The Tea Party, Now More Dead Than Ever

FreedomWorks shuts its doors, its time in the limelight a fading memory.

Photo by Sage Ross

Freedom suffered a terrible blow this week, when the noble crusaders staffing FreedomWorks were told that the organization is shutting down. Leaders blamed the group’s flagging fundraising and influence on Donald Trump, whose cult of personality has swallowed the entire right and apparently left little room for FreedomWorks’ libertarian-ish philosophy to flourish.

That story is partially true, but the ways in which it doesn’t quite match recent history and that of the tea party — a movement FreedomWorks helped define — show us how we should understand that extended period of craziness. 

While FreedomWorks had been around for a while before Barack Obama was elected in 2008, it found its true purpose as a promoter and enabler of the tea party movement that dominated the anti-Obama backlash. From the beginning, the movement was both bottom-up and top-down: There were lots of local tea party organizations that sprang up and ordinary people who got involved in grassroots mobilizing, and at the same time, elite conservative groups like FreedomWorks gave guidance, funding, and promotion to the movement. They knew what many of those foot soldiers may not have completely understood at the time: It was all bullshit. 

By that I don’t mean that the rank-and-file tea partiers weren’t genuinely mad. They were. But they weren’t mad about government spending, which was the ostensible target of their rage. No, what they were really mad about was the fact that a Democrat — and even worse, a black man — had just become president. 

The allure of Founding Father Fetishism

It all began barely a month after Obama took office, when CNBC’s Rick Santelli unleashed an on-air rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange ostensibly about the mortgage crisis, which included a call for “A Chicago tea party.” It struck a chord with Republicans looking for a way to focus the backlash against Obama, and before you knew it, dozens of organizations with “Tea Party” in their names were being formed. Whenever there was a conservative protest about any issue, people would show up in revolutionary garb. 

With groups like FreedomWorks pushing it along, elite Republicans rushed to get to the front of the parade, declaring themselves part of the movement. “I was the Tea Party before there was a Tea Party,” said Speaker of the House John Boehner, the target of so much ire as a leader of the GOP establishment that the far right believed was stopping them from tearing government down. At one point, a bunch of formerly prominent GOP greybeards including Ed Meese and Brent Bozell organized a “Mount Vernon Statement,” announced at an event that featured a George Washington impersonator and immortalized in a document laid out on vellum with fancy script, just like John Hancock would have wanted. One of the few times I felt bad for Sarah Palin occurred when Glenn Beck, then the biggest star in right-wing media, demanded that she name her favorite Founding Father. Clearly unaware that she was supposed to have a favorite, Palin answered, “You know, well, all of them,” to which Beck said “Bullcrap. Who’s your favorite?” (she finally settled on Washington). Everyone had to get in on the act.

Former Saturday Night Live performer Victoria Jackson electrifies the crowd at a tea party rally in May 2009 (photo by RBerteig)

From the tea party to Trump

This was the atmosphere of the time, and it was all spectacularly phony. The tea party gave its adherents a heroic narrative to step into, enabling them to imagine themselves modern-day Madisons and Jeffersons, valiant and undaunted as they took enormous risks to stand up to tyranny. In fact, they took no risks at all, and whether they knew it or not, they were really standing up for the kind of people who funded FreedomWorks: billionaire plutocrats who saw them as shock troops for an agenda of tax cuts and deregulation.  

It was also a fantastic opportunity for conservative grifters to separate the gullible masses from their money. Tea party-themed scams proliferated in the long-running show I have referred to as the Circle of Scam, in which right-wing groups solicit donations to fight the good fight, but the money actually goes to enrich consultants and their partners in conservative media. Here’s one example involving FreedomWorks from 2014:

Glenn Beck worked the crowd like a preacher at a rally this month in Louisville, Ky., declaring that God had responded to conservatives’ prayers by sending a slate of tea party candidates to wrest control of the Republican Party from Mitch McConnell.

But there was a more earthly benefit to the arrangement that brought Beck to the rally. It was organized by the tea party nonprofit group FreedomWorks, which had endorsed the candidates — and which has paid more than $6 million in recent years to have Beck promote the group, its initiatives and events.

It turned out that Donald Trump was an even bigger draw and more compelling vehicle for the scam, and he didn’t even have to put on a tricorn hat. Nobody ever asked him who his favorite Founding Father is, because they knew the answer would be something even more idiotic than what Palin said. Trump doesn’t have the patience for the kind of tiring and tiresome playacting the tea party involves; it requires too much effort and commitment. He doesn’t pretend that he’s motivated by some centuries-old philosophy of government. He may be the biggest liar in the history of American politics (and probably that of the entire world), but he’s also straightforward in a way that can’t bother prancing around in an 18th-century waistcoat. 

In fact, that’s what many found so liberating about Trump: With him, you don’t have to pretend. You don’t have to make believe that you oppose illegal immigration but not legal immigration, or that you believe in equality, or that you care about fundamental American values, or that you don’t just want to punch your enemies in the face. 

Back when FreedomWorks was organizing tea party rallies, one might have looked at the combination of venomous anger and outright silliness prevalent on the right and asked “Could this get any worse?” The answer was “Of course it can.” And so it has.