On Wednesday, The New York Times released an article that correctly noted that the tea party movement within the Republican Party was a new birth of angry, uncontrolled aggression in American politics. It marked a sudden, sharp increase in the violence of political rhetoric, including introducing gun-toting mobs into town halls and screaming masses that seemed to pop up by chance in city parks.
The Times article notes that Republicans have thrown away all the themes that supposedly animated that movement. Except that they haven’t. Because what the article reflects is a cleaned-up version of the tea party. The “concerned citizens angry about the deficit” version of the tea party. The semi-libertarian no-longer-silent mass that was concerned about the government “picking winners and losers.” That tea party is absolutely gone, because that tea party never existed.
That idea of the tea party was always a fiction—and not a polite fiction. It was the way the movement was sold not just in the pages of the Times, but on networks from CNN to Fox. But the reason that the Republican Party no longer hews to a deficit-shy, market-trusting, independent movement is because the tea party was never, ever, not for a moment anything close to that. It was a far-right movement, shaped and directed by talk radio, funded by Republican sources, and weaponized over a single issue—racism.
The closest that the Times article comes to admitting the truth about the movement is when it mentions a bumper sticker that says, “Honk if I’m Paying Your Mortgage.” That concern was generated by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli, who screamed about the need for a “new Tea Party” while on the floor of the mercantile exchange. And his chest-thumping was directly centered on the idea that homeowners shouldn’t be “bailed out” of mortgages in a collapsing housing market. The Times article is correct when it says the concern was about “certain homeowners”; what it doesn’t say is what a thousand talk radio hosts were saying at the time: They were talking about black homeowners.
Tut-tutting over the lack of fiscal concern in the current Republican Party for spending on Trump’s wall, or billionaire tax cuts, or a thousand pointless military purchases isn’t mourning something past. It’s remembering a PR campaign. One that was funded by the Koch brothers, oil companies, the NRA, and the Wall Street forces that actually sank the economy.
Though the Times presents the tea party as if it was a spontaneous uprising against Obamacare and the stimulus package, neither of those things yet existed in February 2009 when rallies, the bus, and the media coverage for the tea party began.
When the tea party began, the U.S. was still plunging steeply down the slide of the Great Recession triggered by the policies of George W. Bush—particularly bank deregulation and the promotion of “innovative” new fiscal instruments such as credit default swaps that served to both push mortgages out the door and generate theoretical wealth several times the global GDP. That house of cards tumbled down, bringing millions of Americans with it, including Americans who suddenly found themselves sitting on mortgages whose rates were skyrocketing even as the value of the homes they represented plunged. Entire neighborhoods were falling to foreclosure like dominoes, with neighbors and local businesses falling into the holes created as upside-down homeowners found themselves in a position where walking away from a busted mortgage was the only possible solution. Stopping that process was a vital step in turning around an economy that was still threatening to plunge straight through the bottom of recession and into a place not seen since the 1930s.
But it wasn’t the bankers who were on those signs being waved at tea party rallies. It wasn’t George W. Bush whose face was splashed with “Joker” makeup or paired with a hammer and sickle. The tea party, from its very outset, was a bought-and-paid-for publicity effort created by the Republican Party and Republican backers to generate anger over the idea that “certain homeowners” were getting bailed out on the dimes of hardworking, nonextravagant Americans. Certain Americans. Take a look at the image that accompanies the Times article. President Obama’s face may be painted Joker white on the placard someone is waving, but the faces on the ground don’t need any paint. They’re just white.
The tea party was a convenient fiction for Republicans, who used it the same way Donald Trump has used his weekly rallies: to generate anger and keep their base involved and energized from the very moment that President Obama took his seat. And it worked. It both worked to bring those voters out to rip apart the Congress in 2010 and served as a convenient fiction to force caps onto spending in 2011 when that spending could have done the most good for the economy.
But it was always a fiction. The Koch-funded bus. The AM radio hosts blaring talk about how Obama was going to funnel all the money to “urban” homeowners and “his friends.” The signs that endorsed birtherism and climate change denial and showed Obama in “native dress.”
The tea party is just where it always was. It’s just the PR campaign that got repackaged. Trumpism is the tea party. It simply changed its hat.