Populist Party of America Ethnographic Analysis

Populist Party of America

The Populist Party’s name is somewhat deceptive. One might mistakenly think that this emergent political party is a modern incarnation of the original People’s Party. The Populist Party of America, however, possesses values and heuristics diverging from the norms that underlay America’s first self-acknowledged populist movement. For instance, Populist America is far more libertarian and would never submit to a condition in which government would become the owner of firms situated in the spaces structured by the institutional economy: the encoded legalisms dictating the types of relationships that actors can assume with one another during their participation in the economy. On the other hand, the People’s Party of the 19th century advocated the nationalization of the railroading industry and of the banking industry. Therefore, the Populist Party of America should not be conflated with the advocacies of the 19th century Agrarian Revolt and some of its socialist tendencies.
This is not to say, however, that there are no commonalities. Both the Populist Party of America and the People’s Party conceptualized their political advocacies as advancing the interests of common citizens; a section whose political voice becomes muffled and suppressed by elitist factions in society. The People’s Party saw its antagonist as the “moneyed interests:” Those who manipulated currencies and its paper notes in order to extract profits from the ventures and enterprises of those who actually contributed to the productivity of the economy. This principle lay behind the distinction between “parasites” and “producers.” The Populist Party of America, alternatively, directs its opposition against corporatism, which makes no distinction between “moneyed interests” and other “corporations,” because both are perceived as having a disproportionate influence upon public policy and its administration in American society. The Populist Party of America does not want to nationalize industry; rather it wants the markets in which corporations are situated to be competitive. This would require the decoupling of corporations and the state, and the abandonment of the current economic form, “mercantilism,” in favor of markets that are actually free and competitive. To sum, there is an overarching theme uniting the People’s Party with the Populist Party of America: They both conceptualize the political field in terms of elites and commoners.

Introduction

The Populist Party of America was incepted during 2002 in the Los Angeles area. It was initiated by a former member of the Green Party, Helen Schmidt, and a former Libertarian Party member, Mike Boldin; both of whom were disenchanted with their past political associations. When I became aware of the Populist Party of America, it was in its infancy, existing only as a website with a sparse registry of geographically disconnected individuals who had subscribed to a biweekly newsletter or had paid the required fee to become a member. I have been questioned by other sociologists whether the party had some basis among people who had formed ongoing reciprocities prior to the organization’s construction of a Web presence, or whether the formation of the community was a disembodied phenomenon; a Web based collectivity that was entirely emergent in Web spaces? This is an interesting query because it relates to how the social networking formed upon the Internet differs from social networking that is forged in real spaces; begging the question, are the relationships formed from computer mediated communications of a nature whereby they facilitate the mobilization of social movements? As touched upon in the “Literature Review,” this mobilization is an event that presumably requires Social Capital: A sociological property that is translatable to the levels of trust existing among individuals in a social group. It has been questioned whether CMC can foster Social Capital among social actors, because it is presumed that the solidification of trust requires embodied interaction: face-to-face engagements among the actors who cultivate trust among one another from their successes at undertaking communal projects.
For the time being, however, I will simply add that Boldin had contacts in the Los Angeles area, who were involved in political activism. Boldin was technologically inclined and managed to achieve some publicity through the art of website design and Search Engine Optimization, (SEO): The optimization of websites and their webpages in order to achieve higher placements in the results of search engines for queries including various keywords and phrases for which the website has been optimized. Additionally, Boldin had accumulated enough contributors, authoring materials, for him to publish a steady stream of new and updated contents. These factors precipitated relatively high Search Engine Results Placements, (SERPs): an attribute generative of link referrals from search-engines. I cite these aspects of the early party existence because they sketch out the setting in which the party development unfolded. From its germination, the Populist Party of America was incubated in the virtualism of Web spaces. There was sparse, minimal embodied activism that was conducted in Los Angeles. However, from my understanding, these affairs never resulted in appreciable party growth. The preponderance of efforts consisted of propagating the Party’s platform via the representation obtainable from the Internet and the World Wide Web, (Web).

