I have a different take on this piece.
It tells of a political effort that has been very successful at achieving the aims of those behind the movement.
I’ve expended as much vitriol about and toward the Tea Party and its impact as anyone, but bitching has become a luxury we can’t afford. It failed to stop the flow of body bags from 9/11, from Iraq, from school shootings, from domestic shootings, from neglected infrastructure, from rural areas with sparse healthcare and an entire country with unaffordable healthcare, from industrial pollution, from an ongoing epidemic of obesity-related disease, from greed-enabled opioid addiction, and from general incompetence in addressing needs that wont be addressed by profit-driven organizations.
We dont really need more evidence of what the problem is.
Similarly, we don’t need any more evidence that liberals in general and Democrats in particular have not learned an effective way to counter the GOP message.
Sure, we have to go all out to win the 2020 election, like every other election, but we really have to stop expecting to have consistent success when we try to rebuild a majority coalition anew for each election and we expect that superior qualifications and superior policy proposals will win.
What can we learn from the success of the Tea Party and all the other pieces of the right-wing political operations? They have been remarkably successful at driving an agenda that isn’t very popular. We can’t, and shouldn’t try to be a mirror image of the right, but we sure as hell ought to be able to figure out how to succeed with an agenda that is more popular and better at serving the needs of Americans.