The establishment took notice and, in conjunction with a mainstream media that absolutely toed the establishment line, reacted. It was not merely the Democrats who did so. Moderate Republicans whose view of big government could be summed up as, “Well, okay, we’ll expand it, but not quite so much right now,” were especially threatened. They were as much a part of the status quo as any overt Democrat statist. So, before the Tea Party could take on the Democrats and return America to what it saw as its traditional politics, the insurgents needed to seize control of the GOP. That meant that the first targets for the Tea Party were other “conservatives” who were not quite so conservative in practice.
In 2010, Tea Party activism—supercharged by the Democrats’ ram-through of the disastrous Obamacare medical insurance reform plan—led to the recapture of the House of Representatives. But it was much less successful in 2012, when several Tea Party–associated candidates made rookie mistakes that likely cost the GOP the Senate—although it was less widely noted at the time that several “traditional” Republican candidates also lost what should have been easy races even as Obama was reelected.
Over the years following Obama’s reelection, the Tea Party fought on two fronts, both against a liberal administration that was attempting to translate a slim electoral victory into a mandate to move even harder left and a GOP establishment that was reluctant to fight for the principles it paid lip service to during the campaign. The conservatives, labeled the “Tea Party” even though that name had less and less meaning over time, forced a confrontation with the administration that led to a short government shutdown. GOP moderates engineered a capitulation, hoping this defeat for their internal opponents would quell the rebellion forever.
The anti-Tea Party reaction was vicious, and its excesses went hand-in-hand with the other actions of the Obama administration that demonstrated to the budding insurgents that America was being fundamentally changed for the worst. The media and popular culture savaged the Tea Party, painting it as racist, as crypto-fascist, and astonishingly, as a tool of the very large corporations the Tea Party itself opposed. Vilified in polite society, the Tea Party—or, rather, the label “Tea Party”—largely vanished. But the insurgency it had sparked only grew.
That growth was fueled by the plummeting credibility and the increasing lawlessness of the Obama administration. Within weeks of the ignominious end of the shutdown, the fiasco that was Obamacare became undeniable. The website that allowed users to participate in the insurance exchanges simply failed to function. While this embarrassing lapse would be remedied over time, the fact that the law would throw millions of Americans off their insurance plans in favor of new, Obamacare-friendly plans that covered needs they didn’t have with higher deductibles at much higher prices could not.
While moderates hesitated, grassroots conservatives savaged the administration for its outright lies, producing video compilations of Obama promising Americans, “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” The liberal media was forced to take the position that millions of infuriated Americans should have known better than to believe what they were told. It was a harsh, but indelible, lesson for millions of Americans who had bought into the idea of “hope and change.”
Frustrated by an opposition that dared to defy it, as time wore on the Obama administration and its liberal allies would reject the norms that had previously governed American politics and act without regard to the customs, practices, and even laws that had restrained previous presidents. It turned the Internal Revenue Service on Tea Party–aligned groups. It ended the 200-year-old tradition of the filibuster in the Senate. As the curtain came down on the Obama presidency, the liberal establishment began to actively seek to suppress free speech. Power prevailed over principle, and the conflict within the culture intensified.
This trend would continue through the Hillary Clinton administration. It would eventually lead to liberalism’s defeat as ascendant conservatives mercilessly dismantled the welfare state while liberals watched helplessly, their power to stop it hamstrung by the very majoritarian precedents they had used to build it.
The Obama administration and the liberal establishment’s exercise of raw power began early. They passed a huge stimulus in the first months of 2009 without any bipartisan support. It was, essentially, a trillion dollar payoff to Democratic voting blocs. It did nothing for the economy, which would languish throughout both the Obama and Clinton administrations. They forced through the failed Obamacare plan without a single Republican vote, choosing to reorganize a sixth of the economy over the objections of every single member of the opposition. Obamacare’s utter failure, which could not be foisted off on liberalism’s opponents, would be one of the weights that would help drag liberalism down.
The Obama administration’s lawlessness, and Clinton’s choice to follow her predecessor’s path, not only sparked anger and distrust in government that fed the insurgency but made compromise impossible. By turning the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies on its political enemies (whether Obama himself knew about the targeting, or whether he merely created an atmosphere that tolerated such un-American activities, remains unclear even now), the Obama administration undercut the moral legitimacy of the federal government. By refusing to enforce laws it disapproved of, such as the crucial enforcement provisions of the carefully crafted comprehensive immigration reform legislation pushed through with the help of the GOP establishment, the Obama administration made compromise impossible. It simply could not be trusted to perform its part of any bargain, so there would be no further bargains.
The standoff in Washington begun after the Tea Party–fueled takeover of the House in 2010 continued after the brutal 2014 midterm election season. The passage of the comprehensive immigration reform law—an inexplicable lifeline tossed to Obama at his nadir by big business interests and Republican moderates—split the GOP, and the Republicans’ dream of retaking the Senate floundered. Even with Obamacare failing before the electorate’s eyes, the GOP barely held the House, though several new insurgent-affiliated members arrived after having successfully primaried moderate incumbent Republicans.
The Obama administration doubled-down on its embrace of executive power, largely ignoring the Congress and seizing new powers through the administrative state during its last two years. These abuses of power continued, and the Clinton administration likewise made little effort to hide its use of government agencies to punish its enemies and reward its friends.
Yet the conservative insurgency grew with each new overreach and each new abuse. The seeds the Tea Party had planted a few years before were sprouting. Activists who had been inspired to take seats on school boards, local Republican committees, and the like now had several years of experience governing as well as enthusiasm. Out in the hinterlands, under the media’s radar and operating where grassroots power could have the greatest effect, they began to have an impact. A growing farm team of conservative leaders was developing, gaining experience, and waiting to move up the ladder.
Insurgents fought back against liberal power grabs in court, recognizing that because the largely liberal judiciary would ignore the law, the real value of the judicial process in the short term was as political theater to highlight liberal wrongdoing. The courts themselves aided the cause by overstepping. Hillary Clinton’s replacement for Anthony Kennedy, a liberal feminist academic like most of her appointees, tipped the balance of the Supreme Court hard to the left and drove millions of formerly passive Americans into the insurgency. She was placed on the Court only because the Democrats eliminated the last vestige of the traditional filibuster, a maneuver they would come to regret.