Populist America Sociopolitical Ideology

It is a leap of faith to surmise that there is such a thing as a party ideology in the context of America history. American party structures can come to envelop multiple sections without ever integrating the diverse groups into unifying systemizations of political belief and interpretation. This is not to say, however, that party politics do not play a role in the deliberative legislative bodies. American politics are rife with extra-democratic institutions – political parties and caucuses are exemplary – which exert pressures, such as party-line voting, upon representatives, who compromise their representativeness when capitulating to the demands of their party bosses. Furthermore, parties –Democrats and Republicans – can be characterized by their rhetoric, which undergoes periodic transformations as the parties attract new constituencies of societal segments. Nevertheless, the Populist Party of America is comparatively minute in size when juxtaposed with the corporatist parties, constituting nothing greater than what is frequently referenced as a “micro-party.” This would lead one to suspect that Populist American would possess a mechanical solidarity; and, subsequently, a significant degree of ideological homogeneity. Such a portrait, however, departs from empirical reality. There are of course thematic congruencies, offering some unity to the individual perspectives forming Populist America. However, these commonalities cannot be stenciled in a surface affording a permanent impression. They are not steadfast rules or principles that have been operationalized. 
I was initially attracted to the group’s loosely constructed agenda: a programme for sociopolitical transformation, which came to be encapsulated under the term, “localism:” a political condition in which state and provincial governments are granted the preponderance of governing powers. In terms that are in accord with an academic register, such a political reordering bares resemblance to “Municipal Libertarianism.” According to Boldin, the Populist Party of America’s political philosophy can be summed:
As far as your dissertation – you’re right on track. Here’s the key statement: “decentralization is seen as a device to empower local political structures in which citizens have expanded influence due to the diminished size and proximity in which they attempt to effect public policy decision-making outcomes. “
Through decentralization, people have a voice. Otherwise, each person is lost in a wilderness, and our only hope is through group rights, group lobbying, and the like – and the interests and rights of the person get more and more diminished over time.
Here’s another thought. The Libertarian party, for example, would want libertarianism throughout the country, and would exercise all power necessary to prevent socialism from arising anywhere. On the other hand, a Socialist Party in power would ensure socialism nationwide around the country – and prevent a libertarianism from arising anywhere too. The same goes for the corporatist parties – pursuing their own interests and keeping out other political ideologies.
Alternatively, though, Populist Party philosophy would allow all these ideologies to flourish, if people wanted them to. If Vermont wants to be [M]marxist, then let them. If New Hampshire wants to be libertarian, let them. etc[.], etc[.], etc. If a structure such as this actually existed, it would be much more unlikely that tyranny would reign supreme. And, if it did in any one area, at least it would be limited in size and scope – in comparison to what we have now….where a single tyrant like Bush can drive the entire nation down the drain.
One thing that’s important, is that we’re not going to sacrifice principle in order to join the system more closely, like the Greens seem to be doing. It would be better for the party to die, than give up or compromise its goals. This is something that will eventually be added in writing to some charter docs….but more on that later.[…]
In contemporary political thought, localism is embodied to some extent by Green and Libertarian platforms. Libertarians object to internationalism, and its constraining impact upon the sovereignty of the democratic nation-state. This logic extends to the American National Government. Accordingly, libertarians desire to transform the Federal Government so that it is as small as possible; only assuming a size large enough for it to provide what states cannot reasonably produce and manage on individual bases, such as a military defense. For this reason, libertarians emphasize the 9th and 10th Amendments of the Constitution, which protect state rights from intrusions committed by the Federal Government. However, their localism is compromised. They insist upon individual property rights and the free-market as overarching, organizing principles used to structure all American social relations. Obviously, such doctrinaire commitment to Liberalism is at odds with local autonomies, which might have developed indigenous values irreconcilable with the normative regime imposed by a Liberal imperiousness. This is not to suggest that Libertarians would compromise their commitment to electoral democracy. Liberalism, on the other hand, in its classical form, was quite apprehensive of democracy, because such political mechanisms could result in the erosion of property rights. Nevertheless, libertarians continue to propagate core tenets of classical liberal ideology. Only, individualism and property rights are alternatively asserted as constitutional fixtures, not as natural laws. Consequently, libertarians constrict democracy in order to protect Liberal values.
