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Forming a national political party in the United States is no small undertaking. Over the generations, the major parties have implemented all manner of obstacles that up and coming parties must overcome, and in recent decades the Federal Election Commission has erected others. At the state level the obstacles are centered mainly around expensive ballot access provisions, while at the Federal level the obstacles are tied to contributions and spending on “Federal election activities.” Any political parties with aspirations beyond the local level live or die by the finesse they are able to bring to bear circumventing these obstacles. 

Historically, the trajectory of growth for a political party has not only been constrained by legal obstacles, but also by the same natural obstacles that have constrained other human organizational enterprises: time, distance, and the costs inherent in transforming the knowledge and creativity of individual human beings into a collective productive endeavor. The truth is, organizing an effective political party in the United States would be hard enough even if the major political parties hadn’t managed to largely pull the ladder up behind them.

But time has a way of passing, and things have a way of changing. Twenty years ago a popular leftist slogan declared that freedom of the press was only meaningful to those wealthy enough to own one—a printing press, that is. But today, in the age of the internet, anyone who wants to can walk into a public library and publish anything they please via HTTP on a service like Blogger or LiveJournal and have their publication immediately accessible by millions around the world with a click of a mouse, at no cost to themselves. Originally conceived as a computer networking architecture for facilitating communication between government and university researchers, the internet has now become a high-quality ubiquitous super-medium within which new modes of social interaction and even new cultures have sprung. 

It was just a matter of time before someone tried to organize an internet-based political party, so be it: the internet is the rock upon which the American liberal capitalist majority shall build a new party. We shall leverage its virtually cost-free communications to sail above as many of the formal legal obstacles to party formation as possible, and defer the costs those obstacles impose as we strengthen. We will short-circuit the old linear process of grassroots begetting local party begetting state party begetting national party; we will instead chart a new trajectory of concurrent development for local, state and national organizations. We will leverage the one-to-many communication capabilities of websites and mailing lists, the many-to-many capabilities of blogs, newsgroups and online forums, and the one-to-one capabilities of email to allow “virtual” party organizations to spontaneously form, and then go analog, one by one, as they become strong enough to field serious candidates. Dynamism begets dynamism. LiberalCapitalist.com is just the start.