at mobilizing to stop a proposal or person they dislike than at agreeing on an alternative.