What Was The Tea Party?

By John Daniel Davidson - Posted at The Federalist:

Perhaps we can understand the surging populist support for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as the outgrowth of the Tea Party movement.

Most Americans think the Tea Party movement was a conservative protest against the Obama administration’s progressive policies. It certainly became that, but it didn’t begin as an outpouring of principled or coherent conservatism—nor was it only a movement of the Right.

In its wrath against Wall Street and crony capitalism, for example, the early Tea Party contained elements of the political Left. More than a complaint over any specific grievance, early Tea Party rallies—hodge-podge affairs featuring tri-cornered hats and, in a few cases, offensive signs—were an expression of deep anger and disillusionment, not with a particular party but with a political establishment perceived to serve special interests, not the American people.

Much of that populist anger was captured and channeled into Republican electoral victories in the 2010 and 2014 midterms, but its roots weren’t entirely partisan. Today, some eight years after the first Tea Party rallies, that anger hasn’t subsided. Its most visible expression has taken the form, paradoxically, of support for Donald Trump—a candidate who declared, the day the Tea Party staged its first large-scale protest in 2009, “I don’t march with the Tea Party.”

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