Part 4 (2/2)

Despite their ties to FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots presents itself as a gra.s.sroots-run umbrella group. From the start of activism in 2009, TPP steadily increased its connections to local groups and individual gra.s.sroots adherents. As of May 2011, the leaders of Tea Party Patriots claim that more than 1000 local Tea Parties are part of their flock, a number that almost certainly overstates their reach.64 About 150 Tea Party sites in our database are clearly tied to Tea Party Patriots, using TPP branding or logos. Another 300 refer to Tea Party Patriots on their websites.

Since early 2010, Tea Party Patriots has orchestrated weekly conference-call webinars that attract the partic.i.p.ation of as many as several hundred local Tea Party leaders in any given week.65 Local leaders discuss problems, try to define shared issue priorities, and swap ideas about programming for regular local meetings. In early 2011, Tea Party Patriots held its first national summit, a three-day event in Phoenix, Arizona, that brought together Tea Party partic.i.p.ants from across the country to share information and organizing strategies.66 In addition, leaders of the Tea Party Patriots have tried to get local organizers to turn over their local contact lists to the national organization in order to increase their own nationwide capacity to orchestrate campaigns and to raise funds from Tea Party partic.i.p.ants.67 Organizationally, TPP has built a staff of modest size, with various ”coordinators” in different regions.68 Finances for the organization have always been murky, and TPP evades public reporting. In September 2010, the TPP coordinators announced receipt of a $1 million anonymous donation. Local Tea Parties were invited to apply for grants to improve websites, mount educational or training efforts, and pursue other nonelectoral projects of local choosing.69 But it is unclear how much funding ever made it to local organizers; a number of gra.s.sroots supporters, including some state coordinators who had previously been heavily involved with TPP, have distanced themselves from the organization and criticized its financial practices.70 Like other national Tea Partylinked organizations, TPP appears to have channeled considerable sums to long-standing GOP consulting organizations.71 The legal status of Tea Party Patriots precludes endors.e.m.e.nts of particular candidates in elections. Coordinators proclaim that endors.e.m.e.nts are best left to local and state Tea Party groups, if done at all. This stance allows TPP to stay out of local and state fights over the relative conservative purity of different GOP candidates; it also protects TPP when particular candidates lose elections. Equally strategically ambiguous are TPP stands on specific parts of the federal budget. Tea Party Patriots pushes the notion of immediate, huge budget cuts, but when asked about particulars, TPP leaders mouth generalities or simply repeat the group's motto, ”Fiscal Responsibility, Const.i.tutionally Limited Government and Free Markets” (a motto nearly identical to that of FreedomWorks). Questioned about tax and health care measures at a forum at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in April 2011, TPP Coordinator Jenny Beth Martin proclaimed that there was no need to discuss the actual content of legislation because good proposals are always to be found at think tanks such as the Cato Inst.i.tute or the Heritage Foundation. GOP Congressional representatives can just adopt those, she said.

Martin's answer confirms that TPP is in the business of leveraging popular support for predetermined far-right policy proposals. Her evasiveness also underscores how a.s.siduously national groups endeavor to keep ”Tea Party” aims vague and general. ”Eliminating the deficit” sounds fine to regular citizens, but specifics such as the abolition of Medicare are not popular at the gra.s.s roots, even with Tea Party people. In Congressional budget battles, Tea Party Patriots uses its national website to urge local groups to pressure GOP representatives against accepting tax increases or agreeing to lift the national debt limit, but TPP never lists specific programs to go on the chopping block. Free-market organizations supported by billionaires find it easy to urge gra.s.sroots people and GOP officials to take rigid stands. After all, these groups and their wealthy backers are not democratically accountable. Nor are they responsible for actually governing.

NATIONAL AND LOCAL IN THE TEA PARTY-A MUTUAL LEVERAGE STORY.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010, was sunny and cool in eastern Ma.s.sachusetts, a perfect day for a Tea Party rally. Surrounded by a ring of media vans, a crowd of a few thousand a.s.sembled on the Boston Common. The Greater Boston Tea Party had originally planned its annual Tax Day protest for April 15, but had been contacted by Tea Party Express and convinced to hold its rally a day earlier to coincide with the arrival of a multistate bus tour and a speech by Sarah Palin. The short notice ruffled some feathers in New England, but the gra.s.s roots quickly adapted. Media coverage would be a.s.sured for such a well-funded, splashy event, so local Tea Partiers provided volunteers, applauded road show speakers, and set up a booth to enroll new members.

