Chapter 12: The Sincerest Form of Flattery
As part of my TEA Party +15 celebration I am serializing my 2019 book The Rise and Fall of the TEA Party. A chapter will appear each Tuesday until the 15th anniversary on February 27.
“The TEA Party will go down in history as a righteous rebellion.” - Mark Levin, January 19, 2017.1
While the TEA Party may not have achieved its original goals, its legacy has lived on in unlikely ways.
Imagine, if you will – and I know this will be difficult for most of you reading this book, but try it anyway – that you were a devout Hillary Clinton supporter, or, you were even further to the left and “felt the Bern” throughout the 2016 campaign. Maybe you even voted for Jill Stein of the Green Party, secure in the knowledge that Hillary Clinton would be a sound backstop candidate. For those who fit this description and believed the polls and conventional wisdom that Hillary would be the one to break that glass ceiling, such as former UN ambassador Samantha Power infamously did,2 consider your utter shock as the results rolled in on Election Night: Ohio is the first surprise call that goes for Trump, then North Carolina and Florida in rapid succession. When Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – a state that had been a Democratic hold since the 1980s! – are called for the GOP, in your panic you realize that the Rust Belt Clinton firewall of states you were assuming was in the bag had collapsed in a heap of rubble. (Eventually even venerable union stronghold Michigan would barely go Trump.) Despite fewer popular votes, in a margin that would grow ever-larger as California received and counted its vast reservoir of popular votes won by Hillary Clinton, that racist, ill-mannered cad Donald Trump was going to become our 45th President.
Sure, there was the half-hearted attempt to shame electors into changing their votes, and it turned out some did – but not in favor of Hillary Clinton. There was (and continues to be, over two years later) significant talk that something had to be done about that antiquated Electoral College.3 But the real effort was placed into a new political drive which set out to get its revenge on the TEA Party voters who elected Donald Trump by using what they considered the tactics previously used with success against Barack Obama. Thus, the Indivisible movement, also called The Resistance, or #Resist, was born and announced practically the day Donald Trump was inaugurated.
In the early chapters of this book I outlined how long of an incubation process the TEA Party really had, as its period of genesis could be traced back to the latter stages of the George W. Bush presidency. It only became manifest in the first few weeks of the Obama administration, after his agenda and priority list of legislation were set into motion. Conversely, since few on the Left had even considered the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency and were instead concentrating on how to push Hillary Clinton further into the Marxist camp on various cherished items they held dear, progressives were caught a little bit flat-footed at first. Their shock quickly turned to rage, and rage into a furious pace of action: a massive march that was originally perhaps intended to show support for the Clinton agenda turned into a show of women – many wearing hats shaped like their private parts – that created a sensation of media attention overshadowing the actual Trump inauguration a day earlier.
And while the Republican Party of 2009 was at least willing to allow the presentation of the alternative vision presented by the incoming Obama administration, in 2017 the new Democrat opposition was right there with the protestors. They provided continuous cover for a long-standing and false narrative that the Russians interfered with the 2016 election, with a few Democrats even standing up and screaming that the President was guilty of treason for his Russian connections – charges which weren't conclusively proven despite the fact the Obama administration was secretly conducting wiretapping operations on the Trump campaign, and perhaps had a mole within. (Revelations that dribble out as the months pass suggest a multi-faceted operation on the order of the Watergate coverup, perpetrated by the “scandal-free” Obama administration.)
So Republicans who held townhall meetings in the early days of the Trump administration were greeted by an organized group of opposition citizens who did their best to be disruptive, turned the questioning into an inquisition on impeaching Trump, demanded strict opposition to the Trump agenda, and garnered media coverage which highlighted the protests as opposed to what the elected officials had to say. Yet while these townhall meetings could be loud, they were never seriously threatened with violence. That was a task delivered by anarchist front groups for the Left.
In the spring and summer of 2017, the discord began to turn more violent with the inclusion of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa groups, featuring members who vowed to shout down or shut down rhetoric and speakers they deemed too far to the right wing (basically anyone to the right of Josef Stalin.) It all came to a head at a rally in support of keeping a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee standing in a Virginia park.
