Crazy on the March: The Tea Party Takes Over the Republican Party

The Tea Party’s ideas are traditional conservative wine served in angrier extremist bottles. They believe the same things that have dominated the American Right since (at least) the Reagan Revolution: a loathing of strong federal government and the desire to curtail—if not eradicate—the social benefits provided by the welfare state; a nativist hostility toward minorities; a strong belief in American exceptionalism; distrust and cultural hostility toward academic “elites” and the promotion of anti-intellectualism and pseudo-science (climate change denial, intelligent design); an embrace of Evangelism as a framework for social and intellectual values; nostalgia for the (whitewashed) post-World War II Greatest Generation; and a lionizing of demagogic leaders (for the Tea Party, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin) who mask their own wealth and corporate sponsors with ersatz populism.
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But most miss the actual political significance of the movement itself.

When trying to locate the place of the Tea Party in American politics, focusing on its rhetoric can be misleading. When some Tea Partiers say that they oppose the Republican Party in addition to the Democrats, they mean a particular kind of Republican Party. And when Tea Partiers claim to be anti-incumbent, they mean a particular kind of incumbent (after all, there is wide support for Sarah Palin, who is not a political amateur).

In fact, the Tea Party is made up entirely of conservatives. Its real political significance lies not in its opposition to Democratic politics, but in what it is doing to the Republican Party. It is waging an internal revolt against the Republican establishment, which is perceived as having betrayed conservative ideology.

The origins of the movement precede the rise of Obama and his hated agenda. During the Bush years, American media was largely focused on the widespread domestic and international hatred of George W. Bush among the political Left (and eventually moderates as well), but largely ignored the internal frustration of conservatives within the Republican Party. Rush Limbaugh voiced widespread conservative anger when he railed against big government “RHINOS”—an acronym he coined for “Republicans In Name Only.”
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Thanks to the efforts of the Tea Party, the conservative wing of the Republican Party is now increasingly taking over the party as a whole (with a very small number of exceptions whose future is dark). Tea Party candidates challenging Republican incumbents in primaries across the country are forcing moderates into political exile—either directly, as in the recent Republican Senate primaries in Alaska, Delaware, Kentucky, Utah, Florida, Colorado, Nevada, and Pennsylvania and the primary for the governorship of New York; or indirectly, by forcing long-time moderates to move to the far Right, to conform to the Tea Party’s ideological purity (John McCain of Arizona is but one example); and to adopt its extreme political rhetoric (Newt Gingrich).

The movement is, therefore, not interchangeable with the broader American frustrations with Obama and the Democrats, though it may draw on this wider frustration as a political strategy. It is rather a purely conservative phenomenon. The Tea Party is not, as many of its adherents claim, a reflection of “what the American people want,” but merely what conservative Americans wish to impose on us all.