Introduction

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, 2024.

Oct 31, 2023

I believe this movement, the Tea Party movement, has the opportunity to break the boom-and-bust cycle (of fiscal and political conservatism) and restore a constitutionally limited government and bring fiscal sanity to Washington. - Dick Armey and Matt Libbe, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto (2010)

There was a day in my life that I recall as a cloudy, late-summer Saturday afternoon. But it was an afternoon spent in the company of thousands of wonderful people who came from every state in the union; a gathering of those who had the shared belief that the vague promises of change promised by the Presidential candidate who had won the election just ten scant months before weren't turning out to be the changes they were interested in making.

The number of people who descended upon the Mall in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 2009 has been subject to debate ever since the 9/12 Rally (also known as the Taxpayer March on Washington)¹ took place. Those who supported the TEA Party and its aims tended to state the number was over one million,² while naysayers pushed the number into the low six digits³ – or even less.⁴ But as one who was there, allow me to just say that it was more people than I had ever encountered in one place, before or since.

On that day, my journey to the 9/12 event was on a chartered bus that began its route near Ocean City, Maryland, stopping in the city of Salisbury where I live before working its way up Maryland's Eastern Shore toward our nation's capital. The Eastern Shore was ripe territory for a movement such as the TEA Party – as one of the few conservative bastions of the reliably Democratic state of Maryland, we on the Eastern Shore knew onetime Maryland Governor William Donald Schaefer wasn't necessarily joking when he called our part of the state the “shithouse.”⁵ The radical left turn of the Obama administration was a movie we'd seen over and over again, projected from our state capital of Annapolis as they ran roughshod over the interests of our rural communities in favor of those who lived across the Bay Bridge from us. We realized Chesapeake Bay wasn't just an estuary bisecting the state, but also the demarcation line between the more conservative lifestyle preferred by those on Delmarva and the liberalism associated with urban areas.

As we departed the bus and walked the remaining few blocks to the Mall, there was the sense that something historic was occurring. I think the closest metaphor I could relate would be that of walking into a packed major league baseball stadium just as the home team rallied in the late innings. The cheering came across to me almost as much as a wave of sound than the sound itself, and there was no question in my mind that our time had arrived. Surely we were a force to be reckoned with; a movement that I had only climbed aboard that April 15 when a rainy Salisbury joined hundreds of other cities in hosting a Tax Day TEA Party – fittingly enough, ours was held at the steps of our city-county government building.⁶

Before I get too far along here, though, I should bring you up to speed on the origins of this book you're holding and how I came to be a willing participant in the TEA Party.

My writing background has its roots as far back as creating a newsletter for the Republicans living in my precinct in Toledo, Ohio two decades ago. Eventually this talent went online after I moved to Maryland: I made a name as a political blogger focusing on state and national affairs, and some may have said back in the day I was a pretty fair writer. Yet by the time the TEA Party movement began, my life was undergoing a significant upheaval: after 22 years in the architectural field, my layoff the previous December had led me to a different avocation I was just starting out with that February. (On the other hand, the Santelli rant came just two weeks after my first date with my wife. Every cloud has a silver lining.)

So, while I was maintaining my blog, political activism wasn't foremost on my mind. However, I posted on the day he spoke out that I thought Rick Santelli would be the next guy on the unemployment line:

I'm not sure how this guy is going to keep his job after what went on today. Mocking the all-important stimulus package on a cable network not named FOX?
(At this point I embedded the Santelli video.)
Rick Santelli is his name, and in many respects he's exactly correct. Why should I, a guy who's played by the rules and financed my home in a prudent manner, be the one who's left holding the bag?
It's especially true now that I've gone into business for myself. If I succeed to any reasonable degree (which I have confidence that I will) all that may get me is a higher tax bracket. Is that the American Way?
We have tried three different styles and types of stimulus packages now – first direct payments to the taxpayers, next bailing out the banks to create more credit, and now the Keynesian spending of government money to prime the economy. You can see on the bottom of the video in the occasional scroll that the markets REALLY love this – otherwise would they be scraping the bottom of the barrel at levels unseen in several years? And it's funny that no one is blaming Presidential policies for the market tanking.
What do we do next if this latest stimulus doesn't work? Will there be any businesses left to create jobs? I don't want to find out but I'm afraid I will.⁷

Needless to say, my circumstances led me to declare a couple weeks later:

The best I can hope for is that the country’s not in some sort of internal armed insurrection come 2013. I hold out exactly zero confidence that anything Barack Obama is doing will improve the economy in and of itself. Now we may bounce back to some extent simply based on the fact that pent-up demand can only be suppressed for so long but it’s my contention that doing what Obama is doing will only lengthen the suffering. This stimulus was a bad idea under Bush and even worse under Obama because he’s throwing more money at the problem!
The lack of confidence is signified by the utter collapse of the Dow Jones and NASDAQ markets, which have seen their overall value eroded by about 1/3 just since Obama was elected. That’s billions or maybe even trillions in aggregate personal net worth, vanished in the proverbial blink of an eye. And while it’s true that huge mistakes were made in the financial sector – mistakes which helped bring about the recession we now suffer from – I’m arguing that the steps government has taken to “solve” the problem will only make things worse down the road. Even our nation is not too big to fail.⁸

