The Tea Party movement is the fifth major wave of immigration
into the modern Republican Party since World War II. It has brought
Americans who had never been politically active to the forefront of
the political fight against the Obama administration’s agenda and
into Republican primaries as voters, and in some cases, as
candidates. The Tea Party movement became the party of opposition
and then grafted itself to the backbone of the modern Republican
Party as it approached the 2010 elections.
The first major wave of individuals and energy to join the
modern Republican Party flowed from the Goldwater campaigns to
defeat Nelson Rockefeller for the GOP presidential nomination of
1964. The second wave was the Religious Right movement of Southern
Evangelicals and conservative Catholics and Orthodox Jews that
coalesced in 1978-1980, joining the movement that helped elect
Ronald Reagan. The third wave flowed from the activists who became
politicized through the presidential campaign of Pat Robertson in
1988 and then entered state and local GOP politics. The fourth wave
was the legions of Ron Paul activists flooding the 2008
presidential campaign with youth, energy, and an ability to put the
Internet to work for liberty.
Each wave has strengthened the modern Republican Party. Each
brought new voters and talent, and increased the numbers of those
not content with voting once every two or four years, but willing
to commit themselves to building the Republican Party and its
allied structures day in and day out.
And yet each wave has been met by skeptics within the Republican
Party worried that the newcomers were problematic — regarding them
as “not quite our sort” or even too “radical” or “extreme.” The
helpful establishment left chimed in each time, warning that the
visibly growing Republican Party was, in fact, weakened, because
the new activists would push the party too far to the right to win
elections.
One understands why the left would warn Republicans against
fortifying their ranks with new waves of conservative
activists.
Conversely, it is always odd to watch Republican Party loyalists
— the establishment theoretically responsible for expanding the
party — resist the integration of each new wave of activism. Local
country party chairs comfortable with monthly meetings of the
usual, familiar, and few local Republican volunteers reacted
negatively to discovering their sleepy meetings overrun by dozens
of new recruits full of energy, direction, and a (seemingly
irrational) desire to replace the sleepy local leadership.
One notes that Wal-Mart is pleased when their parking lots are
filled by new customers. The store managers do not complain about
all the annoying new customers they don’t recognize—and who may
dress differently — coming into the store and messing up the
inventory by buying so much stuff that had not been purchased
before. In the real world, new customers are a sign of success.
Each wave of new activists has had to overcome the Republican
Party’s long tradition of looking askance at newcomers rocking the
boat — and a decade later those rookies will themselves wonder
deeply whether the newest Republicans wish to vote for our
candidates for “the right reasons.”
IN THE FIRST wave, the Goldwater campaigns of 1964 — primary
and general — attracted first-time Republican voters into the
party and to political activism. It also formally marked the
culmination of the long struggle to turn the Lincoln Republican
party — a regional party of the North and Midwest without
particular ideology—into a national Party based on conservative
principles.
Phyllis Schlafly views the Goldwater movement as one occurring
mostly within the existing Republican Party. Yet her book, A
Choice Not an Echo, which began with an ambitious printing of
25,000 and which Republicans were instructed to send to their GOP
delegates to warn them against the Eastern establishment and
“Rockefeller Republicans,” eventually sold three million copies,
attracting many to the Republican Party for the first time. Lee
Edwards, the author of the biography Goldwater: The Man Who
Made a Revolution, argues that the campaign and Goldwater’s
personal example introduced the Republican Party to a new
generation and to voters in states that had no functioning
Republican Party (almost the entire South), and created a cadre of
Republican leaders that would drive the party to the right for the
next 40 years.
The 1970s brought new conservatives to the Republican Party: the
so-called “Religious Right.” There were four streams. First, the
individuals and structures created by Phyllis Schlafly and her
Eagle Forum and the Stop ERA campaign, which viewed feminism as an
attack on traditional families and a studied insult to mothers who
took the time to raise their families. Phyllis points out that many
of her best activists were not originally Republicans, but they
became fixtures in Republican Party politics for decades. A second
stream were groups like the Moral Majority, motivated by the Carter
administration’s attacks on the tax status of Christian private
schools (asserting that they were all efforts to flee racial
integration) and FCC challenges to Christian radio stations based
on the “Fairness Doctrine.” This movement was largely Evangelical
Protestant. Big-city ethnic Catholics began, at the same time, to
leave the Democratic Party because of its enthusiasm for
taxpayer-subsidized abortion. And lastly, the home-school movement:
in the 1950s, a largely left-of-center movement of those who felt
the school system too right wing, but now increasingly driven by
families who feared the hard left/secular drive in many public
schools. They were joined by many parents who noticed the
government school monopolies were not actually providing an
education. Mike Farris formed the Home School Legal Defense Fund
and fought teachers unions in 50 states, winning the legal right to
home school for a constituency that is now two percent of the
population. The home school movement provides real manpower in
politics through Generation Joshua.