At 7 P.M. on Tuesday, November 30, 2010, members of the Buffalo County Tea Party gathered in the Sunroom at the Northridge Retirement Community in Kearney, Nebraska, to hear a talk about legislative issues at stake in the lame duck session of Congress-the last session with Democrats in control of the House before the much-antic.i.p.ated arrival of the new GOP majority in 2011. The speaker was Jeremy Jensen, a former Tea Party leader who had moved on to work as Field Director for the Americans for Prosperity of Nebraska.72 This state branch of the national advocacy organization bills itself as ”on the front line in the fight against big government” and sends regular ”Action Alerts” to tens of thousands of Nebraskans to inspire them to push local, state, and federal representatives in desired directions.73 In the fall of 2010, the co-organizers of a local Tea Party in Maine posted an encouraging announcement on their group's blog: ”Sue and Jane are happy to announce that York County Const.i.tutionalists have received a grant from Tea Party Patriots as a result of a $1,000,000 anonymous donation” to that organization. ”We will be using the grant to further our outreach and educational efforts.” Months later, only eighteen people attended the April 2011 meeting of the York Const.i.tutionalists, so the visiting speaker from New Hamps.h.i.+re could hardly compliment his Maine neighbors on a high turnout. But he did make a point of praising their snazzy new website and Facebook page, recently up and running with support from the grant.

At the end of a March 2011 meeting, the Surprise Tea Party in Arizona discussed various Tea Party sites and came to the consensus that everyone at the meeting should join the Tea Party Patriots mailing list. Around the same time, members of the Jefferson Area Tea Party Patriots in Charlottesville, Virginia, recommitted themselves to local autonomy. A new const.i.tution, bylaws, and yearly members.h.i.+p dues would ensure that all local members have ”skin in the game,” explained group chair, Carole Thorpe. Dues of about $20 a year (with discounts for couples and students) will allow the group to continue its long-standing refusal to take funds or apply for grants from outsiders. Early on, Carole remembers, the Jefferson Area Tea Party was ”a line” on the TPP website. But the relations.h.i.+p never deepened, and she does not partic.i.p.ate in TPP conference calls or webinars.

Much ink and many keystrokes have been spent on issues of ”control” in the Tea Party. Are national, billionaire-backed organizations controlling the Tea Party, or are gra.s.sroots folks in charge? These are the wrong questions to ask about a field of loosely interconnected organizations. Everyone is trying to leverage something they want from others in the network. The fruitful questions are: What do local Tea Partiers want from the national advocates and impresarios? What do the national organizations hope to get from various sorts of ties to gra.s.sroots groups or protesters? What tensions flare up as some actors step on the toes or offend the sensibilities of others? And are relations.h.i.+ps s.h.i.+fting over time?

Loose Ties of Mutual Convenience.

Consider, for example, relations.h.i.+ps between local Tea Parties and the national political action committee called Tea Party Express (TPE)-the California-based group responsible for a media-friendly bus tour and the funding of many Tea Party candidates. Unquestionably, public rallies that gain lots of publicity can be a win-win for all concerned-including the Tea Party partic.i.p.ants who attend, the local groups that pitch in, and of course the national organizations that help to fund and sponsor the rally. Any local irritations of scheduling and coordination, as we saw in one of the opening vignettes for this section, can usually be soothed by publicity and the potential for new members in the bargain. Tea Party Express, in turn, took control of the media imagery and content in the Boston protest, with a convenient backdrop of local, gra.s.sroots volunteers.

