On the future of the Tea Party

As any football fan knows, when a receiver pulls in a long pass and breaks away from the defenders, it's almost impossible for them to avoid high-stepping in to the end zone with the ball held high above their head in triumph. About 98% of the time, this causes no harm. The touchdown is still scored and ESPN has a marginally-more-annoying highlight. No big deal. The other 2% of the time, hilarity ensues. As the receiver slows down to show off, a defensive back who didn't let up will catch up and knock the ball away, turning a touchdown into a touchback and wiping seven points off the board.

The Republicans did their best "Showboating Wideout" impression this week when they started to talk semi-publicly about how they're going to handle the incoming wave of Tea Party-backed lunatic freshman Congresspersons. Trent Lott told a group of the GOP's plutocratic overlords no to worry because the Congressional leadership would "co-opt" them.

It's important to note that this bit of internal showboating won't cost the GOP anything electorally, at least not today, but it does confirm suspicions many of us have held for some time: mainly that the GOP is using the Tea Party and its incredible BP-Blowout gusher of emotion as a means to its own electoral ends.

It does also point-up a major question, however. What happens when the Tea Party is disappointed?

They will be. In ten years, we'll still have Social Security and Medicaid and an income tax. Even the new health care law will still be largely intact. Taxes on the richest 1% will be lower than ever, incomes will still be stagnant, and unemployment will have never dropped below 7 or 8%.

For the next two years, it's safe to assume that the Tea Party won't stray too far from the GOP tent. As nothing much changes, save some nibbling around the edges of health care and making the Bush tax cuts permanent, as deficits continue to rise, the GOP will be able to say "Give us the Senate and the White House! Then we can undo the damage that the Kenyan Muslin Usurper has done!" And given how little the GOP has done since Obama was elected other than obstruct, there's no reason to assume that this strategy won't continue to work.

Which means a few things: First, it's pretty likely, absent a Palin nomination (and even then it may), that the White House will go to the Republicans in 2012, and probably the Senate too. But what then? What happens when it's 2014 and Tea Partiers are still looking at that FICA line item on their paystubs? Could we see then a third-party challenge? A real one? An actual Tea Party with its own convention and party machinery?

Granted, all this presupposes a few things: first and foremost that the Tea Party isn't really what it probably is, a catharsis of White Middle America against the first nonwhite President that will probably die out once he's no longer in office. Secondly, it's also highly likely that once the GOP has the White House and Senate again in 2012 that the Right Wing CorproMedia Apparatus will simply do what it's best at: tell the base what to do. "It's fine now," RWCMA will say, "we've taken America back. You may stand down."

I imagine the last case is most-likely. It seems improbable to me that the Tea Party, an organization that prides itself, among the rank-and-file at least, on having no leadership, no structure, nothing that would serve as the basis of any sort of enduring institution, will be able to survive long enough to make the necessary transition, particularly as the GOP makes electoral gains. To be sure, the Tea Parties have shown us that there is a significant wellspring of emotion in this country that could sustain a far-right populist third party, maybe even one that could wind up with a not-insignificant presence in Statehouses and the US Congress given its inherent regionalism. Indeed, if such a thing happened it might be the best thing for the US in the long term. If the Republicans realized they could no co-opt a true Tea Party and its merry (angry) base of Twenty Seven Percenters they would have to move left, necessitating in turn some degree of Democratic move right (not that the Democratic Party as presently constructed is particularly leftist). It would mean a return to centrist governance and good-faith dealmaking.

I hope.