What is now known as Market Street Park4 in the city of Charlottesville, which is home to the University of Virginia, was once called Robert E. Lee Park. (It was also called Emancipation Park for a year, and the original name change was part of what sparked the unrest.) For over 90 years that park was graced with a statue of its original namesake, but politically ambitious city leadership wanted to tear the statue down despite a state law forbidding it. Leaders of a counter-protest group wishing to preserve the Lee statue called “Unite the Right” had secured a permit to march and hold a rally on August 12, 2017, but the permit was canceled at the last moment. When the “Unite the Right” group, described by the media as mainly white nationalists and supremacists, departed the scene, they were set upon by members of Black Lives Matter and Antifa. Both sides were armed and looking for trouble, and it was trouble they found when a 20-year-old Ohio man who was there to support the “Unite the Right” cause was arrested for the vehicular homicide of a bystander on the opposing side of removing the statues. Heather Heyer was hit by his car as it plowed through a group of people blocking a street and later died from her injuries. In a separate incident that same day, two members of the Virginia State Police were killed in a helicopter crash returning from their surveillance of the protest.
More outrage ensued when President Trump, in a statement delivered that fateful Saturday evening, blamed the violence on “many sides.” Left-wingers – and some shaken moderate Republicans – took to social media to condemn the President for including the unnamed Antifa and BLM in the blame for violence, as James Fields, Jr., the driver who fatally struck Heyer, eventually admitted he was there from Ohio to support President Trump and for retaining the Lee statue at its location.
The next few weeks became a frenzy of other protesters, or even city governments themselves, tearing down Confederate and related statues – often in the dead of night. In a sign of how bad this trend was, the state of Maryland removed from their statehouse lawn a statue of Roger Taney, a Maryland native who wasn't a Confederate but was the author of the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision that held slaves were property. This was done with the full support of Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican who had rejected calls to remove that statue two years earlier in the wake of the Baltimore riots. In another incident, an unknown vandal or group of vandals decapitated a statue of Revolutionary War hero Gen. William Crawford in front of the courthouse of the Ohio county named for him,5 perhaps under the mistaken belief he was a hero in the War Between the States. (While the perpetrators still have not been found, the Crawford statue was replaced in 2018.)6 If history is not taught well in schools, one dead white guy tends to look like another.
But the Charlottesville violence was a second chapter to a story opened earlier that summer. On the early morning of June 14, 2017, a group of Republican Congressmen and staffers was practicing for their upcoming charity baseball game against a similar team of Democrats. That practice was interrupted by a lone gunman who had come from Illinois on a mission to stop Republicans in Congress from enacting the Trump agenda; during the incident, Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana was seriously wounded while the assailant died in an exchange of gunfire with two Capitol Police officers. The sole reason a police detail was there was the presence of Scalise, who was a part of the House leadership – had it been a practice without any member of leadership present it's possible many of the unarmed members and staffers would have been massacred.
The political leanings of 66-year-old James Hodgkinson were apparent from his social media choices, including belonging to an online group advocating the termination of Republicans. In his final act, Hodgkinson was looking to bring that termination to real life.
This additional violence was not a page in the TEA Party handbook. This isn't to say there weren't violent images and statements made at TEA Party protests and rallies: for example, I attended and covered for my website a gathering in my hometown where our Congressman at the time, Democrat Frank Kratovil, was hung from a noose in effigy.7 Sensible people in the local TEA Party agreed this counterproductive display served no purpose and was over the top; unfortunately, those in Antifa and BLM don't seem to agree violence should be off limits. To them, the ends of stopping Donald Trump's agenda must be supported by whatever means are necessary.
In trying to compare themselves to the TEA Party, those who consider themselves Indivisibles have a long way to go: for one thing, those in the TEA Party cleaned up after themselves. At the 9/12 Taxpayer March on Washington I attended, there were dozens and dozens of discarded, homemade signs left rather neatly in, or at least near, overflowing trash receptacles. (If anyone reading this book did a yellow sign referencing Joe Biden's three letter word: J-O-B-S, be advised I took it home as a souvenir because it made me laugh out loud. So it didn't contribute to the trash heap.)
Left-wing rally attendees didn't keep their surroundings nearly as clean.8
However, this most recent activity from activists on the left side of the aisle against what they considered the reactionary elements of the TEA Party is nothing new. Over the decade since the TEA Party gained prominence as a political haven for Constitutional conservatives, there has generally been some sort of center- to far-left purportedly grassroots group placed in response or opposition to them.
