The Tea Party fused astroturfing with grassroots entrepreneurship into a self-propagating franchise

Evidence

The Tea Party is one of the prime examples of the metamorphosis of protest movements through the revamping of politics in a commercial privatized direction. Not only was the movement largely professionally astroturfed by a few large shadow private organizations, such as Americans for Prosperity, American Majority, the Tea Party Express, and FreedomWorks, but it derived much of its energy on the ground through open encouragement of small-bore entrepreneurs to make money in whatever ways they might imagine off the cascading sequence of rallies, bus tours, self-publication of pamphlets, conferences, disruption of town meetings, and other public gatherings. In a sort of chain-letter Ponzi scheme, or better yet, an Amway franchise, the disgruntled were first financed and regimented through large quasi-corporations, made to feel empowered by encouragement to do the same on a smaller scale with their own venture-capital start-ups, then themselves motivated to recruit others to join the movement. For instance, 41 percent of the booths at the Tea Party convention in Phoenix in February 2011 were manned by for-profit groups; an additional 35 percent were large business interests such as Philip Morris and Exxon Mobil. The top-down direction was thoroughly obscured by the groundswell of profit-making activities. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 908

Categorization

• XREF: Multi-level-marketing structure of political movements connects to Milgrom’s institution design work and to Gamson’s challenge to concepts of political opportunity. — connects to: The Tea Party’s apparent spontaneity was manufactured by networked astroturf organizations — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 131; The Tea Party was a product of engineered state-legitimacy crisis, not grassroots spontaneity — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 950; Local Tea Party groups self-financed through small-scale sales (+5 more)
• SEED: Article angle: the Amwayization of American political protest — how movements now self-fund through selling merchandise to their own members, both left and right.
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that a movement’s energy can be harnessed by converting recruits into franchisees of the movement itself — protest as MLM — is a genuinely novel analytic frame for post-crisis politics.

Broader Connections

• Local Tea Party groups self-financed through small-scale sales #exemplifies (0.85)
• A trading-floor rant launched the Tea Party populist movement. #contradicts (0.80) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 478
• Occupy mirrored the Tea Party’s anti-government populism while ignoring its commercialization of protest #responds-to (0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 909
• Billionaire-backed radical-right networks manipulate politics through clandestine think tanks. #complicates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1768
• Petty-bourgeois factions drove Tea Party and Occupy protests #expands (0.72) — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 188