Greens, idiomatically, call for the decentralization of federal powers. This statement can entail various significations. Most apparently, decentralization is often translated into electoral reforms, such as the implementation of proportional voting; a measure intended to ensure greater representation to minorities. Such a proposal, presumably, would decentralize polity, because more perspectives would be accounted for in the representative bodies forming government; subsequently, mitigating the effects entailed by hegemonies formed from majority identities. This aspect of the Green ideology is indicative of their commitment to the typified values of the New-left. Proportionate voting is a mechanism conducive to the conditions fostered under a politic that is structured to provide minority identities some influence; thus, expanding the ontology of Liberalism, which only predicates rights and obligations upon the individual in society.
I have come across writings where some Greens have attempted to conceptualize the New-left. Some have argued that the Green Party is a manifestation of the interwoven memberships to historically marginalized social identities that collectively constitute the social meta-movement, the New-left. The arguments they make in support of their conclusion lack soundness. However, if one were to assume the role of a surrogate, an argument could be fabricated: The social networking existing among members of the New-left facilitates the formation of coalitions. These groups have separate agenda. However, on occasion their interests converge on a policy issue; thus inciting those to mobilize only to the extent that they remain preoccupied in tactical deliberations surrounding the specific issue upon which they have converged. Therefore, proponents of the New-left claim that it is a programme for activism that stifles the establishment of doctrinism. Supposedly, coalitional politics will never result in the institutionalization of any of the agendum belonging particular blocs, which form concentrations within the internetworking of the New-left.
The Green Charter is arguably the generator of coalitional politics. This document is exceptional due to its brevity, only enumerating 10 abstract values consented upon by all Greens. Additionally, these values are not concretized in operational definitions. So their boundaries and entailments are intentionally fuzzy; a condition that allows for heterogeneity among the members of the party. Therefore, the Greens bare the same networked type of morphology that is ascribed to the New-left. Therein, lays the intellectual justification for the insistence that there is continuity between the New-left and the Green Party. This might be an appealing scenario, but it does not accurately represent empirical reality. As I tried to demonstrate in the previous chapter, the Greens are immured in the ideology of Pluralism; a cultural condition fostering a social organization that institutionalizes political strata: elites and masses. This division is engrained in the political processes through which public policy is generated. The elites are overwhelmingly empowered with the right to determine policy while the masses – with exception to extraordinary occasions – are not.
Additionally, the Greens embrace an economic market model called “community economics:” A system of reciprocity that would supposedly allow for increased pluralism on the supply-side of the economy. According to Green theorists, this not only results in a condition where a greater percentage of the population owns the modes of production; additionally, it leads to a state in which the types of production are diversified. In other words, the tendency of free-markets to enter into stages of industrial consolidation – during which an oligarchy emerges, exacerbating the standardization of productive processes – will be prevented through regulatory apparatuses; thus, ensuring more heterogeneity among producers.
Although the Green philosophy, prima facie, is more appealing than the Liberalism propagated in the discourse emanating from the Libertarians; it is imperious in temperament, just the same. This intrusiveness can assume two forms: Firstly, the Greens neglect to account for the fact that the installment of community economics requires increased Federal interdictions in the affairs of local populations. Secondly, the Greens incorporate universally applicable regulations intended to prohibit environmental destruction; most of which emanate from their value of “ecological wisdom.” In respect to the latter of the two propositions, it might well be desirable to enact and enforce environmental legislation. However, it would be a policy instituted and imposed upon all those falling within the stretches of the Federal Government and would leave little room for difference and diversity. All of the regulations that the Greens would enact in pursuit of diversification would paradoxically entail the homogenization of the population under the regime intended to promote diversity. Theoretically, Libertarians can support environmentalism. However, it is premised upon property rights. If a polluter damages other peoples’ property, then he or she can be subject to tort litigation. Unfortunately, without the burdensome evidence needed for a court ordered injunction, environmental issues can only be treated, within this framework, on a post hoc basis.