First among these opponents was the Coffee Party, which sprang up in early 2010 as the centrist alternative to the perceived extremism of the TEA Party.9 The Coffee Party's founder, filmmaker Annabel Park, was described by Newsweek as “just being exhausted by all-Tea-Party-all-the-time on the news.”10
As the Venn diagram of the TEA Party expanded from the fiscally conservative and those concerned about the size and scope of government, it began to include (as evidenced in the previous chapter) many who believed that abortion at any stage of pregnancy was wrong and marriage was reserved for one man and one woman – views portrayed by the dominant media as outdated and simply bigoted. Add in those who were passionate about preserving their Second Amendment rights, and indeed the TEA Party was a group bitterly clinging to its guns and religion.
So while the Coffee Party wasn't overt in its support of Barack Obama and his policies, the fact its organizer was a former Obama campaign volunteer11 should have provided a clue that it would function more or less as an offshoot of the President's Organizing for America online advocacy group. Rather than fealty to the Constitution, the Coffee Party pleaded for a more participatory democracy. As Park wrote:
In America, we have a democracy, but with vulnerabilities and loopholes.
One loophole is that the most active and organized constituents have disproportionate influence over our government. For instance, corporations can afford to pay thousands of lobbyists to work full-time at doing this. This gives them a disproportionate influence over our government and presents a serious challenge to democracy in America.
This is really at the root of our discontent: our government's relationship to corporate America and this special interest seems altogether unconstitutional.
As the Constitution dictates, we want a government of the people, by the people, for the people. Coffee Party USA is a democracy movement, and our goal is to have the government truly reflect the will of the people.12
Forget Park's ignorance of history (the phrase about “government of the people” actually stems from Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, not the Constitution) and consider the following points.
In the first respect, the two movements seemed to have similar aims, but would go about it in differing ways. Like the TEA Party, the Coffee Party had a list of key issues but they weren't as much to do with taxation or the role of government. Instead, some of them cited in Park's CNN op-ed: “accountability, corporate influence, health care reform, education reform, the economy, immigration reform, filibusters, etc.” were being addressed in Congress at the time, with the TEA Party lined up with the conservative opposition. On the other hand, if you looked at a list of the “partners” of the Coffee Party you'd have found a Who's Who of leftist causes.13
As you may also recall, one feature of the TEA Party was a resurgence of interest in the Constitution and our founding documents, and it's worth reminding readers that our Founders were, at best, wary of a participatory democracy as advocated by the Coffee Party. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, our Founding Fathers had created a republic – if we could keep it.
Similar to the TEA Party, though, the Coffee Party has faded from the limelight. But it's still percolating with an extant website,14 one which seems to have a little more backing from actual coffee sales as well as a little bit of revisionist history.15
On the other hand, while the Coffee Party preaches civility, our current Antifa unrest has its roots in another brief but potent cultural and political uprising called Occupy Wall Street (OWS, or simply Occupy.)
Barely a decade after the financial markets were imperiled by the 9/11 attack, a threat of a different sort began September 17, 2011. A group of protesters took over Zuccotti Park in the Wall Street financial district, squatting day and night on the ¾ acre site (at great expense to local businesses)16 until the police finally drove them out November 15.17 While they didn't work in the electoral realm as the TEA Party had done in over 2½ years prior to that point, that two-month stint and its associated and related Occupations around the rest of the nation were credited with instilling the class-envy concept of the “1%” into the political lexicon as well as bringing attention and sympathetic support to a number of other causes within the purview of income inequality, such as a $15 an hour minimum wage for fast-food workers.18
In addition – and just in time for the 2012 elections – the Occupy protests galvanized the Left for a number of their other cherished initiatives such as student loan reform, environmental activism including bans on fracking, proposed campaign finance legislation in response to the Citizens United decision, and a renewed emphasis on banking and business fiscal regulations to expand on those already included in the Dodd-Frank legislation.
Yet while the Coffee Party was seen as a rather benign, almost farcical counter to the TEA Party, those who helped to lead the TEA Party bristled at comparisons to Occupy. “(T)hose occupying Wall Street and other cities, when they are intelligible, want less of what made America great and more of what is damaging to America: a bigger, more powerful government to come in and take care of them so they don’t have to work like the rest of us who pay our bills,”19 said TPP's Jenny Beth Martin and Mark Meckler.
