Are Democrats About to Have Their Tea Party Moment?

The anger in the base towards the party leadership is reminiscent of what happened to the GOP after Obama won

Democrats faced a hellish past few weeks. After Democratic House leaders kept the caucus together to almost unanimously oppose a partisan Republican spending bill, Senator Schumer and a handful of his Democratic colleagues abruptly changed strategy to pass a Trump and Musk-endorsed spending bill with painful cuts.

We can debate how much leverage Democrats would possess in a funding fight, but unquestionably, it’s one of the rare moments of leverage available to the minority.

The response within the party ranks, from elected leadership to local activists to everyday voters, has been a combination of rage and despair. After two months of Trump running roughshod over our democracy, people are demanding a proportionate response from the opposition. Folks are calling for Schumer to step down and floated primary challenges against the Democrats. So many protests were scheduled for Schumer’s upcoming book tour that he canceled it at the last minute.

The public is wondering if Democrats are headed for their “Tea Party moment.” The party may face a grassroots uprising that includes primary challenges for incumbents and an insurgency that could cost current leadership their positions.

Brendan Buck, a former aide to Speakers Boehner and Ryan, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times warning Democrats of the danger of this moment. Despite some misbegotten life choices, Brendan is a smart guy who saw the damage of a Tea Party-dominated GOP up close. He specifically warned:

While a shutdown was avoided this time, many Democrats are engaging in similarly absurd thinking. It is important to appreciate that the bill that Democrats have melted down over is not any kind of conservative coup. It is a stopgap measure to largely keep in place the same spending levels set under President Joe Biden. Democrats just appear to want what they don’t have, and that is any legislative option to stop Mr. Trump. Unfortunately for them, choosing which bills get a vote and which ones the president signs are not privileges afforded to the minority.

Democrats have long mocked Republicans for being prisoner to their base, perhaps thinking their own party too sophisticated or pragmatic to meet the same fate. We have shown, though, that what starts as spoiling for a fight can end in a party taken over by demagogues unmoored from principle.

Brendan is not the only one raising this issue. He echoes recent conversations on Twitter and cable news.

Like Brendan, I had front-row seats to the rise of the Tea Party. I saw the dramatic shift from a Republican Party dominated by Bush and John McCain to one filled with bomb-throwers like Jim Jordan and other extremists more interested in watching the world burn than enacting a positive agenda. I watched the Tea Party attempt to deface the first Black president rather than governing. There are some overly facile similarities, but to say that Democrats are in the same position as Republicans in 2010 misunderstands that moment — and this one.

1. The Core of the Tea Party Movement

In the popular imagination, the Tea Party movement was a grassroots uprising against the big spending policies of both parties — a response to the bailouts, the stimulus, and the impending passage of the Affordable Care Act.

The movement originated with a viral rant from CNBC commentator Rick Santelli calling for a “Tea Party” in response to the Obama Administration’s plan to help homeowners facing foreclosure (How dare we!).

Members of the Tea Party movement showed up en masse at town halls to challenge members of Congress. The images of these angry exchanges embodied both the Tea Party movement and the backlash against Obama and the policies that rescued the country from the financial crisis.

The town hall exchanges from 2010 look eerily similar to the ones from last month as members of the public confronted Republicans over Elon Musk’s efforts to slash government. So it’s easy to see this moment as the inverse of what the GOP went through 15 years ago.

However, the idea of the Tea Party as a movement primarily about lower taxes and small government was always an oversimplification. The movement was also a backlash to the election of the first Black president. Tea Party candidates frequently spread disinformation that Obama was not born in America. Republican Leaders, like Boehner, refused to push back on the lie for fear of angering the Tea Party. A 2016 Stanford University study found that perceptions of threats to racial status were a key driver of Tea Party membership.