The Populist Party of America proffered the notion of localism in order to resolve some of the contradictions embodied by both the Greens and the Libertarians. According to the Populist Party of America philosophy, “decentralization:” a lexicon that is sometimes idiomatic in the Populist America discourse for “localism” – amounts to greater personal freedom because of the diversification of geographic and placeless-cybernetic environments. This pluralistic governing fosters a condition assuming more of a confederated morphology than America’s current state of politic; what is in some vernaculars referenced as “federalism.” However, the term, “federalism,” is misleading because the semantics it connotes are contested. As noted, it is used to denote the current configuration of American politics, which, has become highly centralized with minimal political empowerment deferred to states or to provincial polities. This fits in with the conventional, counterrevolutionary view of American politics. There are two national parties that embody a Plurality of interests at any point in time. Anyone who dares question the two-party status quo is impetuously dismissed as a “paranoid” crackpot, (Hofstadter, R. (1964).
Nevertheless, “federalism” can also refer to an idealized state of American politics; one that is highly decentralized; or, to interpret the lexicon according to Scalia juridical originalism, a federal system of government. The latter of these two uses is often employed by fringe libertarian elements, such as Western militia. It is, however, additionally the meaning given to the term during its usages by Populist America. To define Populist America’s use of “decentralization,” it can denote either a state-of-affairs or a process that enacts the conditions embedded in the decentralized state-of-affairs. To extrapolate, the concept refers to a state that is always undergoing actualization, so the process, itself, is the state under development. If one was to say that the political federation had been decentralized would indicate that it has entered into a state of stasis; a condition wherein the dynamism of local democracy would cease to exist, and one would no longer be free to explore evolving forms of life. 
The immediate objection to be raised can be paraphrased as follows: Such a political model naively assumes power to be concentrated under a central authority, such as monarch. Foucault has demonstrated that the monarch has been “decapitated;” enacting a condition where power is no longer centralized; but, instead, assumes a capillary form, flowing throughout all extremities of society, pervading all aspects of life in Modernity. It is through the subterranean political operations conducted by the Truth-makers in civil society that the American people are disciplined according to a behavioral regime, rendering them compliant to the demands emanating from the modes of production and consumption.
These sub-political disciplinarians – i.e., social workers, grade school teachers, guidance counselors; all of the auxiliary professions attached to criminal justice; and all of the practitioners belonging to the medical-industrial-complex, who problematize deviancy as symptomatic of pathology – manufacture the subjectivities of the population. They are in the business of industrializing bodies, shaping and programming them to serve as contributors to the American systemization of life. The bodies are disposed to seek pleasures incited from the incidents intertwined with the life-processes defined by the system: an organization of social relationships, manifesting domination, marginalization, and subjugation; all of which are operations of power, according to Foucault.
According to Populist America, in contravention to the subterranean political structures that pervade the nation-state, federal programs will be fractured, if not demolished. Nationalized education would be dismantled, along with the entailing ideological homogeneity that it cultivates among the youth who are subjected to the standards of its curriculum. Local enclaves would be free to emphasize histories constructed from narratives stemming from their unique standpoint within the American experience. All of the quasi-political apparatuses intruding into the spaces of civil society – translucent, extra-democratic appendages of governmentalism – will be decentralized along state and provincial boundaries. Professional societies will no longer be empowered by the statutes stipulated by centralized government. The AMA will no longer exist as a state legitimized cartel. Municipalities will usurp power from larger, less immediate political establishments, protecting provincialism from the imperiousness of sociopolitical movements disguising themselves as universalistic; i.e., cultural conservatism or progressivism.
Of course, a student of American history will astutely point out that nearly every liberty; every correction of systemic injustice has been the product of Federal intervention. Indeed, the 10th Amendment of the Constitution has been the legal recourse of bigots and racial supremacists. State’s Rights have been a rhetorical device legitimizing the continuation of sociopolitical conventions and formalities that marginalize and sometimes terrorize minorities in provincial affairs. In response to this problem, Mike Boldin has often said, “You can vote with your feet.” What he means is that as long as indigenous cultures are extended the flexibility needed for them – not only to participate with other sections falling under the American State – but so they can express themselves through their own sociopolitical constructs, there will be enough social difference in order for one to integrate into a form of life that is appealing.

