History vs. the Tea Party

William Temple, a Tea Party supporter from Brunswick, Ga., heading home after the Iowa caucuses.

By SAM TANENHAUS

FOR more than two years, conservatives have been riding a wave of Tea Party insurgency that has formed the most dynamic force in American politics, a protest movement that promised to slash taxes, close the federal deficit and remake Washington. And yet to judge from the results of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, some of the most engaged Republican voters are inching closer to nominating Mitt Romney, the candidate they like least, a Harvard-educated technocrat who is in many ways a mirror image of the president the insurgents want to dislodge.

Even in South Carolina, a seat of conservative activism, the opposition to Mr. Romney appears to be fragmented and diffuse, as Matt Bai reports this weekend in The Times Magazine. Others have put the case more bluntly. “Where’s the Tea Party?” a headline on Politico asked last week.

This is all the more puzzling because the Tea Party movement did not lack for useful precedents or operating models. On the contrary, it is “the latest in a cycle of insurgencies on the Republican right,” as the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice writes in his new book, “Rule and Ruin,” a chronicle of half a century of internecine Republican warfare. “Even the name of the movement was a throwback to the ‘T Parties’ of the early ’60s, part of the right-wing, anti-tax crusade of that era.”

On its surface the Tea Party movement snugly fits this pattern. An organized grass-roots revolt, its influence was decisive in the 2010 elections, when an energized base propelled Republicans to enormous gains in the House, helped secure Senate victories for fresh faces like Rand Paul and Marco Rubio and captured as many as 700 seats in state legislatures. The movement drove the Republican agenda to the right, making stars of legislators like Senator Jim DeMint and Representative Paul Ryan, and did much to shift the political debate from the jobless recovery to the growing national debt.

But even in those early, heady days there were signs of trouble.

In February 2010, while a conservative mandarin like William Kristol, the publisher and editor of The Weekly Standard, exulted that the Tea Party protest was “the best thing that has happened to the Republican Party in recent times,” Sarah Palin, the figure who has come closest to tapping directly into the movement’s animating passions, sent a very different message. Her keynote address to the Tea Party convention, held that month in Nashville, Tenn., and broadcast by both Fox News and MSNBC, was widely received (by, among others, David Broder, the consummate Beltway insider), as signaling a possible presidential run. But Ms. Palin’s remarks were essentially those of a supporter of the new insurgency, rather than its leader. Indeed, she explicitly rejected a leading role. “I caution against allowing this movement to be defined by any one leader or politician,” she said. “The Tea Party movement is not a top-down operation. It’s a ground-up call to caution that is forcing both parties to change the way they’re doing business, and that’s beautiful.” True to this sentiment, she chose to remain a media presence rather than a political one and eventually decided not to enter the presidential contest. Already there was a growing schism on the right, its fault lines precisely those Ms. Palin identified, between the elite — including Mr. Kristol and other journalists who had been among her first champions — and the base. This is a strikingly new development on the right.

It is hard to imagine a similar conflict happening during previous conservative insurgent cycles, mainly because they were centralized operations, often guided by insiders, in many cases Ivy League intellectuals who helped groom political figures for the national stage.

THE first successful insurgency, Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, was the brainchild of seasoned insiders in Washington and New York. Its strategic headquarters were on the East Coast — in fact a suite on Lexington Avenue, near Grand Central Terminal. Its organizational genius, F. Clifton White, a political scientist who had taught at Cornell, teamed up with William Rusher, the publisher of National Review. Together they sewed up slates of delegates even as Goldwater fared poorly in a series of contested primaries against moderates like Henry Cabot Lodge, Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton. Some of the ground troops for the Goldwater campaign were members of the Young Americans for Freedom, an organization created on the family estate of National Review’s editor, William F. Buckley Jr., in Sharon, Conn.

All the while, intellectuals were burnishing the Goldwater brand. One of National Review’s editors, L. Brent Bozell, wrote speeches for him and ghosted his manifesto, “Conscience of a Conservative.” Meanwhile, the journal became, in effect, a briefing book on a potential Goldwater presidency, weighing in with dozens of articles and policy proposals — on taxation, social security, labor law, foreign policy, military expenditures, race relations and more. One of National Review’s brightest young stars, Garry Wills, theorized that Goldwater might compensate for his controversial vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act if he set forth his own vision of racial justice, “encouraging private initiative where laws have not reached or cannot” — for instance by adopting a “policy of preferential hiring,” an idea that prefigured affirmative action.

