Did the Tea Party win or lose?

[darklordoftech]

Did the Tea Party succeed at getting the GOP to do what they want? Did they succeed at moving the overton window?

[Del Tachi]

You have to understand Trump/MAGA as the GOP reaction against the Tea Party, IMO.

[Thank you for being a friend...]

They won big, but it was also a movement that was designed to push the Republican Party to fight hard against Barack Obama and the Democrats, and so it had a specific intent: run candidates in the Republican primaries that would be very conservative, especially so on like health care, taxes, and spending.  The health care bill was so dragged out that it gave a lot of time for Tea Party members to get to the town halls and that got a lot of media coverage.  It made it look like the whole country was revolting against Obama - and it worked like a charm.

[HisGrace]

I think the Tea Party was fundamentally about aesthetics. Like 90% of them didn't care about the issues, they just wanted candidates who acted like buffoons, whether it be a nativist authoritarian, a Paulite pseudo-libertarian, or a standard conservative. It's politics as pro wrestling. That's pretty much what the entire Republican Party is now so they won in terms of taking over the party.

[MarkD]

Lost. Obamacare is still the law, isn't it?

[wnwnwn]

They won in 2010.

[Agonized-Statism]

Kinda. It was a big group and not all of them wound up on board with Trump: placing the civil service under direct presidential control rather than abolishing it outright really would go against some of the Tea Parters' values, as much as some want to paint them all with the same brush, although I'm sure some of the more conspiratorial ones justify it by imagining that Trump will use unitary executive theory to downsize the government. Nuance is important here.

It started as an organic policy-driven grassroots small government movement of rural Southerners and Midwesterners opposing the Bush administration's enormous government spending, especially on the post-9/11 forever wars once the occupation clearly lost the support of the American public around 2006. There was a lot of discontent from within the party with the Republican 109th Congress' smaller-than-average list of accomplishments, relatively short number of days in session, and numerous scandals (Jack Abramoff, Mark Foley, Cunningham). The Wall Street bailout was another formative moment. The base wanted a GOP focused on limiting the size and scope of government, and naturally the target once Obama got elected was Obamacare. It shared goals with the now also defunct libertarian and ancap movements of the post-Great Recession years- populated by techy millennial elite aspirants- but that's not what the Tea Party was. There were some early inklings of Trumpian populism with big financial firms and global corporations correctly linked to big government, and Main Street USA was the raison d'être: I still have an anti-NAFTA button from a Tea Party rally.

It was a grassroots movement in that the party was purged in favor of candidates backed enthusiastically by the conservative base. However, the PACs swallowed up resources and energy in overhead and vendor fees, and the Tea Party moniker and values were coopted by the party establishment. By the end, it had degenerated into a pyramid scheme and a marketing strategy to bring out the base without the earlier expectations of fiscal accountability from candidates.

The older Republican stalwarts that made up the movement found themselves powerless and irrelevant as the base was animated by new issues, namely the 2014 immigration crisis. They were crowded out by younger voters of the alt-right counterculture that emerged with Gamergate alongside social conservative and religious right movements renewed by discontent with the rapid social media-driven societal change of the day (the gay wedding cake story and Ferguson protests were key moments). There was also a bunch of previously civically disengaged voters whose call to arms was the global surveillance disclosures and the government attacks on political organizing it revealed. All those elements came together for Trump of course, and when the old establishment was quickly defeated in the primaries, they rallied behind Tea Partier Ted Cruz- that was when it became clear to the stragglers that the Tea Party and the establishment it once fought were dead.

[Vice President Christian Man]

Considering they took over the GOP, I'd say they did.