Forces affecting the Development of Populist America

It was in this ecology, the Web, in which the members of Populist America, during the organization’s formative stages, were situated and in which its contributors were socially and technically engaged. Therefore, they had to develop the heuristics necessary to effectively maneuver and manipulate the objects and actors found within the ecology of the Web. By this, I mean to point out that the people who contributed to the organization, www.PopulistAmerica.com, had to navigate through virtualism, learning to manipulate Web spaces and the objects therein. This entails exposure to living documents and all of the artifacts comprising the ecology of the web. Additionally, one must learn the cultural principles organizing forums in which actors engage in CMC. The web is decentralized. Nevertheless, it is extremely integrated, due to the interconnectedness of its parts. Therefore, I think most would concede that the prognostication of American social fragmentation, resulting from Internet diffusion, amounted to alarmism. The reasoning in support of this hyperbole can be prototyped as follows: The Internet allows for the end-user to personalize his consumption of news-content so that it fits and reinforces his ideological prejudices. Retrospectively, it appears evident that predictions of Balkanization failed to account for the nature of hypertext: a medium that facilitates the Web’s integration, because it allows for additional semantic properties to be attributed to lexicon and expressions, increasing the density of the conceptual networking formed among the objects populating the Web’s ontology.
These higher-order languages provide the Web programmer with artifices serviceable for designating references embodying the functionality of hyperlinks; consequently, forging new types of conceptual associations that are formed between and among Web objects. These relationships within and among documents qualify as both intra-textual and inter-textual; meaning, they can link between objects within the same document, or they can link objects existing in separate documents. Such references can endow the pagination with lateral dimensions. This, in turn, exposes the end-user to a variety of ideological perspectives, because contrarian viewpoints are not only summarized, but, additionally, they are linked to directly. Due to this interconnectedness among the objects belonging to the Web ecology, Populist America’s contributors, who acted upon Web contents or in reaction to Web contents, were exposed to cultural codes extending beyond the organization of Populist America. It was for this reason that Web 2.0 – a topic that is addressed later in this chapter – influenced the ideological perspective of Populist America.
It remains undetermined just what the latent dispositions of hypertext entail in so far as their serviceability in the construction of a distinguishable communicative medium. It has yet to solidify into routine practices forming an aesthetic and communicative discipline that has been modeled in accordance with the objective dispositions – properties belonging to the medium as an object-in-itself – that can be manipulated to have effects that are distinct from other media. At this stage in its development, the Web continues to be handled according to practices that are associated with the conventions for constructing other, forerunning media. Such a treatment of a medium during its initial adoption is predictable. When cinema first emerged it was conceived in terms belonging to the vocabulary of theatre. The camera was envisioned as a device that extended visual access to the stagecraft of drama en mass. The audience could be expanded by reproducing what had transpired on the stage by presenting it, anew, to additional spectators in the form of motion picture.
Therefore, the camera was positioned in front of the stage in order capture the drama narrated through the stagecraft. What resulted was an experience that was sterile, absent of the compelling qualities felt by an audience member, who is situated in the theatre, observing the stagecraft without mediation. The motion picture failed to recreate the projection of hyper-reality in which the audience collectively brackets the externalities to an interpretive frame of analysis that collapses the distinction between stagecraft and our very real and sometimes intimate social interactions and engagements. Here, in this frame of analysis, the drama is experienced as if it were no different than the narratives that are interwoven into our relationships with others. We feel catharsis because we experience theatre within this hyper-reality, in which stagecraft and life converge.
