Tea Party Time: The Making of a Political Uprising

A conservative revolt is shaking up the Republican Party nationwide. But are Democrats next?

By Michael Scherer Thursday, Sept. 16, 2010
    • Joshua Lott / Reuters

    People hold signboards during a "tea party" protest in Flagstaff, Arizona August 31, 2009. Organizers say the event is an effort to work against members of Congress who voted for higher spending and taxes. The midterms are still two months away, but already a lot of Tea Partiers are looking beyond the elections and working out where to go from here. Picture taken August 31, 2009.

    (2 of 3)

    The Backlash Against Elites
    So far, the primary victories by Tea Party candidates like O'Donnell have exploited one of the biggest open secrets of American politics. The two major parties, for all their power to shape the national agenda, have seemed to care too much about retaining their power. Off-year primary elections tend to turn out just a fraction of the electorate, making establishment candidates vulnerable to even small popular movements.

    In Delaware, O'Donnell defeated Mike Castle, a titan of state politics with a war chest of $2.6 million, more than 40 years of government service and statewide favorability ratings over 60%. Castle polled well ahead of Democrat Chris Coons even as O'Donnell polled far behind. Yet O'Donnell was able to win with just 30,000 voters at the polls, or about 3% of the state's residents. It was the same in Alaska, where Joe Miller ousted Lisa Murkowski with little more than 55,000 votes, and in Nevada, where Sharron Angle won with just 70,000. These are not the sort of numbers that cause Democratic fainting spells, but they have proved heart-stopping for Republicans. "The GOP is very worried. It's very hard to deal with the Tea Party movement," explains James Thurber, head of American University's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies. "It's like fighting guerrilla warfare with them."

    In the past, state and national parties have dealt with such insurrections by shifting their endorsements and donations to candidates who can win general elections. But like all other forms of authority — the press, the banks, the corporate leadership — the nation's political leaders are embroiled in their own crises of legitimacy. The tools that were once useful in thwarting outsider candidates have become further expressions of rejected authority.

    If anything, the new authorities in Republican politics are rebels such as Sarah Palin, Senator Jim DeMint and Representative Ron Paul, who define themselves as lonely agents of change fighting impossibly large institutional powers. Conservative media heroes Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have been careful not to embrace the GOP in any formal way. On a recent radio show, Limbaugh announced that he was replacing the Buckley Rule, which advised Republicans to vote for the conservative candidate with the best chance to win in a general election, with the Limbaugh Rule, which says vote for the person furthest to the right. The fact that William F. Buckley Jr. is no longer an icon for conservatives may be the clearest sign yet that the authorities of old have collapsed.

    On the night of O'Donnell's victory, former White House senior adviser Karl Rove appeared on Fox News, obviously annoyed that the wisdom of party elders about O'Donnell's checkered personal financial history had been ignored. "It does conservatives little good to support candidates who, while they may be conservative in their public statements, do not evince the characteristics of rectitude, truthfulness and sincerity and character the voters are looking for," he said of O'Donnell, attempting to preach to the choir. The next morning on the same network, Palin demonstrated where the real power lies by dismissing Rove's comments as the musings of "expert politicos." "Bless his heart," she said of Rove. "We love our friends there in the machine ... I say, 'Buck up.'"

    Rove was himself an indirect beneficiary of the last great wave of popular revolt within the Republican Party, which more than anything else has provided the framework for the Tea Party. The Goldwater revolt of 1964 ended in a historic defeat against Lyndon Johnson. But while it appeared that LBJ's overwhelming win left no survivors, Goldwater's run planted the seeds of an ideological revival that revolutionized Republicanism — and American politics — for the next 40 years. The losing 1964 campaign led just two years later to the election of Ronald Reagan as governor of California, presaging his presidency and reinvigorating the College Republican organization that gave Rove and much of the current GOP leadership in Washington its start in politics.

    3. 1
    4. 2
    5. 3