A Democratic version of the Tea Party is a bad idea. Here’s why

Is it time for a Democratic Tea Party? Since President Trump’s victory, and especially after Senate Democrats rejected calls to force a government shutdown, there has been a flurry of calls for Democrats to adapt the tactics and strategy of the conservative, 2010s Tea Party movement for their own progressive ends. Some activists have argued that the Tea Party can teach Democrats some valuable lessons about the power of bottom-up organizing.

That may be so. But political scientists like me have been studying the impact of the Tea Party on American politics for over a decade. And this research tells us that the Tea Party also offers some other important lessons about what not to do, at least, if Democrats actually want to build and wield political power.

The first thing that comes to mind when we think of the Tea Party’s impact on American politics is the 2010 elections, when the emergence of the Tea Party coincided with an epic Republican wave. But whatever electoral benefit the Tea Party movement produced for Republicans was short-lived. Just two years later, President Obama won re-election, and the Democrats picked up seats in both the House and Senate. And political scientists have found no evidence that identification with the Tea Party movement helped Republican candidates in 2012. In that election, Tea Party Republicans tended to win in the places where far-right Republicans would have won anyway.

Even the Tea Party’s earlier success in 2010 is less impressive than it seems at first glance. One of the most stable findings in political science, including in my own research on American concerns about inequality, is that Americans’ political preferences swing back and forth on a pendulum: When American policy moves to the left, Americans get more conservative. When American policy moves to the right, they get more liberal. This is one reason why the president’s party usually loses seats in midterm elections. When Obama passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and a huge stimulus bill in his first two years in office, the Tea Party was able to ride the resulting rightward pendulum swing to big victories in a year in which Republicans were already expected to do well. But it couldn’t deliver Republicans a victory two years later, when it mattered even more.

If Democrats want a roadmap for taking back the presidency in 2028, the Tea Party shouldn’t be their model. That said, the Tea Party does offer some important warnings. Although the Tea Party’s ideological purity and hostility to compromise energized the Republican base, it made it difficult for them to actually get stuff done. One of the Tea Party’s most important priorities was repealing the ACA, but they were never able to do it. In 2013, while Obama was still president, they tried to force him to repeal the law by shutting down the government, a strategy that ended in total failure. Even in 2017, when Republicans controlled all three branches of government, the Tea Party’s own refusal to compromise destroyed Republicans’ hopes of repealing the ACA. When it comes to changing policy and passing laws, the Tea Party seems to teach a powerful lesson about how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

It is precisely because the post-Tea Party version of the Republican party is largely ineffective at actually passing laws (even when they control both houses of Congress) that Trump has turned to executive orders and the novel but unconstitutional strategy of just not spending money that Congress has ordered the government to spend. But Democrats who want the government to do more (as opposed to less) need to actually pass legislation to achieve their goals.

Perhaps most ominously, the Tea Party also teaches us what can happen when a grassroots insurgency overthrows party leadership, but provides nothing to replace it. Political science research confirms that the Tea Party’s radicalism helped to fracture and weaken the Republican Party. And Republican leaders like Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, who championed the Tea Party, were then forced to watch in despair as it kicked them to the curb and transformed the party into a cult of personality with no real principles beyond what Trump happens to be in favor of on any given day.

The lesson here is that, if you burn down a political party, you may not have control over what emerges from the ashes. Maybe it’s something better and stronger. But maybe it’s an authoritarian demagogue or a dysfunctional assortment of perpetually squabbling splinter groups.

The Tea Party offers many lessons for Democrats. But its most important lesson might be that when it comes to winning elections and changing policy, enthusiasm and purity alone may not be enough.

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