There were figures in the Republican Party who believed the
addition of traditional values conservatives would split the GOP in
two. They failed to realize that the homeschoolers, defenders of
Christian radio stations and Christian private schools, and
opponents of government promotion of secular humanism through
public schools and grants to “community organizers” simply wished
to be left alone. Economic conservatives defended their economic
livelihoods. The Religious Right’s non-negotiable demand was to be
left alone to raise their families and live their faith.
A distinct third wave came in 1988, when the Rev. Pat Robertson
ran for president, drawing on the Pentecostal movement to build a
donor base of more than 320,000 committed supporters, and won the
Iowa Caucus through the strength of his volunteer network. George
H.W. Bush won the primary, but it was Robertson who was to have the
longer run influence on the modern Republican Party after he took
his activist base and, with Ralph Reed, built the Christian
Coalition to 2 million members. Robertson exhorted his supporters
from his “failed” presidential campaign to join the ranks of the
Republican Party—not simply as voters but as local and state party
leaders. Within three years, some 17 states were run or greatly
influenced by his legions.
One can argue whether the Perot voters were the storm-petrels of
the later Tea Party movement. Certainly the Perot candidacies of
1992 and 1996 were made possible only by the decision by George H.
W. Bush to break his “read my lips” pledge to oppose tax hikes.
Bush had an otherwise successful presidency, managing the collapse
of the Soviet Empire without a great deal of blood on the floor and
evicting Iraq from Kuwait without getting stuck occupying the place
for a generation. No tax hike, no Perot. Still, the Perot
phenomenon showed a willingness of 19 percent of the electorate to
walk away from a Republican Party not committed to focusing on
limited government.
The next wave came from the 2008 Ron Paul presidential campaign,
which was always a more successful political movement than
campaign. Paul raised more than $34 million from individual
contributors. Every Republican event had more Ron Paul bumper
stickers, posters, and visible volunteers than all the other
candidates combined. McCain’s fatal error was endorsing the Bush
TARP bailout, but he also erred in not enlisting the Paul
supporters in his campaign. Indeed, Ron Paul had his own competing
convention in Minneapolis in August 2008, attended by more than
12,000 very loud and energetic supporters who’d traveled on their
own dime to their own convention. These activists continue their
engagement through the work of the Campaign for Liberty (shades of
Eagle Forum and the Christian Coalition), and their power can be
seen in Rand Paul’s crushing victory in Kentucky’s GOP primary, the
defeat of Nevada’s Sue Lowden — blamed for keeping Ron Paul
supporters out of the GOP convention — and the more than 300
co-sponsors in a Democrat-controlled Congress for their legislation
to audit the Fed.
THE TEA PARTY is the latest wave of new energy and activism and
voters into the Republican Party. Tea Partiers are best understood
as Americans who had been too busy running normal lives to focus on
politics but who became, in early 2009, terrified by the
overspending in Washington that they saw threatening the economy
and the republic.
The Tea Party avoided the dangers of Caesarism, or Perotism, by
refusing to name a pope or king or spokesman. Consequently, it
cannot be beheaded by the establishment media — who thought they
could do this by attacking Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sarah
Palin.
Conservatives were spared certain disaster when the Tea Party
movement refused to create a third party that could have split the
Center-Right vote in 50 states and created a permanent left-wing
majority in the House and Senate. Historians will wonder at how
close we came to losing everything.
And, by creating the movement that will vote against
overspending, the Tea Party movement completes the Center-Right
coalition. Already there were identifiable structures and groups
that would abandon the Republican Party if it raised taxes,
supported gun control, attacked parental choice in education, or
threatened religious liberty…and now there is a large and visible
group that will leave the room if “spend too much” — the George W.
Bush disease — rears its head again.
The Tea Party movement has proved it strengthens the
Center-Right. We have seen its turnout for public rallies. We
detect its numbers in the polling data. And, with its active
participation within the Republican Party primaries, it has helped
nominate candidates that are, with a few possible exceptions, both
more Reaganite and more electable.
In contrast to the observation of the results of Stalin’s purge
trials where it was said there would now be fewer, but better,
communists, the Tea Party activism in Republican primaries and the
November 2 election will result in more and better Reagan
Republicans.
