The Tea Party Movement Is Dead

Yesterday’s announcement of the abrupt closure and dissolution of FreedomWorks by its board of directors is the closest thing we will get to a formal date of death for the Tea Party movement, which in truth has been dead since Donald Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015. Trump did for the Republican establishment what it couldn’t do on its own in killing the Tea Party and its demands for small, constitutional government.

That impetus may return someday, as it has in the past — nobody during the first seven years of George W. Bush’s presidency was seriously predicting a mass movement against “compassionate conservatism,” Wall Street and corporate bailouts, socialized medicine, and the growth of the security state, any more than anybody in 1955 (outside National Review) seriously predicted the rise of Goldwater conservatism — but this particular iteration of the movement is dead as a doornail. Its institutions, of which FreedomWorks was one of the most prominent, are either collapsed or (in the case of the House Freedom Caucus) entirely repurposed toward MAGA populism. A few legislators (Chip Roy comes to mind) still define themselves in identifiably Tea Party terms, but many of those who rose within the movement have gravitated since then more toward either the MAGA side of the movement (think of Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, and Ron DeSantis) or the more traditional party (think of Nikki Haley).