In another essay, the literary scholar Hugh Kenner argued that since Beltway ideas originated within the universities, Goldwater might enrich “the tonality of the entire network” by “bringing to the academic ear Chicagoan rather than Keynesian economics.” One of those Chicagoans, Milton Friedman, an adviser to Goldwater, devised a model for a negative income tax. This idea later evolved into the current Earned Income Tax Credit, which provides a refund to many low- and moderate-income earners.

For these conservatives, the prospect of a Goldwater presidency offered more than protest against Democrats and liberals. It was an opportunity “to crystallize the conservative position in national affairs,” as Mr. Buckley explained after Goldwater’s devastating defeat in the general election. Crystallizing the position meant giving it more coherence and also making a case that skeptics and adversaries would have to take seriously. Goldwater intellectuals, including Mr. Wills and the novelist John Dos Passos, then joined a new organization, the American Conservative Union, which still is a powerful Beltway institution.

INTELLECTUALS were instrumental as well in the next great conservative insurgency, Ronald Reagan’s challenge to President Gerald R. Ford in 1976. The campaign drew on arguments in books like Mr. Rusher’s “The Making of a New Majority Party,” Kevin Phillips’s “Mediacracy” and Patrick J. Buchanan’s “Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories.” Each posited that the blue-collar Democratic constituency rooted in the New Deal had grown increasingly conservative, alienated from “big government.” Parallel arguments could be found in The Public Interest, the policy quarterly that specialized in rigorous critiques of federal antipoverty initiatives and pension fund “socialism.”

Such debate had the effect of uniting intellectuals with politicians, and of bridging differences that might otherwise have separated “top-down” strategists from “bottom up” activists.

Of course, the Tea Party faithful also claim that theirs is a movement of ideas, in many cases the same ideas that Goldwater and Reagan espoused. But they tend to emphasize quixotic crusades — the repeal of the 17th Amendment, which established the election of United States senators by popular vote, or Representative Ron Paul’s mission to abolish the Federal Reserve. Beyond this, “candidates who claimed the mantle of fiscal conservatism had no real plans for reducing government expenditures beyond the conservative pursuit of politics-as-warfare,” Mr. Kabaservice writes. They favor “cutting programs that benefited Democratic constituencies while preserving programs that benefited Republican constituencies and avoiding any serious reform of defense spending or middle-class entitlement programs.”

Tea Party adherents are often “strategically ambiguous” on fundamental economic issues, the Harvard scholars Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson note in their new book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.” They describe a conference last April, in which Jenny Beth Martin, one of the founders of Tea Party Patriots Inc., was asked about specific tax and health care measures. In the authors’ account, Ms. Martin said there was “no need to discuss the actual content of legislation because good proposals are always to be found at think tanks such as the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation.” In “Tea Party Patriots,” Ms. Martin’s own new book, written with Mark Meckler, the organization’s co-founder, there is some policy discussion along with familiar denunciations of government overreach. The book also proposes a “Forty-Year Plan for America’s Future.” It is weak on specifics. “What will the final plan look like?” Ms. Martin and Mr. Meckler ask. “One thing we can tell you from experience is that it will be far better, and wiser, than anything that any of us can imagine right now. When the creativity, ingenuity, and genius of the American people are unleashed, wonderful things happen.”

Perhaps, but it’s not a plan. It’s a preachment, aimed at the like-minded. The same is true of the Tea Party movement itself. Dick Armey, himself a Beltway insider before he became the chairman of FreedomWorks, one of the most powerful Tea Party organizations, acknowledged as much when he reportedly told the freshman Republicans shortly after the 2010 election: “You don’t owe your office to the majority. You owe your office to the people who put you there.” Those people, however, compose only a fraction of the electorate. And that fraction is divided. For now the beneficiary is Mitt Romney, who has emerged, paradoxically, as a kind of Goldwater in reverse, the lone moderate in a field of insurgents. Like Goldwater in 1964, he has swatted away each new rival, though in this instance they have been Tea Party favorites like Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Ron Paul. Another target, Newt Gingrich, may be the most credentialed insurgent in the field, the mastermind of the 1994 Republican revolution, which gave the party its first majority in the House of Representatives since the 1952 election.

After National Review denounced Mr. Gingrich, when he briefly rose to challenge Mr. Romney in Iowa, an article in The American Spectator, a conservative magazine that has been sympathetic to the insurgents, suggested that “William Buckley’s defiantly against-the-wind conservative masterpiece has gone G.O.P. establishment.” A more accurate term might be conservative establishment. But then, as Sarah Palin, whose own rise to celebrity was partly the doing of editors at National Review and The Weekly Standard, knows all too well, that particular establishment prefers to direct its revolutions from above.

NYT