The relations.h.i.+p between big national funders and small gra.s.sroots groups appears to be one of mutual convenience, with little shared knowledge or joint investment, particularly when it comes to Tea Party Express. Quite a few of the Tea Partiers we interviewed in different places had attended events involving Tea Party Express, but no one at the gra.s.s roots reported feeling closely tied to that organization. Several people in Phoenix said they had driven north to Searchlight, Nevada, for the bus-tour rally there. But speaker Sarah Palin received mixed reviews in Arizona and Virginia, as well as in Ma.s.sachusetts. The president of the Greater Boston Tea Party dismissed TPE as a group of ”entertainers,” and other Tea Party activists have complained that Tea Party Express is not gra.s.sroots.74 From the perspective of Tea Party Express, the lack of much gra.s.sroots interest and close attention may be a good thing. Gra.s.sroots supporters provide a colorful popular backdrop for TPE to attract media attention and collect more contributions to spend on candidates and affiliated business operations-without any pesky accountability to local leaders. And TPE leaders are surely content that certain aspects of their work have remained off the radar of most Tea Party activists. After a series of offensive remarks about Islam, TPE spokesman Mark Williams was eventually cas.h.i.+ered for writing a blog post suggesting that black people would prefer to be re-enslaved rather than have to do work.75 Though the incident was widely covered at the time by the mainstream media, Tea Partiers we spoke to were unfamiliar with it, and thus it did not affect their views of TPE, to the degree they had any.76 For TPE, the avoidance of close gra.s.sroots ties, and the scrutiny that might accompany such ties, may be a wise strategic choice.

Virtually all of the national organizations we have discussed have tried to link local Tea Party people with their public events.77 The dynamics are usually the same. The local Tea Party people get added publicity when the event is nearby; Tea Parties further afield may get help paying for transportation if they are willing to take outside money. Not all groups are willing to use buses funded by FreedomWorks or Americans for Prosperity or any other outside organization. The Charlottesville Jefferson Area Tea Party took up subscriptions to charter buses of its own; and we also heard regularly about local groups putting together volunteer car-pools. But many Tea Parties take advantage of offers of resources that seem free of strings, and in return sponsoring organizations earn a measure of good will from the gra.s.sroots folks, and perhaps a few more names for their email lists.

Idea Pushers and Takers.

Rallies and bus tours make for mutual back-scratching, but they do not necessarily foster deep relations.h.i.+ps between gra.s.sroots people and the national organizations fis.h.i.+ng in Tea Party waters. What about other kinds of relations.h.i.+ps? Particularly fascinating to us are the ties forged to local Tea Parties by national and state-level advocacy groups pus.h.i.+ng hard-right values and policy ideas. How do groups like Americans for Prosperity, or gun rights groups, or libertarian organizations form useful relations.h.i.+ps with local Tea Partiers? Such professional idea-pushers want to disseminate everything from worldviews to very specific legislative plans-plans that realize free-market goals, or undo progressive policies, or defund rival groups, such as public sector unions, connected to the Democratic Party. But how do right-wing advocacy organizations manage to get local Tea Party people to listen to what are often abstruse-or implausible-ideas?

Some of the ideas of these free-market advocacy groups circulate through blog networks and get forwarded through email chains. Many Tea Party members we met are avid email forwarders, sending on to a long list of acquaintances everything from budget reports to political jokes, often several messages per day. Over time, the most successful ideas bubble to the surface through the right-wing blogosphere and into the mainstream media-a dynamic we will discuss in detail in Chapter 4. In addition, many local Tea Parties have their own well-designed websites with notices about webinars, reports, and videos disseminated by this or that rightwing advocacy group.

Indeed, by the middle of 2011, many of the almost 1000 local Tea Parties whose websites we examined in our national survey included references or links to national advocacy organizations. We define a reference broadly: some are simply links in a long list of trusted information sources, while others are reports, articles, or calls to action reposted in their entirety. Though the results are only a snapshot of Tea Party activity in the spring and early summer of 2011, they are nonetheless quite illuminating. The libertarian Cato Inst.i.tute was far less popular than the more generally conservative Heritage Foundation, appearing on only 126 sites, compared to Heritage's 345. Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks were cited relatively equally, with FreedomWorks receiving 267 mentions and Americans for Prosperity 206. As we've already seen, Tea Party Patriots far outstrips the compet.i.tion in terms of its connections to actual local Tea Parties. TPP is mentioned on 498 sites, almost half the total set of Tea Party groups we found, and almost 150 of those sites have adopted Tea Party Patriots' online branding or logos.78 But professionally run advocacy groups also reach Tea Parties directly. Many of them offer training sessions for gra.s.sroots Tea Party organizers and members, who may learn about policy ideas as well as organizing strategies. Several Tea Party members we spoke to in Ma.s.sachusetts had taken part in workshops organized by American Majority, a conservative activist-training group founded by Republican insiders, including a former speech-writer for President George W. Bush and the former political director of the California Republican Party. Along with discussions of the Const.i.tution, their workshops cover the typical local organizing bases, including primers on government structure, advice on ”the most effective ways to contact elected officials,” and guidance on using new media like Twitter. Americans for Prosperity and Tea Party Patriots have provided similar training opportunities to other Tea Party groups we spoke to.

