Here's a rule of thumb I routinely use: If one person screws up, then they're very likely at fault. If hundreds of people screw up, then the system or situation they're a part of is very likely at fault.
Now, there are obviously plenty of situations that are genuinely ambiguous, or that are over-determined, where you can readily find both individual and systemic factors to blame. (And, of course, there are intermediate levels of analysis--the small group, the institution, etc. So the individual/system dichotomy I develop below needs to be taken as a deliberately simplified first-order approximation.) But even in such situations, it can save you a whole lot of grief to step back and try to see which broad explanation is likely to yield the biggest immediate payoff in terms of changing the direction of things.
That's why I can share a great deal of frustration with individual politicians--even including members of the Progressive Caucus, for example, without necessarily focusing my blame on them.
Now, here's the thing: It's my belief that the period of time in which the blogosphere formed was a period when both sorts of explanations/approaches were much more evenly balanced. This was true for a variety of reasons, but the best way to summarize was to say that things were in a massive state of flux and uncertainty, typified in the realm of physics by what happens with common forms of phase transition:
A phase transition is the transformation of a thermodynamic system from one phase or state of matter to another.
A phase of a thermodynamic system and the states of matter have essentially uniform physical properties. During a phase transition of a given medium certain properties of the medium change, often discontinuously, as a result of some external condition, such as temperature, pressure, and others. For example, a liquid may become gas upon heating to the boiling point, resulting in an abrupt change in volume. The measurement of the external conditions at which the transformation occurs, is termed as the phase transition point.
Phase transitions are common occurrences observed in nature and many engineering techniques exploit certain types of phase transition.
The term is most commonly used to describe transitions between solid, liquid and gaseous states of matter, in rare cases including plasma.
During a phase transition, what's most important is the change in the energy state of the entire system: keep the heat on, and the water will turn to water vapor: it will boil. But at the same time, it needs specific places where the boiling process concentrates, as anyone knows who's watched water boil in a glass container. Likewise, when water vapor condenses into water, as dew forms in the morning, it does so at specific points, rather than everywhere equally at once. Because we have individual agency, at times in which social/political systems are transitioning like this, the actions we take to help create the change both "generate the heat" to alter the entire system, and specifically direct it toward particular condensation or boiling points--we bring particular pressure to bear on individuals and specific situations.
I don't mean to slime the slime molds by comparing them to the GOP. It's nothing personal, you see. It's just a mathematical thing. There are actually two different types of slime molds, plasmodial slime molds and celluclar ones. It's the cellular ones I'm referring to here. The live most of their lives as individual unicellular organisms, but they assemble themselves into a cluster that acts as a single organism, in response to a chemical secretion.
It's that transition--from one form to another, much like the phase transitions from solid to liquid or liquid to gas--that's what slime molds have in common with the GOP. Only instead of the chemical secretion bringing them all together into one super-organism, it's the other way around: they're secreting chemicals like there's no tomorrow, and flying off in all directions at once. It's almost as if they were a slime mold living backwards through time.
As the Democratic Party is not only growing in size, and growing more coherent in its policy, but also attracting increasing support from independents and Republicans, the exact opposite is happening to the GOP. It's not just a matter of religious conservatives vs. "free market" types, much less conservatives vs. moderates (both of them!) It's much worse than that. Like a disintegrating slime mold, they are falling apart into separate lumps--the Sarah Palin lump, the (rather tiny) not-Joe-the-not-Plumber lump, the always-reincarnating Newt Gingrich lump, the (possibly now extinct) Bobby Jindal lump, the (utterly hilarious) Michael Steele lump, and of course, the Rush Limbaugh ubber-lump.
STATE BLOGS
I don't mean to slime the slime molds by comparing them to the GOP. It's nothing personal, you see. It's just a mathematical thing. There are actually two different types of slime molds, plasmodial slime molds and celluclar ones. It's the cellular ones I'm referring to here. The live most of their lives as individual unicellular organisms, but they assemble themselves into a cluster that acts as a single organism, in response to a chemical secretion.