Rip Gop

by Stanley B Greenberg

  Even the leaders of the Tea Party groups did not realize what they had accomplished. After all, President Barack Obama would be reelected by the American people with an Electoral College landslide in 2012. But that landslide obscured the escalating erosion of white and white working-class voters’ support for Democrats and the Democrats’ own voters’ disillusionment with the economic recovery. Both allowed Republicans to gain from a second off-year wave in 2014 and Donald Trump to win the presidency in 2016.

  This historic but deep and prolonged political moment was produced by the rebellion of the conservative, antiestablishment wing of the Republican Party, which deeply feared a socialist Obama presidency, fueled by a genuine grassroots resistance that brought 250,000 into membership and organized rallies and marches, the work of the Koch brothers, far-right billionaire allies, and Fox News, which devoted itself to promoting the Tea Party resistance. Academics Vanessa Williamson and Theda Skocpol rightly describe it as “a mix of local networks, resource-deploying-national organizations, and conservative media outlets [that] constitute Tea Partyism and give a great deal of dynamism and flexibility at a pivotal juncture of US politics.”4

  It began with Rick Santelli’s rant on CNBC from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and his call for a “Chicago Tea Party” that went viral, pushed by conservative activists skilled in using the web. “This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hands! President Obama, are you listening?”5 He situated his rebellion against the government plan to help people facing foreclosure to refinance their homes; in reality, he was outraged that African Americans and Hispanics, who had been targeted for subprime loans packaged by the very derivative traders who were now being offered government help, were now in desperate need of help.6 It made it easy for conservatives to elide white and black, instead targeting “hardworking taxpayers” and “freeloaders.”7

  The couple dozen protests on February 27 were sparsely attended, despite Rush Limbaugh’s branding the economic stimulus as “Porkulus” and organizational help from the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, headed by former Congressman Dick Armey.8

  Ultimately, 400,000 to 810,000 people joined 542 rallies across the country and 250,000 would join one of the Tea Party groups—Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet, Tea Party Express, Tea Party Nation, FreedomWorks Tea Party, and 1776 Tea Party. Some of the groups were genuinely local and decentralized, and the Tea Party Patriots led the membership growth after the Tax Day rallies in 2009.9 The average congressional district had 402 Tea Party members. At the core were the 250,000 activists and 150,000 who posted personal profiles on Tea Party sites in 2010.10

  None of this mobilization would have been possible without Fox News. Three in five Tea Party supporters watched Fox News, and its coverage of the Tea Party grew in the month leading up to Tax Day and continued at a respectable level in the month afterward. CNN covered the Tea Party during the April 15 rallies. Fox’s most popular hosts Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, and Neil Cavuto broadcast from Tea Party events. Glenn Beck received $1 million a year to read embedded content provided by FreedomWorks, and he cosponsored a September 12 rally as the Democratic Congress was taking up the Affordable Care Act.11 That rally was a turning point for the movement, as all the groups worked together and met in the street: “Before the last port-a-potties were removed from the Capitol Mall, the Tea parties had turned from periodic protests into a full-fledged social movement.”12 Tea Party members tried to dominate when questions were asked at Democratic congressional members’ town halls and their jostling and shouting at Democrats going to vote at the Capitol made them a disruptive presence.13

  The size of the Tea Party as a social movement was not that large by historical standards nor as large as the Women’s March that would follow the inauguration of Donald Trump as president. “But the professionalization of the underground infrastructure,” Jane Mayer writes, “the growth of sympathetic and in some cases subsidized media outlets, and the concentrated money pushing the message from the fringe to center stage were truly consequential.”14

  This social movement gained force and momentum, to be frank, because President Obama was “at the vortex.” The Tea Party was dominated by a “freewheeling anti-Obama paranoia.”15