As you could guess, I was utterly frustrated and looking for any port in a storm. A few days later I received a press release in my e-mail that spelled out the first set of Tax Day Tea Parties (interestingly enough, it came from the Portsmouth Tea Company) which I reprinted as a blog post with some additional comments.⁹ At the time I hadn't heard of one for my hometown of Salisbury, but sure enough a local TEA Party was brewing – I finally got word of it a week beforehand.¹⁰

Once we got together we had a lot of sound and fury during those heady days back in 2009, vowing that we would make the Washington insiders pay in the 2010 elections. Few students of conventional wisdom truly believed this turn of events could happen, but the TEA Party followed through and shocked the world when the Democratic Congressional majority – a majority that Bill Clinton's political adviser James Carville believed would once again be as long-lasting as the one that Democrats enjoyed for four decades before the Contract With America brought it all crashing down in 1994¹¹ – was instead wiped away in just four years by the midterm wave election of 2010. In turn, TEA Party regulars themselves assumed this midterm victory was just the first step in a generational political change.

Instead, the TEA Party movement has, at least outwardly, been shown to be just as fleeting and temporary as the Democratic majority in Congress was. As one who still believes in the TEA Party's mantra that we were Taxed Enough Already, I think it's almost criminal that a movement that had such promise lost its way. Since I also believe that we are doomed to repeat history unless we understand how we got into the situation in the first place, it compelled me to study the rise and fall of the TEA Party and perhaps give readers the idea of where we can go at a nadir when neither of the major-party Presidential selections in the 2016 election cycle when I began writing this seemed to have the faintest idea of how to limit government. For his part, Republican Donald Trump had a valid plan to lower taxes, but warned this modest change was just his initial negotiating point.¹² It was very likely that his rates would end up much higher, said Trump, the process more complex than the single-page form he initially promised working-class taxpayers.¹³ (It turned out the future President was pretty much on the money in describing the events leading up to and the effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed late in 2017.)

Trump's campaign, in my view, was the terminus of this stage of the TEA Party saga in spite of his surprising success, and the overriding question that needs to be answered now is how those who were part of the most conservative/libertarian political movement in over a generation (since Ronald Reagan's ascent to the presidency in the late 1970s) could turn around and back a candidate who supported Hillary Clinton's Senate campaigns,¹⁴ had little idea of the workings of the Constitution,¹⁵ and pledged to do nothing with some of the most fiscally troublesome aspects of government like Social Security and Medicare.¹⁶ For many of those who made up the TEA Party the selection of Trump as a preferred candidate after his liberal predecessor was elected seemed to be counter-intuitive, although I think we had a valuable clue regarding those programs many see as entitlements. Yet the ascent of Trump is instructive on the true political leanings of the rank-and-file membership of the TEA Party, too.

While I'm arguing the story of the TEA Party as a useful and relevant conservative movement ended with the ascendance of the “alt-right” and the election of a populist in Donald Trump, I have to admit its legacy lives on in some of the most unlikely ways. At its most visible, consider one counter-balance left-wing reaction to Trump called the Indivisible movement and their insistence that their model of disruption for the Trump agenda is the TEA Party. From the Indivisible Guide:

The authors of this guide are former congressional staffers who witnessed the rise of the Tea Party. We saw these activists take on a popular president with a mandate for change and a supermajority in Congress. We saw them organize locally and convince their own (members of Congress) to reject President Obama’s agenda. Their ideas were wrong, cruel, and tinged with racism – and they won.
If a small minority in the Tea Party could stop President Obama, then we the majority can stop a petty tyrant named Trump.
To this end, the following chapters offer a step-by-step guide for individuals, groups, and organizations looking to replicate the Tea Party’s success in getting Congress to listen to a small, vocal, dedicated group of constituents. The guide is intended to be equally useful for stiffening Democratic spines and weakening pro-Trump Republican resolve.¹⁷

As the book unfolds, I'll delve deeply into the Indivisible narrative that the ideas of the TEA Party were “wrong, cruel, and tinged with racism.” One disadvantage the TEA Party labored under was the fact that much of its media coverage came from journalists and reporters who could neither hide their agenda nor their displeasure that people in flyover country wouldn't embrace what these political experts thought was best for our nation: the policies of Barack Obama and his allies in the Democrat-controlled Congress. While the TEA Party movement was far from unblemished, neither was it simply a reaction based on “white privilege” or the fact that a President who identified as a black man (despite being of mixed parentage) was elected. In my opening chapters, you'll find that the roots of the TEA Party long predate the Obama presidency.