Added TPP's Michael Prell:
The Tea Party Patriots have three core principles: fiscal responsibility, free markets, and Constitutionally limited government. By contrast, the Occupy Wall Street protesters are demanding less fiscal responsibility (they want more government spending), an end to free markets, and the overwhelming majority of OWS demands – from guaranteed wages to free tuition to universal health care and more government control over markets – all call for a radical expansion of the size and scope and power of government to control us, and to take care of us, from cradle to college to grave.
Occupy Wall Street is calling for a declaration of dependence on government; a call for more government control over our lives. It is the direct opposite of the Declaration of Independence that sparked this nation into existence, and it is the direct opposite of the core principles of the modern-day Tea Party movement.20
One final take comes from a TEA Party organizer from Fort Wayne, Indiana who happened to be in Washington, D.C. for a TEA Party event and witnessed this:
(As compared to the TEA Party) The Occupy Wall Street movement… is a direct result of union organization and community organization, and is organized and encouraged by leftist activists. The movement is also very well funded.
The biggest contrast to date is the level of violence, arrests and law breaking that shadows the people involved in Occupy.
Recently, I had the opportunity to attend a tea party event in Washington, D.C., at the downtown Convention Center. During the event we were informed that the building had been surrounded by about 500 Occupy D.C. protesters who were attempting to break into the building and were aggressive. As a result of their activity, the building was placed on lockdown.
They were banging on the windows and placing small children in front of the doors to keep those attending the dinner from leaving. I left the ballroom to get a look outside. The building was surrounded by Occupiers, security guards and police. They were chanting, beating on the building and blocking the streets.
Protesters blocked all the exits, and people were finding it difficult to leave the building. Those who managed to exit were attacked with physical violence.
As I walked around the building looking out, I noticed several people being attacked by the protesters and being hit with objects and their fists. At one exit they knocked down an elderly woman and surrounded her. At another exit they attacked people as they exited by allowing them to get halfway or more across the street, then grabbing the last people in the group and hitting them.
This is the kind of action that mobs use to get their point across, not peaceful groups like the tea party movement. The contrast of the groups is very obvious. No tea party group ever left a mess at a rally, attacked people or destroyed property.21
Then again, in looking at the political landscape in 2019 it may be argued the brief and mercurial Occupy Wall Street movement was more successful at moving the cultural and political needle to the left than the TEA Party was in moving it to the right, despite the latter's electoral successes. Occupy, however, enjoyed many of the tactical advantages that the TEA Party did not: most helpful to them were a relatively sympathetic media which could use the bullhorn of the nation's largest media markets (as opposed to the myriad small towns and out-of-the-way places in “flyover country” where TEA Party regulars generally chose to call home) to amplify its coverage as well as a governmental administration in a number of the same cities and states that was down with the OWS struggle as fellow far-left travelers. Many of the “sanctuary cities” for illegal aliens also turned a blind eye to their own Occupy groups as long as the protests were kept reasonably peaceful, and they were quick to respond to calls for progressive legislation which could be adopted on a local level, such as the minimum wage hikes.
Compare that to a lack of action on some of the major pieces of national policy and legislation the TEA Party desired – the federal budget is still hopelessly in the red (and will remain so for at least another two years thanks to legislation passed in February, 2018) because no one has the political will to consistently cut spending; meanwhile, eight years later the Trump tax cut finally passed Congress despite being demagogued by people in both parties and passing in a form barely recognizable to its original proponents in the Trump administration. On a still sadder note: even when Republicans were in charge of all branches of government for the first two years of the Trump administration, Obamacare is still the law of the land. (That's a story I'm saving for a little later.)
Now I'll listen to an argument that states a case that things could have been a lot worse for us had the TEA Party never existed as a check and balance to the Obama administration, even though it's impossible to prove such a hypothetical negative. In that respect, the rise of the TEA Party was similar to the situation a decade and a half earlier where Americans elected Bill Clinton over the incumbent George H.W. Bush (a.k.a. “Bush 41.”) Recall that Clinton only won with a plurality of the vote because of the populist Ross Perot running as an independent, and once he was in office Americans did not take kindly to the direction he and fellow Democrats originally wished to proceed, including the prospect of “HillaryCare” socialized medicine. They instead countered it forcefully by embracing the Contract With America and electing a Republican House majority for the first time since the Eisenhower presidency at their first opportunity in 1994.
