The Tea Party: Is the rebellion over?

“Is the Tea Party dead?” asked Chris Cillizza in WashingtonPost.com. The conservative movement launched in 2009 was rocked last week by a series of disputes, departures, and signs that the GOP establishment is “ready to abandon it.” Former Rep. Dick Armey quit his position as head of the organization FreedomWorks, “one of the pillars of the Tea Party movement,” citing internal mismanagement. Four Tea Party–backed congressmen were booted off House committees by Speaker John Boehner for repeatedly refusing to toe the party line. Most significantly of all, the movement’s “patron saint” in Congress, Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, announced he would resign his seat to head up conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation. Whisper it quietly, said David Brooks in The New York Times, but the Tea Party “mania has passed.” In the wake of the voters’ rebuke in November, the far-right extremists who consider compromise a form of surrender are retreating to “ever more marginal oases of purity”—leaving an opening for a new generation of kinder, gentler Republicans, such as Sen. Marco Rubio.

Establishment conservatives like David Brooks have never understood the Tea Party, said Daniel Foster in NationalReview.com. The coalition of grassroots activists is “too diffuse and contradictory to be talked about as a monolith.” Its only “mania” is a healthy concern about our ever-expanding government. Yes, the movement has some “kooks and cranks,” but it was Tea Party–aligned conservatives who drove the electoral wave of 2010, and their small-government passion made stars of Republican upstarts such as Rubio, Chris Christie, and Rand Paul. Reports of the Tea Party’s death are highly premature.

In fact, the outlines of its comeback are already visible, said Paul West in LATimes.com. DeMint still has a prominent platform, and is already being talked about as a “purist Tea Party contender” for the 2016 presidential nomination. The House remains packed with small-government conservatives, representing red-state districts that are overwhelmingly Republican. In the 2014 midterm elections, the GOP’s “older white base” will turn out in force, said Jamelle Bouie in WashingtonPost.com,and the Tea Party will undoubtedly pick up more congressional seats. You can call Tea Partiers unyielding in their opposition to government and taxes if you like, “but they know what they want” and aren’t giving up. Until Republican moderates have a similar level of fervor, the Tea Party will remain a force that can’t be ignored.

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