How We Killed The Tea Party

Any postmortem should start with the fact that there were always two Tea Parties. First were people who believe in constitutional conservatism. These folks sense the country they will leave their children and grandchildren is a shell of what they inherited. And they have little confidence the Republican Party can muster the courage or will to fix it. Second were lawyers and consultants who read 2009’s political winds and saw a chance to get rich...

Republicans inside the Beltway reacted to the burgeoning Tea Party with glee but uncertainty about how to channel the grass-roots energy usually reserved for the left. A small group of supposedly conservative lawyers and consultants saw something different: dollar signs. The PACs found anger at the Republican Party sells very well. The campaigns they ran would be headlined “Boot John Boehner," or “Drop a Truth Bomb on Kevin McCarthy.” And after Boehner was in fact booted and McCarthy bombed in his bid to succeed him, it was naturally time to “Fire Paul Ryan." The selling is always urgent: “Stop what you’re doing” “This can’t wait.” One active solicitor is the Tea Party Leadership Fund, which received $6.7 million from 2013 to mid-2015, overwhelmingly from small donors. A typical solicitation from the TPLF read: “Your immediate contribution could be the most important financial investment you will make to help return America to greatness.” But, according to an investigation by POLITICO, 87 percent of that “investment” went to overhead; only $910,000 of the $6.7 million raised was used to support political candidates. If the prospect signs a “petition,” typically a solicitation ofhis or her personal information is recorded and a new screen immediately appears asking for money. Vendors pass the information around in “list swaps” and “revenue shares” ad infinitum...

POLITICO last year reviewed the activity of 33 conservative PACs for the 2014 cycle. Combined, they raked in $43 million dollars, according to the POLITICO report. Of that, $39.5 million went to overhead including $6 million to entities owned by PAC operators; candidates got $3 million. Another report analyzed 17 conservative PACs from the 2014 midterm. It came up with different numbers than POLITICO, finding that the bottom 10 PACs in terms of the ratio of spending to actual candidate support received $54,318,498 and spent only $3,621,896 supporting candidates....

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Even worse, as the competition for the conservative dollar grew, so did the hysterics. The movement literally tore itself apart in the quest to find the “true conservatives” or the right “warriors” who would finally topple Obama, repeal Obamacare, and expose the true extent of Hillary’s lies. They stoked controversies beyond all reason, fed the worst sort of conspiracy theories, and led rank and file conservatives to believe that their elected representatives were doing literally nothing to oppose the Obama administration. But conservatism-as-a-business corrupted more than just PACs. One of the reasons why the GOP presidential field was so large is that recent past experience (like Mike Huckabee’s television show) taught Republican politicians that there was upside in failure. Book deals, radio shows, and Fox contracts beckoned. Always there was an incentive for hyperbole. The result was a conservative movement that for some of its “leaders” devolved into three parts cash and one part principle. And in that formula, cash is king.

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