Contrary to popular opinion, the Tea Party is not dead
Under the headline, “The Tea Party Is Officially Dead. It Was Killed by Partisan Politics,” at Reason.com, Matt Kibbe posits the notion that last week’s Republican spending spree officially killed the Tea Party.
He writes:
The grassroots movement that fought so hard for fiscal sanity in government over the past decade is no more. It was killed off by the very same Washington establishment it sought to overthrow. Its death leaves proponents of limited government with some big questions: What went wrong? And what do we do now?For me, it’s personal. For years, the Tea Party was my life, and I have the the battle scars—and tattoos—to prove it. When I was the President of FreedomWorks, I worked side by side with tens of thousands of citizen activists as a Tea Party organizer, organizing protests and knocking on doors, hoping to topple the Goliath of government. But now the party’s over.
The quasi-conservatives over at the once-conservative website now misnamed The American Conservative joined with Kibbe in writing the Tea Party’s obituary:
Matt Kibbe is absolutely correct that the Tea Party is dead, and the mortician will note that its passing occurred around 5:30 a.m. last Friday morning, when Congress passed its two-year budget deal. That agreement vaporizes the Tea Party’s lone legislative accomplishment, the spending caps that were imposed in 2011; they were raised twice before, but never under a Republican president. It allows for $195 billion in new military spending and $131 billion in new domestic spending over the next two years. Its non-defense discretionary spending significantly surpasses even the amount proposed in 2016 by Barack Obama, who probably thought he was being quixotic. It gives the defense establishment more money than even the Pentagon wanted, and maintains funding for Planned Parenthood. It is a shameful document that shows once and for all what a sham was all that congressional shadowboxing during the Tea Party’s years of rage.
I beg to differ.
As Kibbe noted, he was president of FreedomWorks during the rise of the Tea Party. But while working “side by side with tens of thousands of citizen activists as a Tea Party organizer, organizing protests and knocking on doors, hoping to topple the Goliath of government” FreedomWorks was one of a number of organizations – Americans for Prosperity is another — seeking to monetize the Tea Party phenomenon for profit and power. Despite protestations to the contrary, organizations like FreedomWorks didn’t help the Tea Party advance the Tea Party agenda of smaller government and lower taxes, it used the Tea Party to advance the agenda of FreedomWorks and its deep-pocketed donors, among them neocons Rupert Murdoch, Charles and David Koch, and crony-capitalist supporting Bradley Foundation, Scaife Foundation, Castle Rock Foundation, Earhart Foundation and Olin Foundation.
Their agenda was not the Tea Party agenda of smaller government and lower taxes. They wanted crony government and more wars. And by co-opting the Tea Party movement they provided fodder for the Left and the mainstream media to demonize Tea Partiers, like in this nonsensical column posted The Huffington Post, and this one that appeared at Salon.com.
What died last Friday morning was what could best be termed as the Institutional Tea Party, which is the professional political apparatus that developed around people like the aforementioned cronies and deep-pocketed faux conservatives, along with charlatans like Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio (both senators voted for the budget bill) – so-called “Tea Party darlings” all.
Contrary to popular opinion, the Tea Party was not a political apparatus and never intended to be from the start. It was an idea – the idea that people at the ground level could exercise their rights under the 1st Amendment, “petition their government,” and bring about change that would shrink government and direct it back to its constitutional parameters.
The Tea Party was mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, blue collar workers and business owners, retirees and veterans, whites and blacks, and old and young, all meeting together to discuss in local forums how to effect change from the ground up by the size of their numbers, the persuasion of their arguments and the power of their ideas. They said the Pledge of Allegiance at meetings, opened them with prayer and then drank coffee and soft drinks. They ate homemade cakes and pies and cookies and discussed the problems they saw in government and what they thought were the best solutions. They started blogs and read blogs started by like-minded others. They opposed TARP-like bailouts of Wall Street and the car industry, socialized medicine, government mandates and government meddling in their daily lives, and weren’t afraid to say so.
The Tea Party did not die last week, nor will it ever. You will find it whenever a group of people get together and discuss the lofty idea of the Founders — that Americans are a unique people who are smart enough and resourceful enough to fend themselves and their brethren if their freedom is protected from politicians and governments.
The Tea Party did not die because ideas never die, and there are still millions of Americans who love their country but despise what the elected class has done to it for their own profit and power. They still say the pledge, open with prayer, and oppose TARP-like bailouts of Wall Street and the car industry, socialized medicine and government mandates and government meddling in their daily lives. They still write their own blogs and read websites like Personal Liberty®. And they still believe that someday, somehow, sanity will return to Washington.
And they’re still meeting together in local forums and discussing the same problems because the people put in office by the people who co-opted their movement failed them. But that doesn’t make their concerns any less valid or their movement less alive.
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