Another dynamic to keep an eye on is the desire of local and state Tea Party groups for a constant flow of programming. Let's say you are a local Tea Party organizer interested in finding something interesting to do for each monthly meeting, and you do not have a lot of money to spend. Where to turn? Local organizers explained to us that many of their members (such as the older men and women who attend as couples) want to watch a show or hear a speaker each month. For an attractive lecture, they may show up and even put some money in the collection box. But they may be less interested if a group discussion is the only thing scheduled, or if they think the main purpose is to ask them to volunteer for tasks. Local organizers, if they are any good, want to have group discussions and inspire real partic.i.p.ation, but they may need to make members.h.i.+p activities just part of a meeting, with an entertaining speaker or visual presentation scheduled for the rest of the event. A local Tea Party also needs to advertise programs that may attract drop-ins-to keep adding new recruits as some earlier partic.i.p.ants drop out. After the 2010 election, one local leader explained, some people did pull back, ”patting themselves on the back” for displacing Democrats from office. But others kept arriving to check out the group, enabling this local Tea Party to sustain members.h.i.+p and energy. Given the need to come up with attractive events months after month on a low budget, national and state organizations that offer speakers are a G.o.dsend for local leaders. In fact, a lot of ultra-conservative advocacy organizations are trying to place their speakers, so local Tea Party programmers can pick and choose. They can go with issues that seem hot in their region and engage speakers who have earned a good reputation as they make their way from one local Tea Party to the next.

These outside speakers, we think, are one way for politically consequential ideas-including some very strange ones not grounded in facts-to circulate among local Tea Parties. They are also how ideological organizations like Americans for Prosperity form closer links with local citizens-as in the opening vignette about Nebraska, where the Buffalo County group meeting in Kearney heard from a state-level organizer for Americans for Prosperity. During our visit to Arizona, that state's coordinator for Americans for Prosperity was also making the rounds, and so were speakers from the Second Amendment Sisters, a pro-gun group.

When we visited the Peninsula Patriots in Virginia in late January of 2011, the invited guest was Donna Holt, Executive Director of the Virginia Campaign for Liberty. For an audience of about sixty members, Holt presented an elaborate PowerPoint lecture connecting local sustainable planning efforts (bike paths, for example) to what she portrayed as a grandiose, decades-long, UN-hatched conspiracy to use environmentalism as a ruse for imposing a ”globalist totalitarian dictators.h.i.+p” on America. Conspiratorial visions of this sort may be too fantastical to survive broad public scrutiny, but they can percolate quietly in networks of local Tea Parties.79 After listening to the Campaign for Liberty speaker, the Peninsula Patriots got a lot of takers for a subcommittee to focus on fighting sustainable development.80 Other Virginia Tea Party groups scheduled events on the same topic in early 2011; and local groups worked together against sustainable development legislation in Richmond. The Campaign for Liberty obviously got its message out.

The need for a steady flow of programming allows national ideological organizations to provide a welcome service to gra.s.sroots Tea Parties, whose members offer a warm and largely unskeptical reception to ideas ranging from practical policies to conspiratorial visions. Often the ideas pushed by ideological elites are abstruse enough that local people will accept them uncritically. The conspiratorial talk given to the Peninsula Patriots by the Campaign for Liberty representative, like talks by other guest speakers we have heard at Tea Party meetings, provoked not a single criticism during the question-and-answer session. Instead, audience members appreciated the overarching sentiment of the presentation, which emphasized intrusive bureaucrats-a reality local people feel they understand from dealings with irritating business regulations or local zoning rules. By invoking strong feelings and providing easy-to-digest worldviews linked to specific policy goals, the national ideologues have much more impact than they likely would if they formally ”controlled” local groups.