The attempt to cinematically reproduce the catharsis incited through theatre failed because we experience motion picture according to different aesthetic principles. The camera is not a passive observer of events. Even the “objectivity” of documentary is merely an idiom for grammars that are followed when contributing to any and all genres. Instead, it is more effectively understood as the narrator of drama: A discerning agent who focuses upon that which is relevant or salient to the narrative that it is being depicted. Cinematography that actualizes the potential of the medium consists of a director telling a story through the lens of the camera. Through this device – the manipulation of the lens, having it focus upon objects and details; as opposed to a single frame created through a single position resulting in a stream of motion pictures that passively records all that transpires within its scope – the audience vicariously experiences scenes according to various vantage points. Sometimes audiences assume the perspective of a character existing as a constituent part of the unfolding narrative; other times from the exterior of the story, such as the omnificent standpoint held by the director. Resultantly, we can be positioned immanently in the narrative, causing us to empathize with the apprehension and anxiety attributable to a specific character who is placed amidst plot tensions; or we can be positioned not in the scene, but somewhere in liminality, assuming the perspective of a sympathetic – albeit unobtrusive – deific onlooker; a phenomenology resulting from the director’s inducement of dramatic irony, which leads us to dread a character’s looming misfortune; an incident that will occur in the future, and of which the character is unaware.
All of these scenarios are created through techniques specific to cinematography: It involves the directorship, not only of the stagecraft, but of the positioning and the repositioning of the camera, shooting angles from within and from without the setting of the scene as the actors move and speak. The camera can focus upon an expression or a miniscule gesticulation in order to suggest a particular interpretation to the film’s audience. What is significant about these activities is that the camera is not a detached observer: a type of blank slate that impassively records the events that transpire within the frame of its shot. Rather, it is the interpretive agent who dynamically engages in the construction of the narrative that is being cinematically constructed.
Predominately, the Web, as things currently stand, continues to be conceptualized in the vocabularies belonging to preexisting media. For example, the typical webpage is structured in accordance to the pagination organizing the content flow of a scroll. As a result, the text is presented as one continuous page, so the reader must use the mouse or keyboard in order to “scroll” down or up as he peruses its contents. Needless to say, such pagination fails to exploit the potentialities of hypertext. With a variety of markup programming standards, serving as programming artifices, webpages can be designed to afford the end-user with endless varieties of flow patterns that can be actualized as he reads the text. The flow of contents is not unilaterally determined by the author. The structure of the scroll, on the other hand, imposes a two dimensional interface between the reader and the text. The structure of a scroll prohibits the reader from consuming the contents according to a serialization that deviates from the author’s intention.
More sophisticated web designs will attempt to emulate a codex. The contents are organized into pages that fit the screen used by the end-user. Most of these designs will employ sitemap, which serves as a table of contents. The references provided in the table will possess links, allowing the end-user to jump to the beginning of chapters, which are denoted by headings. Additionally, other grammatical definitions can be used in order to designate passages to which hyperlinks connect. Anchors can be placed in order to create the possibility of a link to any point within the flow of contents. Specific lexicon can be bookmarked by the designer, in order to create cross-references and citations. Nevertheless, even the codex fails to capture the full potentiality of the Web as a medium of communication.
It is my contention that the Web’s potential for originality exists not in the final product of authorship, but in the workflow process through which authorship is conducted. The Web is distinctively well-suited for an authorship process that is collaborative. Further, the relationships between and among those who collaborate need not preexist the project itself; meaning, the relationships do not necessarily need to be formed in advance of the project’s initiative. They can be formed during the project, or, in some instances, even after the project has been left to fallow. An example would be open source coding projects that are conducted upon servers, such as Sourceforge.net. The projects can be left unrestricted allowing for new members to voluntarily contribute to the projects, even after a project has remained inactive for a substantial period of time. Additionally, there have been experiments performed using the open source weblog platform, Wordpress. Those interested in devising new collaborative workflow processes have programmed Wordpress themes that facilitate networked collaborative authoring of texts. Contributors can augment the contents through the commenting feature of the Wordpress platform. Others can comment upon comments that are already posted; or, if endowed with administrative privileges, the main bodies of text can be amended or revised by authors elevated to the status of editors. However, such distinctions marked by gradations of administrative privileges are not stressed or encouraged. The relationships formed among contributors are intended not to be vertical, but predominantly lateral. The elevated privileges are a stopgap measure to prevent against malicious spamming or vandalism. The Wikipedia has instituted similar devices to prevent against those who lack the community ethics. In one instance, the Wikipedia had to block IP Addresses that were traceable to Congressional staffers who attempted to litter the pages of the Wikipedia with propaganda and libelous material.
