In its five-plus years, the tea party has mocked many an obituarist. The pens are out again after last week’s primaries.
Tea party-backed candidates for the U.S. Senate lost in Kentucky and Georgia. Our state’s governor and House speaker handily defeated challengers running under the Gadsden banner. The GOP “establishment” appears generally ascendant.
But the tea party still has a chance to foil those who are writing it off.
For starters, there are a lot of tea partyers. They may not constitute a true “silent majority,” and not only because they’re plenty vocal. But a substantial number of people identify with the movement in one way or another … which brings us to a crucial point:
There’s no such thing as “the” tea party.
I’m not only talking about the fact many organizations call themselves tea parties. “Tea party” has come to mean, more or less, “not establishment.”
The tea party sprung into being to oppose Washington’s bailouts, stimulus plans, rising debt and, eventually, Obamacare — and the possibility these would lead to higher taxes. Nationally, that’s still a pretty fair description.
In Georgia politics, however, the label is applied not just to the state-level versions of those federal issues. It’s used to describe everyone from social conservatives to the Ron Paul-ian Liberty Caucus, from those who want to crack down on illegal immigrants to those who champion tighter ethics laws.
While there are tea partyers in each group, the groups don’t overlap perfectly. Far from it.
So, for example, Speaker David Ralston beat an opponent whose backers were primarily (though not exclusively) tea partyers. But it wasn’t really the tea party that took the hit with the ouster of state Reps. Charles Gregory of Kennesaw and Sam Moore of Ball Ground. They’re more accurately placed in the Liberty Caucus, whose interests are much broader than the tea party’s core fiscal matters.
There is, however, one commonality among some of these groups that could spell their demise. That’s their willingness to be pure in defeat rather than accept partial victories or allies.
The result? More defeats than victories, and a shrinking number of allies.
This isn’t just about elections, although it never helps the cause to challenge men as powerful as the governor and the speaker — especially in such an intensely personal way — and lose.
It’s also about the anti-establishment’s tactics under the Gold Dome, which leave an ever-worsening taste in the mouths of legislators. Many legislators say they’re tired of working on a tea-party issue and managing to get maybe 80 percent of what was initially sought, only to be called traitorous squishes because they couldn’t get enough votes to deliver the last 20 percent.
In the end, they’re inclined to stop listening to those activists at all.
Margaret Thatcher encouraged “relentless incrementalism.” Lawmakers may not exactly be relentless on some important issues, but the activists also must be willing to accept incrementalism.
If you’re part of the tea party, or a tea party-ish group, and you think you don’t see enough results, by all means question your legislators. But take time, too, to investigate how leaders of your own movement are working on your behalf.