Any political goodwill for progressive agenda items originally desired by OWS, though, rapidly became extinguished among the masses by its more violent successors in Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Even the best efforts of the news media to spin the events in Charlottesville as brought on exclusively by the white supremacists in attendance failed to pass the smell test, and threats of more violence from these far-left groups if radical change wasn't brought about – such as the impeachment of President Trump and Vice-President Pence – did little to attract the mainstream American or even those who are left-of-center and may otherwise believe in policies these groups advocate. Like most, sensible liberals still think necessary change can be accomplished within our current political system without the implied threats. And don't forget: despite their reputation, a common theme of the TEA Party gatherings was a lack of violence.
The one area where the current Trump “resistance” comes closest to using TEA Party tactics is in the loud and hostile questioning of Republican Congressional members who dare to hold town hall meetings, much akin to the rancor of some similar events hosted by Democrats in 2009-10. It's fine to question the Trump agenda, but the lack of civility in some TEA Party hotbeds is being paid back in spades now. They obviously didn't get the message to “Incite Civility and Reason” the Coffee Party has tried to peddle.
But Antifa and Black Lives Matter aren't the only ones deaf to the clear message of the people. Having seen the failure of the 115th Congress – the first totally Republican-controlled Congress since the end of the 2005-2006 session – to do as they promised and completely repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, before I conclude I'll explain how the TEA Party was let down yet again.
In the meantime, though, I want to wrap up this three-chapter departure from TEA Party chronology to consider those who questioned the sincerity of those rank-and-file members who made up the TEA Party. The next chapter looks at the TEA Party through its criticism from the Left, and weighs their arguments to determine whether the contentions were legitimate or not.
Notes - bearing in mind some of these links may now be dead ones:
1 This isn't from the transcript. I wrote Levin's statement on my phone as I was listening to the program because I knew it would go somewhere in this book.
2 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/15/the-full-transcript-ben-rhodes-and-samantha-power-216322 Yes, Power admitted “I've had a lot of bad ideas in my life, but none as immortalized as this one.”
3 Hence, the National Popular Vote movement and compact:
https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/
7 http://monoblogue.us/2009/07/28/widespread-panic-about-our-freedom/ As I wrote at the time, “Let me say straight away that I wouldn’t have recommended the noose and effigy of Frank Kratovil.”
9 https://web.archive.org/web/20100323083209/http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/03/18/park.coffee.party/
10 http://www.newsweek.com/what-founder-coffee-party-wants-70529 Given the description of the timing of events in the CNN opinion piece as creating the Facebook page on January 26, Park snapped in the immediate aftermath of the Scott Brown election, described in detail back in Chapter 4.
12 https://web.archive.org/web/20100323083209/http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/03/18/park.coffee.party/
13 Their current list of partners is at the bottom of the Coffee Party website, a long scroll down. Here is a handy list from late 2017, before they redid the website: https://web.archive.org/web/20171228045834/http://www.coffeepartyusa.com/our_partners
14
http://www.coffeepartyusa.com/
When this chapter was originally written in 2017 the blog had been untouched since January of that year – while its podcasts remained active – but since then the Coffee Party site has been totally revamped and is current.
15 http://coffeepartyusa.com/2018/10/16/something-special-for-you-for-keeping-us-strong-for-10-years/ Accessed December 1, 2018. That is unless they are counting themselves as part of the Organizing for America crew as that was active in 2008.
16 http://nypost.com/2011/11/13/occupy-wall-street-costs-local-businesses-479400/
18 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/the-triumph-of-occupy-wall-street/395408/
19 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/content/occupy-wall-street-theyre-no-tea-partiers-2/
20 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/content/ows-vs-the-tea-party/
21 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/misc/tea-party-is-nothing-like-occupy-movement/ This is apparently a reprint of a guest column McClendon penned for the News-Sentinel newspaper in Fort Wayne, Indiana. (McClendon still occasionally contributes there.)
Next Tuesday will continue my series with Chapter 13: Looking from Across the Aisle.
In the meantime, you can buy the book or Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now. And remember…
I couldn't attach a picture, but I took a photo of a newspaper political cartoon I clipped of Joe Biden sitting on a stool with the narration "preparing for the VP debate"
Big Bird, The Count, & Elmo stamding in front of a chalk board with the letters (& numbers below) J(1) O(2) B(3) S(4)
Big Bird is saying (Concentrate, Joe)