I don't think it's a stretch, though, to categorize the left-wing resistance to Trump as “wrong, cruel, and tinged with racism.” Unlike the TEA Party, the progressive activists haven't been satisfied with the disruption of GOP Congressional members' town hall meetings or with their own gatherings in Washington, D.C. and other places around the nation. As the Trump presidency has progressed, their side has gained a number of less savory fellow travelers, most particularly radical members of the Black Lives Matter group that arose from the seeds of white-on-black police-involved shootings during the Obama administration and the “black bloc” or “Antifa” radicals who have devolved to violent and disruptive actions to put a heckler's veto on conservative or right-leaning speakers and gatherings. These counter-protestors were mostly missing during the heyday of the TEA Party, but with the inauguration of Donald Trump they were emboldened to come out of the woodwork as the resistance. So while Indivisible claims it's using the tactics of the TEA Party against the Trump administration, they've upped the ante significantly to a point where violence is becoming a new normal at political events. In certain areas and situations, it's become dangerous to be a Trump supporter at a “peaceful protest.”¹⁸

There is a saying generally credited as an ancient Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” At the infancy of these most interesting political times, the 9/12 rally I attended was not just a high point of my political life, but it also seemed to be the highest swell in the tide of conservative protest activism. Some of the players who served as the “leaders” of what was a grassroots movement without a true standard-bearer have faded away, but others have become just the sort of entrenched inside-the-Beltway types they railed against during those early TEA Party days. To paraphrase The Who, the new boss has become the same as the old boss.

Michael Johns, who was one of the 22 participants in the original TEA Party conference call, noted in a retrospective he wrote in 2015 that, “All the Tea Party movement founders from (#TCOT originator Michael Patrick) Leahy’s first conference call are impressive in their own ways, and have their own personal stories about what sparked their leadership in this now historical movement.”¹⁹

I agree completely, and this leads to another aspect of my book: I wanted to get the perspective of those who were there at the beginning. In the initial, heady days of the TEA Party phenomenon there were about 100 activists who, it could be argued, got in on its ground floor. Just like those original investors in a company like Microsoft or Starbucks, a few parlayed their involvement into great fame and fortune but most who still believe in the ideals the TEA Party expressed are doing so far from the limelight. I believe those who have shunned the spotlight and weren't worried about who got the credit for positive change are the ones who will best tell the story of the rise and fall of the TEA Party because they were there at the beginning and exhibited the most passion about its ideals – more than most, these otherwise ordinary Americans lived and breathed this stuff but did so as a means to improve the land they love, not their bank accounts.

Fortunately, I was able to unearth a surprisingly large sample of their thoughts via their own writings at the time. I also reached out to many who were still active or willing to talk about that portion of their lives. To those out of that group who have chosen to share their thoughts and stories with me, I owe a significant debt of gratitude.

Most casual observers credit financial reporter Rick Santelli with the birth of the TEA Party because he coined the modern incarnation of the phrase. But its roots go back well prior to Santelli's February, 2009 rant, and even predate the election of Barack Obama. Indeed, the genesis of the TEA Party may be the handiwork of a longtime political gadfly whose son was a beneficiary of the movement a few years later. But even that beginning point came as a result of influential men and women who passed on well before the TEA Party rose in the last decade, and my aim is to sift through all those tea leaves and make sense of it all as this modern-day tea party came into being, developed into what seemed like an unstoppable political juggernaut, then just as suddenly became the subject of scorn as it slid into the irrelevance that ended with many of its most passionate leaders backing a candidate who was accused of working against the movement when it was at its peak of power.²⁰

This, then, is the story of the rise and fall of the TEA Party. May it be only a short time before it rises from the ashes of history because we need it more than ever.

Notes - bearing in mind some of these links may now be dead ones:

1 http://www.freedomworks.org/content/taxpayer-march-washington-scheduled-september-12-2009

2 http://michellemalkin.com/2009/09/12/celebrating-the-912-rallies/

3 http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/freedomworks-cuts-estimate-for-crowd-at-its-9-12-rally-by-one-half

4 http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/tea-party-protesters-march-washington/story?id=8557120

5 http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1991-02-17/news/1991048114_1_eastern-shore-william-donald-schaefer-governor

6 http://monoblogue.us/2009/04/15/pictures-from-salisburys-tea-party/

7 http://monoblogue.us/2009/02/19/the-next-guy-on-the-unemployment-line/

8 http://monoblogue.us/2009/03/02/steele-vs-limbaugh/

9 http://monoblogue.us/2009/03/07/quirky-but-appropriate/

10 http://monoblogue.us/2009/04/08/a-retro-protest/

11 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103901536