The New York Times wonders why there aren’t big protests against Joe Biden:
The number of conservative demonstrations nationwide since the Biden inauguration remains a fraction of the volume of liberal demonstrations that followed the Trump inauguration in 2017, according to data collected by the Crowd Counting Consortium, a public interest and scholarly project directed by the researchers Erica Chenoweth of Harvard and Jeremy Pressman of the University of Connecticut.
Where left-of-center demonstrations made up three-quarters of all demonstrations in the United States during the six months after Mr. Trump entered office, conservative demonstrations account for just 10 percent of the total since Mr. Biden did (protests against racism and policing have accounted for the majority). And at only a few dozen of them have protesters explicitly criticized Mr. Biden, according to the crowd counts, in contrast to the hundreds of Obama-critical Tea Party events held by the summer of 2009.
Well, there was that one time tens of thousands of MAGA’s got violent and stormed the capital to try to kill Pelosi and Pence. But other than that …
The transformation of the Republican Party since 2009 offers another possible explanation. The rise of the Tea Party “marked the beginning of a mainstreaming of right-wing resentment politics” that helped pave the way for Mr. Trump’s presidency, said Rachel Blum, a political scientist at the University of Oklahoma.
Its very success in remaking the G.O.P. might have made a new grass-roots resurgence on the right unnecessary. “There doesn’t need to be another Tea Party because Trumpism is the downstream” representation of it, Professor Skocpol said. “Trump is leading himself, front and center, a much more personality-centered embodiment of the same urges.” Where Mr. Obama commanded activist attention in 2009, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project has documented more than four times as many pro-Trump demonstrations as anti-Biden ones through July 20.
In some cases, Mr. Trump’s influence has fueled opposition to fellow Republicans rather than against Democrats. “A lot of the anger is focused on Republicans that betrayed Trump, that threw Trump under the bus,” Ms. Dooley said, mentioning Representative Liz Cheney, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell. “That’s what a lot of people are focused on versus 2009.”
The Tea Party was “anti-RINO” too. Remember Eric Cantor?
I wrote about this months ago, noting that the DC GOPers believed the Tea Party was going to re-emerge and shut down Biden’s domestic agenda, which was a joke:
Igor Bobick of the Huffington Post recently reported that Republican officials are anxiously awaiting a resurgence of the Tea Party, which they have been expecting to reconstitute in the face of Joe Biden’s ambitious agenda. It was, after all, a smashing success back in 2009 and 2010 in opposing President Barack Obama’s health care plan. You’d certainly assume that they’d be getting the band back together. But so far, it isn’t happening. And there’s a reason for it: people like what they are seeing.
Bobic quotes deficit hawk Republican Sen. Mike Braun saying, “even my counties back in Indiana are happy, which is a very conservative area. They’re asking, ‘How can I spend $15 million in a rural county?'” Braun ruefully admits that Biden’s agenda is a smart political move and he’s right. Biden and the Democrats are betting that people are hungry for some positive government action and they are determined to deliver it.
But there’s more to it than that.
The Tea Party was a grassroots movement but it was also heavily subsidized by some of the wealthiest activists in the country. The Koch brothers’ operation and other wealthy interests spent quite a bit of money to make the Tea Party a reality because their libertarian ideology really was on the line. But when you think about it, it was a bizarre set of issues for grassroots activists who usually organize themselves around a sense of victimization. And it didn’t really fit their usual modus operandi. The “threat” was a total abstraction — how were they “victims” of other people getting health care?
Sure, the right has always opposed government programs if it would benefit those they believe don’t deserve them (and I think you know who those people might be). But the outrage against Obamacare was really all about Obama. They had to sublimate their racist backlash into something and that was on the menu but the war the Tea Party was really fighting was against the election of America’s first Black president.
Yet some Republicans in Congress are still operating under the illusion that their voters really did care about deficits and will be moved to protest despite the fact that they still adore Donald Trump, a man who didn’t care about any of that. In fact, right-wing grassroots activists are already engaged in a battle that is far more energizing and interesting to them than any of that egghead economic stuff ever was: Donald Trump’s Big Lie.
According to a new CNN poll, 70% of Republicans believe the election was stolen. And they are taking action. We all know about the flurry of restrictive voting laws that are quickly being enacted all over the country and the preposterous “audit” taking place down in Arizona by a bunch of Trump fanatics and conspiracy theorists is probably just the beginning. The explosion of GOP grassroots activity in the states isn’t just about Joe Biden or the events happening in Washington. They are also working night and day to punish Republicans who dared to disagree with Trump’s version of events and ensure that Trump will be able to win the next election.Advertisement:
The Washington Post took a look at some of the grassroots action taking place around the country. They interviewed one Michigan organizer who is trying to censure and remove a Republican Party executive who accepted the results of the election. She said, “I think I speak for many people in that Trump has never actually been wrong, and so we’ve learned to trust when he says something, that he’s not just going to spew something out there that’s wrong and not verified.” That sort of cultish delusion is forcing official rebukes and purges of Trump apostates all across the country.
And then this happened to Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Ut., over the weekend:
The motion to censure the former GOP presidential nominee failed 711-798, which I’m sure softened the humiliating blow. But it’s bubbling up to Washington as well. The House GOP caucus thought they had successfully managed the “Liz Cheney problem” but it’s coming back. Axios reported that there may be another vote to remove her and from the behavior of the leadership, it seems as though the worm has turned, no doubt because these Representatives are getting an earful from their activist base. The party is now eating its own.
The Tea Party IS the Trump base. Always has been.