The failure of the Tea Party movement to rally around a single presidential candidate has convinced many pundits that its time as a major force in mainstream politics may be coming to an end. But make no mistake, even if “Tea Party” fades as a label, the forces that created the Tea Party movement and the ideology the label represents are likely to be around for a long time — because the Tea Party ideology and rhetoric have long been a part of American life.
For the past century, a series of movements with different names has argued that the modern administrative state is an un-American and unconstitutional aberration. In the 1930s, the American Liberty League said New Deal programs like Social Security and minimum-wage protections were the work of alien socialists. In the 1950s, the John Birch Society said that fluoridated water was a communist plot and Eisenhower a dupe for the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, Barry Goldwater and his supporters argued that government programs to end segregation and discrimination conflicted with bedrock principles laid out by the founding fathers. In the 1990s, the “patriot movement” claimed that the United States was giving up its national sovereignty to the United Nations.
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