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 97th 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.
