https://www.indybay.org/uploads/2016/12/16/indivisible-resisting-trump-agenda.pdf
Here's the Tea Party success: it thwarted any chance for progressive reforms. The Tea Party succeeded by:
1. Changing votes and defeating legislation
2. Radically slowing federal policy making
3. Preventing any compromise by Republicans
4. Shaping the national debate to fit its terms
5. Ultimately allowing an extreme-right government hostile to every liberal reform of the last century
This was by a small group of people who represented but a small part of America. Very soon the US government will be nothing more than an enforcer of the will of a rapacious elite that might turn the calendar back as much as a century on political life.
What the liberal opposition must avoid doing that the Tea Party did:
1. Fabricating a reality
2. Threatening people that they see as enemies
3. Physically assaulting people
4. Using obscenities and such offenses as burning people in effigy
5. Targeting hatred not only at Congress, but also at persons for their religion or ethnicity. (For us that would be against Protestant fundamentalists and white people of the Mountain and Deep South).
We must be better than they are...
It's all local, so but national issues like Social Security, Medicare, poverty, environmental quality, tax equity, education, and reproductive rights are personal issues. Political life is an extension of personal morality.
Trump is a MODERATE Republican. This is what many Democrats don't get. He's not beholden to Congressional Republicans, and they know it.
There will be many areas where Trump's actual proposals will appeal to a coalitions of Republicans and Democrats. It is far from impossible that we will be back to the days were party regimentation in Congress will be lessened, as it was prior to 1994. Trump's proposals to strengthen infrastructure, and (possibly) his proposals on healthcare may be issues that will be popular with some Democrats, even as they repel the "miniscule government" faction of Republicans. (Democrats are emotionally vested in the ACA, but it's viability was in question from the day the SCOTUS shot down the expansion of Medicaid.) The Tea Party wanted to destroy Obama and GOP Fellow Travelers. That sort of concept isn't in line with the kind of compromise and achievement that gets things done.