  Of course, all the Tea Party groups said their biggest concerns were budget deficits, taxes, and the overreach of the federal government, but the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights report, Tea Party Nationalism, said the Tea Party gave “a platform to anti-Semites, racists, and bigots.” Hardcore white nationalists and militias were attracted to some of the rallies of the 1776 Tea Party, a group with fewer members than I have Twitter followers. The leader of the Tea Party Express was forced to resign because of his racist rants, referring to President Obama as “a half-white racist, a half-black racist and an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare fraud.”16

  But racial resentment and hostility to immigration were front and center for the principal groups, which is why they had such an impact. The leaders of the two largest groups, Tea Party Patriots and ResistNet, were strongly anti-immigration and wanted repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment, which ensured citizenship by birthright. Their keynote speaker was Congressman Steve King, who led the GOP caucus pushing for stronger enforcement of immigration laws. All but the FreedomWorks Tea Party had “birthers” in their leadership and described the president as not an American, probably a Muslim, creating a compelling rationale for the call “Take it back, Take your country back.”17

  As Barack Obama was being inaugurated as president of the United States, Charles Koch, the CEO of Koch Industries and longtime funder of far-right and libertarian groups, gathered a small group of billionaire allies at a small desert down outside Palm Springs. The mood could not have been more grim. Koch had written to his employees that America faced “the greatest loss of liberty and prosperity since the 1930s.”

  The participants at Koch’s annual retreat invited donors who funded the most conservative initiatives for decades: Richard Mellon Scaife, Harry and Lynde Bradley, John Coors, Betsy DeVos, Robert Mercer, and Sheldon Adelson. They included more than a few who faced legal or regulatory jeopardy. And they included the owners of energy and coal companies who shared the Koch brothers’ worry about what an Obama administration might do in addressing climate change.18

  They determined, in Jane Mayer’s description, “to nullify the results of the election.” They were determined “to stop the Obama administration from implementing the Democratic policies that the American public had voted for but that [the Kochs] regarded as catastrophic.”19 Senator James DeMint of South Carolina, who spoke at the meeting, set the tone: “Compromise is surrender.” DeMint would soon have a whole coterie of Senate and House Tea Party allies who were determined to stop the Democrats from governing or doing anything they had been elected to achieve.20 DeMint also did not realize yet that stopping the Democrats cold was a tactic that would be extended through four elections. Indeed, during the fight over the Affordable Care Act, DeMint said, “If we’re able to stop Obama on this [ACA], it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”21

  The GOP leadership in Congress never gave the president a honeymoon and tried to ensure his failure, even at the middle of the financial crash. Every Republican House member voted against the president’s economic recovery program and all but three in the U.S. Senate voted against it in early 2009.22 The determination of Republican base voters to stop the Democrats was growing, and by 2012, GOP establishment candidates lost their primaries, were forced off the party’s line, or were forced out of the party in Utah, Alaska, Kentucky, Colorado, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and, most spectacularly, Florida, where Tea Party–backed candidate Marco Rubio defeated the incumbent governor Charlie Crist.23

  On January 21, 2010, right at the outset of the off-year election, the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Ele
ction Commission overturned the ban on corporations and unions giving to political campaigns. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote on the highest court, wrote, “By suppressing the speech of manifold corporations, both for-profit and nonprofit, the Government prevents their voices and viewpoints from reaching the public and advising voters on which persons or entities are hostile to their interests. Factions will necessarily form in our Republic,” citing Federalist Paper No. 10, “but the remedy of ‘destroying the liberty’ of some factions is ‘worse than the disease.’”24 That ruling liberated billionaires to become oligarchs and spend their wealth seeking control of the U.S. government. It was already legal to donate secretly to 501(c)(3)s that engaged in nonpartisan charitable activities and 501(c)(4)s that did some political work related to their social welfare purpose. In 2006, just 2 percent of campaign spending was “dark money” channeled through these vehicles or super PACs, but in 2010, it would be 40 percent. Koch and his allies spent $130.7 million to stop the Democrats.25

  The Tea Party wave election created a Republican Congress and the freshmen class was determined to disrupt regular order in the House and President Obama’s plans on increased government spending, above all else. As the economy stalled short of a recovery and unemployment was still near 10 percent, President Obama sought modest new spending and tax cuts, but the determined House Republicans pressed for big short- and long-term cuts in federal spending that would give America its own period of austerity.

