Rare News Desk
The Tea Party has hit a rough patch, or so most of the political commentariat is saying.
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Tuesday’s primary elections caught the movement flat-footed, with Bryan Smith wildly outspent in Idaho and Matt Bevin getting pulverized in Kentucky. A recent CBS News poll found that only 15 percent of voters say they support the Tea Party.
In response, several writers have argued that, while the Tea Party is losing disparate political battles, it’s already prevailed in the larger war by dragging the GOP towards fiscal responsibility.
“The ‘establishment’ candidates may have won [on Tuesday], but they did so by becoming increasingly conservative,” opined Ben Jacobs at the Daily Beast. “The GOP, like any smart political entity, absorbed that energy, in the form of fiscal conservatism,” according to Doyle McManus.
Jacobs and McManus are largely correct. The Tea Party isn’t about endless primary challenges or perpetual revolution. In fact it was never focused on electoral success per se. Its goal was to fundamentally alter the ideological composition of the Republican Party.
With the GOP far more unbending on government spending than it used to be, and with thinkers like Rand Paul and Mike Lee prodding the system from within, they’ve enjoyed a degree of success once thought impossible.
But that also doesn’t mean that the Tea Party can string up its “Mission Accomplished” sign and go home. The GOP might be evolving, but at its core—and especially among its leaders and donors—it still has a strong bias towards the hoary Bush administration consensus.
Endless war and education federalization might not poll well (even in the GOP), but they still hold great sway over Republican fat cats.
Take the sequester. If ever there was an issue to dynamite open the chasm between the establishment and the Tea Party, it was last year’s automatic budget cuts. The traditional GOP position has long been to support military spending no matter how bloated the Pentagon gets or how gaping the deficit becomes. The Tea Party, on the other hand, is fiscally hawkish first and foremost.
Grover Norquist recently held up sequestration as proof that the Tea Party won the GOP civil war. But did it really? It’s true that Republican leaders in the House allowed sequestration to take effect. But then they repealed its deepest cuts in last year’s budget agreement, negotiated by supposed small-government champion Paul Ryan and supported by 169 House Republicans.
All this over budget cuts that turned out to have baby teeth: the sequester resulted in exactly one government lay-off and no federal employee was furloughed for more than seven days.
Or consider that in 2008, of all the Republican presidential candidates, only one, a member of the Paul family, supported a more restrained foreign policy. Now after five years of Tea Party activism and libertarian intellectual ferment, of all the likely 2016 Republican presidential candidates, only one, a member of the Paul family, supports a more restrained foreign policy.
Granted, Rand is a far more palatable campaigner than his father and has a real shot at winning the presidency. But at a time when the public thinks America should “mind its own business internationally” by a margin of fourteen points, the GOP has remained remarkably resistant to change on international issues.
If Rand Paul runs for president, he’ll probably have to endure a swarm of attacks from Republican moneymen like the crapulous Sheldon Adelson.
Then there’s the farm bill that increased subsidies for agribusiness, supported by 163 House Republicans. There’s Justin Amash’s NSA amendment, killed thanks to 134 House Republicans. And there’s the astonishing movement in Congress to resurrect earmarks, supported by at least one Senate Republican.
If the Tea Party is trying to evolve the GOP into something more like the human race, then we’re at the Australopithecus stage—midway, showing certain cognitive functions, but still prone to random and spontaneous acts of violence against others.
So while the party is on the right track, the policy battles and those contentious primaries must continue, even if they’re more selective and muted than before.
It took Australopithecus almost 2 million years to become the modern human being. Hopefully the GOP’s evolution will prove slightly less stubborn.
