A dozen years ago, a flippant remark on television set off what came to be known as the Tea Party movement. There are many remarkable things about that movement, not the least of which was the 2010 election. It was a massive rebuke of the political class and a precursor to the popular unrest we see today. White people got truly angry and self-organized to express their anger at the system.
Another remarkable feature of the Tea Party movement was just how little it accomplished, despite the numbers and cash it possessed. The new Republican majority in the House did nothing useful. They blamed the Tea Party for having cost them some Senate elections. They said without the Senate, the party was helpless to roll back the Obama agenda. Then they got the Senate and did nothing.
The great 2016 revolt was a response to the failure of the Tea Party. It was more of a rejection of the GOP than a rejection of Washington. Maybe the GOP was just the convenient symbol for the system. Regardless, the same people who were in the Tea Party movement rallied to elect Trump. Like before, the response from the Republicans was to undermine and thwart the efforts of their voters.
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