  The 2010 Tea Party wave election produced an unprecedented and enduring ideological shift in the Congress. The new class of Republicans into the 112th Congress was dramatically more conservative than the Republicans in the prior one, but indeed, the extent of the shift to the right was greater than witnessed in any prior wave election—including that produced by the Newt Gingrich Revolution in 1994. Over three quarters of the new members were Tea Party freshmen, and they were committed conservatives.26 The GOP Tea Party triumph produced an immediate polarization of the Congress that only worsened with time.

  With such an ideological wave, Theda Skocpol wrote, the Tea Party freshmen had a mandate “to demand immediate measures to slash public spending and taxes,” “go nuclear,” and “refuse compromises with Democrats over the funding of government.” They were acutely conscious of the Tea Party protests to stop the Democrats from moving their agenda on the economy, health care, and climate change.27 They had a mandate to repeal Obamacare, slash government spending, and block “cap and trade.” Sent by the Tea Party and Evangelical base, the legislators were determined to stop immigration and abortion, too.

  Half of Republican identifiers supported the Tea Party, and their views could not be clearer for the Tea Party freshmen: they viewed the government’s rescue of the economy as “morally wrong” and their country as “going to be ‘lost.’”28 The Tea Party base and leaders almost universally opposed the economic stimulus (91 percent against), Obamacare (88 percent), and clean energy (81 percent), and wanted to end DACA, the program that legalized the status of the children of undocumented immigrants.29 And the Evangelicals cheered on and joined the Tea Party protests against President Obama, making the Tea Party fully socially conservative: two thirds would ban abortion or permit it only in the case of rape, incest, or the health of the mother. Two thirds would ban gay marriage.30

  The Tea Party class was acutely conscious of the Tea Party activism and rallies that drove the wave and produced a Congress that was dramatically more conservative than anything seen before. Sixty freshmen joined the Tea Party Caucus.

  The strength and energy of these rallies in congressional districts, according to an impressive study by academics Michael Bailey, Jonathan Mummolo, and Hans Noel, elevated the image of the Tea Party and produced a bigger Republican vote.31 And critically, increased Tea Party activism pushed members of Congress to join the Tea Party Caucus and even vote against the GOP House leadership on raising the debt ceiling and avoiding a government shutdown early in the new Congress.

  The new Tea Party members were prepared “to go nuclear” almost immediately, and we now appreciate that this emboldened conservatism was produced by the Tea Party–Evangelical bloc that felt angry and threatened by the Obama presidency and expressed itself through a social movement of grounded opposition in their districts. They were determined to stand in front of this train of government activism.

  FROM KEYNES TO AUSTERITY

  The Tea Party mandate was to stop President Obama’s efforts to address the financial crisis and deep recession.

  President Obama took office in a maelstrom. The economy shed 650,000 jobs a month during his transition to the job and 780,000 a month after he was inaugurated.32 People faced massive financial destruction in the devaluation of houses, stocks, and securities. The stock market lost over 50 percent of its value and shareholders lost $1.2 trillion. The burst housing bubble and deflation took away $16 trillion of net worth, and one in five had homes that were underwater. Consumer spending ground to a near halt. And “Watching wave after wave of foreclosure sweep across the American landscape,” as Alan Blinder writes, “was like watching a slow motion train wreck take a human toll.”33

