Is the Tea Party over?

By Richard K. Barry

Last week, Roll Call reported that organizers of a major Tea Party convention that had been planned for the fall was being cancelled due to low registration.

Organizers had hoped that the event, called the Freedom Jamboree, would provide an opportunity for Republican presidential candidates to court the conservative movement, and, apparently, both Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum had confirmed they would attend.

It seems that the twenty-one local Tea Party groups which began organizing the event did it in order to "reclaim the movement from national umbrella groups and offer an alternative to the annual fall Tea Party rally on the National Mall."

As one of the organizer's told Roll Call, "We were doing it because we were fed up with the infighting that these umbrella groups had done in 2010."

Interesting to note that this is the second Tea Party event cancelled because of lack of interest. Last year, a Tennessee-based group, Tea Party Nation, cancelled an event that was to have taken place in Las Vegas. They had their excuses, but, really, nobody wanted to come.

At a time when Republican politicians are being pushed around by the so-called Tea Party movement, it does beg the question as to who is doing the pushing. If these people can't generate enough interest to pull together a national event or two at the grass roots level, does it mean that we were all correct in our assessment of this thing as an astroturf movement?

The truth is that these things are never that simple. The Koch Brothers / Fox News / Sarah Palin type catalysts have been essential, but movements come into being because a subset of the population is ready for the message. I know some will howl, but the mass psychology of fascism is instructive here.

My point is that I don't deny that the Tea Party has been a mass movement, only that it will have to start organizing itself like a political party, or actually join one already in existence, if it hopes to continue to have any influence.

Yes, there is a reason that political parties exist and that is because it takes so damn much effort to aggregate interest across the country and give it direction. The Tea Party may have claimed pride in the fact that it has no leader, but after a while that just doesn't work anymore.

In the short term, if you throw enough money at any movement, no matter how diffuse, it's going to have an impact, hence the astroturfism of the Tea Party movement. The hard work starts when the "movement" begins to mature and requires centralization and leadership. Eventually that will mean that the Tea Party either folds into the Republican Party or goes away.

Not surprising that one of the organizers of the Freedom Jamboree wrote to fellow activists saying that "[i]t appears the Tea Party horse is riderless, and riding off in all directions at once."

In fact, a basic truth, whether from the left or right, is that social movements can influence politics, but they are not the same as a political organization. They are a blunt instrument without the ability or structure to make the kinds of decisions required by politics -- without the ability to bring it all together.

We are seeing this in Washington now with the debt ceiling negotiations. The Tea Party Caucus can't compromise, can't negotiate because its base is not an organization but rather an idea.

Again, in the short term you can get a bunch of people motivated to show up to mass events for the sake of idea. Many wonderful gatherings have taken place on the premise. But, after a while, you need the organization, you need the party or people will just stop showing up.

Too bad, though, because what this country really needs right now is another convention of colorfully-dressed people doing their best Founding Father impersonations.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Elephant Dung #30: Majority of Republicans, including even more Tea Partiers, support new third party

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

There may be something to be said for a third party in American politics, or even for the American system to become a multi-party system, but the reality is that it's a two-party system (i.e., a system with two dominant parties and some tiny ones that never win anything) and that third parties have generally failed to capture the public's attention.

In the recent past, there has been talk of a third party emerging in the center to capture independent voters -- and, in generally, those who are economically conservative and socially liberal/libertarian. Think back to Ross Perot, for example. It was never clear to me how such a centrist party would survive, but the frustration with the two-party status quo that drive those movements was certainly real.

But what about a third party on the left or right, a third party that could actually challenge the dominance of the two parties while taking a significant chunk of support away from one of them? Given how conservatives tend to unify around the Republican Party, it seemed that a third party of this kind would most likely emerge on the left, a party of progressives and disgruntled ex-Democrats, a party that was fed up with the centrist and even GOP-leaning inclinations of the Democratic Party establishment, a party that would promote both social justice and something other than the barely-regulated capitalism that is embraced by both of the main parties.

But maybe not.

A new Gallup poll shows that support for the establishment of a competitive third party is particularly strong on the right, among Republicans and more significantly with the Tea Party:

A majority of Republicans said for the first time that a third party was needed in American politics, according to a Gallup poll released Monday.

Fifty-two percent of Republicans, and an even stronger number of Tea Party supporters, support the creation of a major, third political party, underscoring the occasional tensions between grassroots conservatives and the GOP establishment.

An overall majority of Americans, 52 percent, said that a third political party was needed; the most profound shift has come among Republicans.

The number of Republicans who said that a third political party was necessary was at an all-time high since Gallup first began tracking opinion on the issue in 2003. And while support for a third party has crept steadily upward in the GOP, for the first time, it represents a majority opinion.

Supporters of the Tea Party are even more likely to back a third party, the poll found. Sixty percent of Tea Party supporters back a third party, while 32 percent say the existing two parties are adequate. By contrast, 47 percent of Tea Party opponents said the bipartisan system is adequate, and 44 percent favored a third party. 

It seems unlikely that a Tea Party-ish third party would ever emerge on the right to challenge the GOP, and to divide conservatives, not least given that the GOP itself has moved steadily to the right in recent years and has come to embrace the Tea Party with open arms. And yet the Tea Party, or rather the multitude of groups that together make up the loosely-linked Tea Party, continues to wage war against insufficiently conservative (that non-Tea Party) Republicans. Targets include John Boehner, Richard Lugar, and Orrin Hatch, long-time solid conservatives and loyal Republicans who, despite their electoral success and political standing, have failed to embrace the new Tea Party GOP agenda with the fervent absolutism the Tea Party (and, more and more, the new GOP establishment) demands. And, indeed, the Tea Party has shown again and again that it is prepared to suffer at the polls for its absolutism, helping to select unelectable Republican nominees (like Sharron Angle) and, where they fail, throwing up their own candidates to divide the conservative vote. It's better to be "right," it would seem, than to win.

And so I wouldn't put it past the Tea Party, or some elements of it, to break from the GOP and create some right-wing party that adopts an extremist agenda, carves off a significant chunk of the conservative vote, and leaves the Republican Party unable to win even relatively safe seats.

Maybe that's more my hope than a prediction, but it's telling that the Tea Party, which helped the GOP take back the House last year, is increasingly prepared to go it alone.

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