Before All the Tea

It has been more than six years since Barack Obama’s first successful run for the presidency. And it has been more than six years since the rise of the Tea Party, the antigovernment movement sitting at the right flank of American conservatism. To its detractors, the Tea Party represents a departure within politics, a movement of unprecedented venom toward progressive ideals, even toward the political process itself. Venom aside, the Tea Party is not, in fact, unprecedented. It has been around for quite some time, operating under various names.

Thirty-four years ago, the nation’s political attention was riveted on the rise of what seemed an unprecedented, sharply rising groundswell of political conservatism among public officials and citizens alike. Dubbed the “New Right,” this movement signaled a coalition between conservative Republicans and conservative Democrats, or “Dixiecrats.” In fact, this coalition had been gaining strength since the early 1960s, largely in response to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and the Supreme Court’s rulings on desegregation, church-state separation, and criminal rights. But it wasn’t until the 1980 election that what Congressional Quarterly dubbed the “conservative coalition” helped bring a president into office. Like today’s Tea Party, the 1980s New Right drew most of its strength from white Christians living in the southern and western states. And, like the Tea Party, it made its mark especially within the Republican Party, whose right wing had gradually been accumulating greater and greater influence.

Mainstream observers reacted to the New Right much as the mainstream would later react to the Tea Party. To most of the journalists, scholars, politicians, and activists witnessing its ascendance, the New Right represented a break with the comity and centrism that had long enabled public institutions not to explode with regularity. These observers worried—aloud and often—that political equilibrium itself faced an unseemly challenge. The New Right, and its impact on its opponents, should remind us that American politics has not changed all that much over the past three-and-a-half decades.

Nowhere did the early-1980s New Right make its presence more felt than in the United States Senate. In November 1980, with Republicans gaining control of the Senate for the first time since 1955, the conservative coalition took a quantum leap forward. Sixteen new Republicans senators were elected that year; at least half of them enjoyed volunteer and financial support from far-right organizations, including groups with religious orientations and “moral” agendas. The election doubled the ranks of New Right senators.

Most of these newly elected conservatives, along with their allies already on the Hill, were filled with raw passion and were prepared to fight for what they believed to be the will of ordinary Americans—that is, the will of white, conservative Christians allegedly disinherited by the national government. “The conservative Republican Senate freshmen came crashing onto the enemy shores of liberal Washington, riding the crest of the New Right wave, self-confident and even self-righteous, convinced that they held the new franchise on truth,” wrote the Washington Post, observing that “all of the New Right senators saw themselves more as missionaries of a new political gospel than as politicians.” The most recent electees adopted a confrontational style. They were not terribly given to compromise, eager as they were to arrest decades-long liberal policies. Nor were they shy about it. Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.), elected in 1976, explained that “ours is an offensive battle,” while recently elected William L. Armstrong (R-Colo.) eagerly anticipated “pursuing the peaceful overthrow of government” through the use of “confrontation politics.”  The chamber’s customary decorum was anathema to these conservative radicals; political pragmatism was no more than a wet blanket on their missionary fires.

The well known activist Paul Weyrich could only crow approvingly that “the New Right—and to an extent we’re like communists in this—feels victory is inevitable.” But, to their critics, the far-right senators were impetuous bullies. Some critics dubbed them the “popsicle brigade” on account of their childishness and refusal to observe protocol. Others were more harsh. The executive director of the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action declared, “They are the new primitives. . . . They want to repeal the twentieth century.” An AFL-CIO lobbyist complained that “they made the Senate a meaner place . . . and they do it with such Christian fervor.” For syndicated columnist Nina Totenberg, history might have been in the making. “One hopes we haven’t reached the point in this country where civility and caution go out the window. One hopes we are not being faced with a sort of right-wing Red Guard that is unswervingly bent on its own form of cultural and constitutional revolution.”

Nor were liberal senators any more comfortable with their fervor. George McGovern (D-S.D.), whose own tenure in the Senate had recently been terminated through New-Right electoral efforts, noted that the “zealotry, self-righteousness, and vindictiveness” of the new breed of senators “connote something radically different from the authentic conservatism of, say, Robert Taft or Senator Goldwater.” Liberal Republicans were equally alarmed. Lowell Weicker (R-Conn.) admonished opponents of legalized abortion that “we’re not running this country on instructions from Mount Sinai,” while Robert Packwood (R-Or.) complained of the New Right’s “Cotton Mather mentality,” a “narrow, unforgiving . . . feeling that ‘God speaks to me [and] I will tell you what He says.” Another senator anonymously scolded his far-right colleagues: “The democratic process presupposes that you have differences of opinion, but you respect your opponent’s point of view and the element of compromise that the process requires.”

In 1981, several New Right leaders, including James McClure (R-Id.), Jake Garn (R-Ut.), Orrin Hatch (R-Ut.), and Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) assumed important committee-leadership posts. CQ declared 1981 a year of monumental change. “The conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats—the backbone of President Reagan’s support in both House and Senate during the 97^th Congress—in 1981 showed a strength unequaled in the 25 years Congressional Quarterly had measured the coalition’s muscle.” This was especially the case in the Senate, where the coalition defeated Northern Democrats in ninety-five percent of floor votes.

Many New Right Senators and their constituents, like today’s Tea Partiers, felt frustrated by their movement’s failure to achieve far-reaching legislative victories. Mainstream Republican leaders, including President Reagan, prioritized economic reform over moral reform, thereby denying cultural conservatives legislative victories on abortion and school prayer, among other issues. Still, the larger New Right gained a great deal of momentum in the Senate and grew sanguine about its prospects for ultimately turning its socio-political vision into law.

The parallels between the early 1980s and our own time are striking. Trends now and then, in conjunction, demonstrate the cyclical nature of politics in the United States. Power is fleeting; coherent coalitions are like the sand. The Tea Party will not remake American politics, and neither will it disappear.