  President Bush, President Obama, the U.S. Treasury, and the Federal Reserve battled to enact and implement the bailout of the eight Wall Street banks. They were focused on restoring stability to the financial system, which was successful, though little was done to restrain executive bonuses or give the taxpayers ownership in the banks going forward. The Fed on its own bought $2 trillion worth of assets to further stabilize the financial system. The Democratic administration and Federal Reserve in the United States and the Labour government and Bank of England in the UK both virtually nationalized the banks, guaranteed personal savings accounts, and, for twelve months, got governments globally to cut interest rates and raise short-term spending to stimulate the economy.34

  In unchartered territory, the Federal Reserve dropped interest rates from 3 to 2 percent and then to near zero, where they stayed for more than three years. The European Central Bank waited a year and momentarily raised them, but then cut interest rates sharply to 2 percent, ending at 1 percent.35 And in a coordinated immediate turn to Keynesian stimulus, the United States passed an economic stimulus package worth 5.5 percent of our GDP, while China did more than double that, Spain 7 percent, and Germany 3 percent. These stimulus packages worked to avoid a global depression and stabilize most of the economies.

  People were in pain, angry about the greed that had sunk the economy, though equally angry about the bailouts of the irresponsible and the lack of accountability. So, this whole structure was vulnerable to attack from conservatives and what economist Paul Krugman would call “the very serious people” in the room who frowned on unchecked spending.

  President Obama went to the Congress to pass an economic recovery program costing $888 billion, which was unprecedented at the time, though liberal economists publicly and privately said it was not big enough to get the wrecked economy moving again. To muster Republican support in the Senate, the administration cut $100 billion slated to help state and local governments avoid job layoffs and made tax cuts 40 percent of the total package. Obviously, both changes came at the expense of a fuller jobs recovery.

  Required to maintain a balanced budget, the states laid off 300,000 teachers. Republican governors did their part to block major infrastructure projects, including a planned tunnel under the Hudson River to increase train flow and high-speed rail construction in Florida and Wisconsin.36

  The federal government increased spending, but most of it went to higher unemployment benefits, tax credits, and food stamps, which are expected to surge when the economy sinks.37 They were helped by Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, who won changes in the 2008 Farm Bill that greatly expanded eligibility for food stamps and added more funds for them in the recovery act.

  The administration took only halfhearted steps to help the 3.1 million homes in foreclosure. “They had the power to do something about it
,” Blinder wrote, just as they had the authority to stabilize the banks, “and it just didn’t [happen].” People, he concluded, “felt as though they were mugged. It’s because they were.”38

  Government action did stabilize the financial system. It quickly slowed job losses and the economy began to add jobs in September. The elites could breathe again. However, this slow and incomplete recovery failed to get the economy back to full capacity and did not fix the underlying damage on the ground. The unemployment rate rose to a daunting 10 percent a year after Obama took office.

  And as Blinder wrote, nobody on the economic team spoke to the country about their strategy and the president gave no speeches on what to expect, though he spoke to a joint session of Congress on health care in September. The public was on its own in a time of crisis and pain. Most pretty quickly came to see Obama’s economic plan as a bailout of the banks.39

  James Carville, John Podesta, and I met with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and chief counselor David Axelrod repeatedly to discuss people’s deep pain and anger about the bailout of those who had produced the crisis and the need for the president to let the country know where he was taking it. In March 2010, I warned that the recession and pessimism were “worsening for our new base voters” of people of color, those under age thirty, and unmarried women, and there wasn’t much support for the idea that “Obama’s policies helped avert an even worse crisis.”40 I became apoplectic when President Obama cheered each job report in the summer of 2010, as unemployment remained high and new jobs paid much less than before the crisis.

  Unemployment was nearly 10 percent for much of 2010. All the seeming government activism left the economy well short of its capacity, and with 8.8 million people unemployed at the end of 2010—two and a half years after the financial crash. Clearly, America needed a federal government willing to spend and invest much more heavily in infrastructure and other job-creating programs that the private sector would and could not do. That is what Paul Krugman wrote at the time and later in his book: we cannot reduce unemployment and get out of this depression “without a burst of government spending.”41