Despite instances, such as political hacks who use platforms such as the Wikipedia for malicious ends, the behavior of those who participate in Wikis overwhelmingly embodies communitarian values, (Cunningham, B. L. a. W. (2001). The ethics, which form the Zeitgeist of the Web, underlie these collaborative initiatives. These projects all value openness and transparency, and, for the most part, they encourage inclusivity formed along horizontal dimensions. Therefore, these values are generative of networked social relationships as opposed to organization that is proto-corporate or hierarchical in character. It is my contention that exposure to this environment had a profound impact upon the development of the Populist America ideology. Remember, the Green Party grew out of a culture that was not entirely separate, but certainly different in crucial respects from the Zeitgeist of the Web. American Leftist thought has been plagued by authoritativeness, which precipitates van guard exceptionalness, leading, in turn, to authoritarianism.
In the case of Populist America, the interface between the social actor and dimensions of the Web ecology resulted in exposure to a greater range of web contents. These additional characteristics of the Web enable intellectual digressions, causing the actor to broaden the range of his deliberations, extending them beyond the expectations formed from the forecasts contemplated when preparing for projects that are intended to be immediately and exhaustively the manifestation of party interests. This infusion of externalities presented a perceptual field loaded with possible tangents for an actor to explore. It is from this interconnectedness that members contributing to the party’s growth were exposed to socializing influences communicating perspectives of knowledge that reflected the values embedded in the Web Zeitgeist.

Politics of Web 2.0

The trick, then, resides in the use of “openness” when generating viable political movements. “Organic” participation is the catalyst to a campaign that is sustainable in the sense that the participants are inclined to continue to support it and it is not resource prohibitive because it can leverage support from grass-root networks comprised of manifold nodes of small donors. The Dean Campaign for the 2004 Democratic Primary was the first notable attempt to build a political movement from the bottom-to-top using the Internet as the communicative catalyst. Rather than an assortment of paid consultants who dictated policy adoptions and their advertisements to the voting public, the process of a platform formation was somewhat of a grass-roots affair. It was through the many dialogical engagements with ordinary supporters that policies came to be prioritized. It raised massive amounts of money by bypassing the professionalized liberalism that had provided the traditional support for the Democratic Party. The Internet was used to tap masses. This is not to say that there was no courtship of elites, but the politicians who did endorse Dean appeared to be of a populist persuasion, such as Tom Harkin.

Conclusion

In terms of Populist America, it decidedly rejected the formation of any esoteric organizational structure, which might eventually require a parliamentarian to decipher. As far as Populist America was concerned, structure was never a preoccupation. Populist America has been and continues to be an organization concerned with networking that is conducted along horizontal dimensions. If one takes notice of Populist America’s website, (http://www.populistamerica.com), he will not find any papers or charters detailing the structure of the party. The party wants to be as horizontal as possible, leaving aside vertical formations for necessities, not for the satisfaction of power fetishes. If one examines the organization of Populist America, he or she will note that if anything it is a confederation, not an integrated structure with vertical strata. Anybody can contribute according to his or her own inclinations without any subscription to doctrines; an aspect that stands in clear contrast with the Green Party, which demands that each of its members embrace the “The Ten Key Values.” Of course, as already stated, these values are loose and flexible, but their mere presence is indicative of a centralizing tendency in the Green Party ideology. There are no formulized doctrines that must be followed in order for one to join Populist America.
This organizational pattern – a will toward lateral growth – should not be confused with a lack of structural imagination. Rather it is conceptually related to the previously explored concept of “localism.” It is an extension of Jefferson’s notion of the “yeomen.” More precisely, it is equivalent to the Athenian Metrioi, Morris (1996). Therefore, Populist America materially embodies what it advocates politically: Free men (and women) standing side by side as self-sufficient equals, joined together by philia; interdependent yet free of one another. It has nothing to do with organizational fidelity, and everything to do with organizational potentiality. The greater the diversification – which is amplified by localism – the broader the prospects are for something more agreeable to one’s living preferences. This is not freer market theory, because it can entail communalism. It is not anarchy, because it can entail statism. It is localism because it allows neither Liberalism nor communalism to achieve universalism. It respects the provincial as long as the provincial does not feign cosmopolitanism.