But what happens when Tea Partiers have direct, favorable personal experience of matters criticized by national ideologues? Or when gra.s.sroots Tea Partiers already have different or more mixed beliefs than those articulated by national advocates? In Chapter 2, for instance, we found that rank-and-file Tea Partiers have considerable affection for Social Security and Medicare, even as they pay lip service to extreme views about slas.h.i.+ng federal spending. Gra.s.sroots Tea Partiers have a different take than the policy-makers at right-wing ideological think tanks, for whom Social Security and Medicare are anathema. National groups such as Freedom-Works and Americans for Prosperity have long been committed to privatizing these huge, popular U.S. social insurance programs, taking funds out of them so that taxes on business and the wealthy can be reduced. Right-wing ideologues also hope to boost for-profit businesses that manage savings for retirement. So what happens when Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, and other ultra-free-market advocacy groups push these privatizing plans in the name of gra.s.sroots Tea Partiers, most of whom are either on Social Security and Medicare already, or expect to be soon? Will local Tea Partiers become skeptical of advocates claiming to speak for them-at least on matters where Tea Party people have concrete experience and views of their own?

To some degree, perhaps. The reason that Congressional Republicans backed away from Paul Ryan's Medicare voucher plan soon after the House GOP voted for it in April 2011 may have been a spreading realization in Was.h.i.+ngton DC that this plan was not playing well beyond the Beltway, even in Tea Party circles.81 GOP leaders decided to soft-peddle the drive for privatization until the 2012 election. But no one should expect real fireworks between elite free-market advocates and local Tea Partiers. The national groups will keep their messages vague. They will continue to talk about ”America going broke” and the ”need to slash spending” and ”cut taxes,” without getting overly specific until just before they seize the chance-if one presents itself-to push through major restructurings of Medicare and Social Security. Until then, ideological advocates and GOP politicians working with them will try to fudge the truth on policy specifics and keep the focus on hatred of Obama and his allegedly ”socialistic” plans. They will try to do this all the way until the critical 2012 election-when they hope to use gra.s.sroots fears and fervor to help push Obama out of the White House.

Local Tea Partiers will continue to consume ideas, speakers, and other kinds of programming from the advocacy groups, taking much of what they hear on faith. Even where Social Security and Medicare are concerned, Tea Party people may come around to ultra-free-market nostrums, if phaseout legislation includes a long timeline, so that older people today and tomorrow believe they will be held whole in federal programs, while big cuts are put in place for younger cohorts. National ideologues can make use of Tea Partiers' sense that younger Americans are not working hard enough, not ”paying their dues.” Generational tensions contribute to gra.s.sroots Tea Party activism, and the national ideological organizations and their DC allies may figure out how to exploit such divisions.

In the final a.n.a.lysis, the loose relations.h.i.+p between professional idea-pushers and local Tea Parties is mutually useful enough to enable advocates to set agendas and disseminate general arguments, without becoming any more answerable to local groups than Tea Party Express is accountable to the people who attend its bus-tour rallies. Free-market advocacy groups can provide programming to local Tea Parties and add tens of thousands of Tea Party members to online networks, without ever engaging in discussions or answering for the specifics of policies pushed in Was.h.i.+ngton DC and state capitols. Tea Partiers at the gra.s.s roots are not sufficiently questioning of free-market ideologues to raise tough questions. If an organization seems to be against Obama and liberals, Tea Partiers are trusting to the point of gullibility. Their outlook exemplifies that old adage in politics: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The Attempt to Weave Tighter Ties.

Like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, the umbrella organization Tea Party Patriots reaches out very actively to local groups. From its founding in 2009, TPP adopted a folksy, volunteer pose on its national website. The national organization loudly proclaimed that it wasn't trying to control anything and allowed local Tea Parties to register themselves on the TPP website. In addition to helping manage national rallies and coordinating local groups on a weekly conference call, TPP offered some small grants to Tea Parties to enable them to upgrade their local websites and educational activities. No doubt, the applications enlarge TPP contact lists and allow for tighter links between national and local conservative organizations-and may have helped TPP raise funds from local groups.82 Without seeming bureaucratic, TPP's activities facilitated gra.s.sroots organizing and encouraged communication about and among local and state-level Tea Party efforts.

