Solving The Riddle of the Tea Party

It’s taken me a long time to wrap my head around the Tea Party. What had me confused was the strangely contradictory messages it seems to keep sending. It wasn’t until I realized that there are two “Tea Parties” (one real, one fake) that all the pieces began to fall into place. And now that I understand what’s going on, I can firmly say that the Republican leadership/establishment is doomed, the Democrats are about to become a permanent minority, and the country is undergoing a seismic shift that will reshape our politics. . . and not everyone is going to like it.

Let’s start with the real Tea Party. When I’ve spoken with actual Tea Party people and I watched their responses to events, a clear pattern began to emerge. These people are largely new to politics and they come from across the political spectrum. They are bound together by a common set of beliefs that they feel is no longer represented in Washington: smaller government, fiscal sanity, an end to interest group politics and corruption, and the replacement of ideology with common sense principles. And most importantly, they are serious about remaking the country to reflect these views, i.e. they have no interest in being a mere protest movement. Indeed, they have set goals and then methodically gone about learning how to achieve those goals.

Moreover, unlike other interest groups, these people are not interested in power, money, fame or political theater. They resent celebrity, which they see as not serious, and anyone who tries to exploit them. Indeed, they disdain leaders entirely. We know this from several facts. First, they are loosely organized with no chain of command, an unheard of structure for a political movement. Secondly, they’ve refused to anoint a leader; indeed they reacted angrily whenever anyone tried to claim the mantle of Tea Party leader. Third, they’ve set about doing the kind of work that doesn’t require a leader. In other words, rather than rushing to the Jones campaign and demanding that Jones be made President so (s)he can impose the Tea Party agenda, they’ve set about infiltrating the Republican Party from the ground up and doing whatever they can individually to fix whatever they can reach. They are in essence a million do-it-yourselfers who have decided to renovate their portion of our political system.

All of this adds up to something fascinating and truly rare in human history: a spontaneous popular movement. Popular movements occur when a critical mass of people suddenly all get the same idea AND choose to act upon it. These are really rare and really powerful. In fact, the only ones I can think of are the Civil Rights Movement, the abolitionist movement, the fall of Eastern European communism, the French Revolution, and the creation of Protestantism.

What separates these from the way societal change normally happens historically is that most change is the result of a determined group of leaders seeking to impose change upon the population from the top down. Examples of this range from the Communist Revolution to the Inquisition to the American Revolution. By comparison, a popular movement is based on a shared set of ideas and tends to be leaderless, meaning that the movement draws its momentum and goals from the collective beliefs of its participants and it spreads person to person until it simply overwhelms the old way of doing things from the bottom up. This makes these movements impossible to combat and much more permanent because the change happens in the very belief system of the population. For example, the Civil Right Movement didn’t just make discrimination illegal, it changed the culture so that people began to view discrimination as wrong and thus turned against the practice whether or not it remained legal. Moreover, you can’t stop a popular movement by discrediting its “leaders” because they aren’t what drives the movement; they are in fact irrelevant to it.

If this is an accurate assessment of the Tea Party, and I think it is, then the future looks like this: the Tea Party represents a permanent major realignment in American thinking, from which a new Republican Party will emerge as thousands of Tea Party people flood the GOP and instill their values in it. I understand this is already quietly happening. This will take some time, but it is inevitable, and its completion will be marked by a purge of the leadership.

When completed, the New Republican Party will advocate (1) smaller government, (2) fiscal sanity, (3) an end to government-sponsored privilege, and (4) an end to the party’s cozy relationship with lobbyists. This means an end to the relationship with K-Street and Big Business. The New Republican Party also will place a lower priority on social issues and likely won’t be as ideologically strident, which probably means a rocky relationship with the Religious Right, though the two groups clearly share some views, i.e. ending government funding of abortion. (As an aside, don’t confuse the Tea Party with the Libertarians on either social or economic issues; the Tea Party is not anti-government so much as it favors a humbler government, and it’s not libertine by any stretch.)

As a result of these changes, I would envision the establishment wing leaving the party. In their place, I would look for conservative Democrats, who are finding themselves unwelcome in the increasingly far left Democratic Party, to join this New Republican Party. This should produce a strong, lasting majority.

So what took me so long to figure this out? It’s this second “Tea Party” I mentioned, which had me confused just as it’s blinded the establishment to the true nature of the real Tea Party. What the establishment sees as the “Tea Party” is a group of opportunists who spend their time trying to get headlines. These people are political and celebrity opportunists, lobbyists, armchair revolutionaries, and establishment conservatives looking to hijack political muscle. These are the people who were for the bridge to nowhere before they found it brought them more celebrity to be against it, who charged fees to speak at Tea Party events, who disclaimed leadership of the Tea Party while trying to become its national spokesman, who formed alleged-Tea Party groups using lobbyist money and put lobbyists on their board of directors, who claimed to support the Tea Party (after attacking it) while trying to redefine it to fit their own ideologies. These people are a rogues gallery of bogus-outsiders who use victimology and conspiracy theories to build a cult of personality, and who skillfully exploit a symbiotic relationship with the media to further their own fame and fortune. These people have nothing to do with the real Tea Party and are merely a distraction to a movement that does not need them.

I know some of you won’t accept this fact, but it’s true. The Tea Party has no leaders because it is not a movement that is amenable to leadership -- it is not a cult of personality sitting at home waiting for the right politician to lead it to the promised land. It is, instead, a million average people all struck by the same idea at the same time who are going quietly about achieving their individual goals. They've learned that they cannot rely on politicians to change the system, so they’ve decided to change it themselves.

Thus, put your faith in a Palin, a Bachmann, a Beck, an Armey at your own risk, for they don’t represent what is really going on. For that, put your faith in a BevfromNYC or a PittsburghEnigma and a million others like them. . . they’re the ones who are changing the world.