Yet coordinating a political phenomenon steeped in the rhetoric of ”states' rights” and local control remains a major challenge. Local Tea Parties and their leaders have responded in diametrically opposite ways to TPP's efforts at orchestration-as suggested by the vignettes about Maine, Arizona, and Virginia at the start of this section. With limited involvement of Tea Party Patriots, Virginia Tea Partiers launched a state federation in early 2010. Although some local Virginia Tea Party leaders now partic.i.p.ate in TPP conference calls, others do not-and we heard suspicions from several Virginia leaders about TPP efforts at control and direction. Arguably, the success the Virginia Tea Partiers had in creating supra-local linkages through their own state federation has made local Tea Parties in that state less amenable to involvements with Tea Party Patriots. One Virginia leader was especially caustic, dismissing Tea Party Patriots as merely engaged in ”building a donor base.” He called three national organizations ”frauds”-including TPP along with and FreedomWorks and Tea Party Express-and suggested that all three are trying to aggrandize themselves off gra.s.sroots efforts.

Tea Party groups clearly differ about the value of ties to Tea Party Patriots. Our interviews in Arizona showed that rank-and-filers could evolve favorable views of TPP in a state where it has achieved a concrete presence. In February 2011, Tea Party Patriots sponsored a summit in Phoenix, enabling us to ask for impressions from some of the gra.s.sroots people in that area. ”As a matter of fact, we weren't too sure,” said Gloria Ames. ”We don't know too much about [TPP coordinators] Jenny Beth Martin and Mark Meckler.” Given their ”political background,” Gloria was uncertain whether the two were trustworthy. In this regard, Gloria seemed to have accurate information about the careers of Meckler and Martin, both of whom had been involved in GOP politics prior to becoming coordinators for Tea Party Patriots. But Gloria's concerns were eventually a.s.suaged. At the 2011 summit, Martin and Meckler surveyed Tea Party members on various issues, and when an issue got a mixed response from local activists, they decided not to take a position on it. ”That made me feel better,” Gloria concluded. Larry Fisher, who partic.i.p.ates in the weekly TPP webinars, was similarly impressed with TPP's commitment to ”coordinating” not ”leading.”

Even the most engaged local partic.i.p.ants in Arizona were not entirely clear on how Tea Party Patriots fits into the national scene, however. In response to a question about how he came to get involved with Tea Party Patriots, Larry Fisher could not recall. ”How did we find out about the national group? I don't know if I remember ... No, they did not come around with the bus ...” He consults with his wife, but comes to no conclusion. In short, even though Larry partic.i.p.ates weekly in the Tea Party Patriots webinars, he could not readily distinguish TPP from Tea Party Express. Clearly, Tea Party Patriots has made headway in weaving ties to and among local Tea Parties in many states, but it has had to proceed with a light hand to avoid antagonizing locals. The result is widespread but hazy knowledge about TPP, which remains for many local Tea Partiers just one of several national organizations floating through their movement world.

The Initial Strength of Weak Ties.

As we have spelled out in this chapter, the Tea Party involves loose ties of mutual convenience among vibrant actors pursuing their own purposes at local and national levels, with each set of actors trying to leverage help from the other. If this is how the Tea Party surge has worked, what is the bottom line? Have loose links among Tea Party organizations helped or hurt conservatives?

In the earliest phases-during the heady days of protest and early organizational efforts in 2009 and 2010-the Tea Party eruption benefited greatly from the loosely interrelated activism of local Tea Partiers, on the one hand, and the cheerleading of national advocates and politicos, on the other hand. Gra.s.sroots enthusiasm was encouraged by the sense that people could get their own act together-at most facilitated, but not directly controlled, by any official elites. And elite efforts to orchestrate and leverage gra.s.sroots activism, touting the Tea Party label, were not significantly impeded by the fact that national organizations rode as well as stoked gra.s.sroots activism. Loose ties were not a problem, even when various national advocacy groups went off in different directions, and even when their efforts sometimes hurt rather than helped the established Republican Party (a matter we discuss further in Chapter 5). The thrust of local and national Tea Party activism through the November 2010 elections was maximized by loosely connected organizational efforts. Tea Party efforts moved forward in mutually encouraging ways, within and across the edges of the GOP but not under party control.

The overall point, after all, was to free conservatism from the tainted ”Republican Party” label in order to maximize the election of conservatives in 2010. Tea Partiers of all stripes shared that broad goal, and they were going to make greater headway through loose connections than they would through centralized management. Because there was no one center of authority and resources, the fate of the Tea Party was never inextricably linked to the political fortunes of any one candidate or organized ent.i.ty. When particular candidates were defeated or particular organizational leaders discredited by scandal or racist episodes, gra.s.sroots activism was not discouraged and elites who escaped trouble could just keep operating. No one had to take responsibility for mess-ups.

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