Tea for Two

Even when he’s right, it’s hard to sympathize with Chuck Schumer.

And I do think he’s right on the merits to steer Democrats away from a government shutdown. They “don’t have the cards,” to borrow a phrase from another recent national fiasco.

It isn’t just the ideological differences I have with him that make sympathy difficult. It’s the fact that he’s terrible at retail politics. He’s taken a bad situation for his party and made it worse.

On Thursday he published an op-ed explaining why he’ll support the House GOP’s bill to fund the government through September. It’s awful, awful, awful legislation, he assured his base, but the alternative would be worse. If the government shuts down, Elon Musk and his flying monkeys will have a pretext to DOGE-ify the entire federal bureaucracy by shuttering the left’s favorite agencies and furloughing thousands of workers. And when the shutdown ends, they’ll get to decide who comes back to the job and who’s permanently expendable.

A shutdown standoff would also be a gift to Donald Trump by diverting public attention from the dumbest trade war in history. “Right now, Mr. Trump owns the chaos in the government,” Schumer wrote. “He owns the chaos in the stock market. He owns the damage happening to our economy. The stock market is falling, and consumer confidence is plummeting.” We’ve all heard the old saying about what to do when your enemy is making a mistake. Well, Trump is making a mistake by tariff-ing global investors into a panic. Schumer is acting accordingly.

Besides, if Democrats did shut down the government, we all know Trump would eventually convince 50 percent of the country that doing so somehow caused the market correction that’s already happened.

I think Democratic voters might have grudgingly tolerated a capitulation by their leader in the Senate if Schumer had been clear about his intentions all along. But he wasn’t, because he’s terrible at politics.

Literally one day before announcing his support for the Republican legislation, he was heard telling reporters that his caucus was “unified” in supporting a 30-day funding alternative instead. Nor did he show his cards when the GOP’s bill came up for a floor vote in the House, despite the fact that numerous Democrats from reddish Trump-friendly districts were preparing to risk their necks by opposing it. Imagine casting a vote in the name of party solidarity that you know will be unpopular back home—only to find out that doing so was pointless because the Democratic leader in the other chamber was planning to help Republicans pass their bill anyway.

Having opposed the GOP funding legislation almost unanimously, House Democrats are now a little miffed at Schumer. And by “a little miffed,” I mean “thinking of marching into the Senate to confront him and lining up primary challengers for his next election in New York.” Social media on Friday was a volcano of grassroots outrage at his betrayal after he raised their hopes that the party was about to fight, fight, fight by forcing a shutdown on a president they despise—and then wimped out. 

Every conservative of a certain age who’s watching this play out is thinking the same thing: I’ve seen this movie before.

Former Republican strategist Rory Cooper is one such conservative. On X on Friday, he summarized the current Democratic disarray with sarcasm: “A political party divided over shutting the government down, and the base of the party doesn’t think leadership is fighting hard enough, and leadership has almost no options. First time?”

It’s not his first time, nor mine. This is the stuff of which Tea Parties are made.

Many left-wingers who are furious today at Schumer are leaning into the parallel. “I would not be surprised to see, if not quite a Tea Party equivalent, a wave of challengers against old Democratic incumbents in particular,” the leader of one progressive activist group warned the New York Times. “It is not going to be ideological. It’s going to be style.” Search Twitter and you’ll find angry commentary about the Democrats’ Senate surrender littered with similar references.

The analogy is obvious.

Tea time.

In 2008, burdened by an unpopular president and economic turmoil, Republicans lost the White House and both houses of Congress. The party was left with an identity crisis and a morale problem. Bushism was exhausted and discredited, and a charismatic “transformational” president from the other party looked poised to make the GOP a minority indefinitely with the new coalition he had built.

The Tea Party was the right’s solution to the morale problem. Lacking a national political leader, it fomented an angry populist backlash to the president’s agenda. In doing so it eased the Republican identity crisis for a while, as Barack Obama’s agenda polarized Tea Partiers into Reaganesque demands for smaller government and “constitutional conservatism.” Only later, in 2016, would it become clear how threadbare and opportunistic that identity was.

What was novel about the Tea Party was that it blamed its own side’s “out of touch” political establishment for America’s failures as much as it did the other’s.

Because the right’s reaction to Obama cosplayed as an ideological reawakening, congressional Republicans were derided as turncoats and deemed part of the problem if they strayed toward the center on policy. But in reality, populist venom for moderate “Republicans In Name Only” was as much a reaction to style as substance. Conciliatory GOPers who preferred to work with Democrats instead of confronting them aggressively—who weren’t willing to “fight”—were marked for political death via primary challenges. They would be replaced in time with uncompromising obstructionist blowhards who set unachievable goals and then, once elected, duly failed to achieve them.

If you followed politics between 2009 and 2015, that’s the movie you watched. Today it feels like we’re watching the sequel.

In 2024, burdened by an unpopular president and economic turmoil, Democrats lost the White House and both houses of Congress. The party has been left with an identity crisis and a morale problem. Culturally progressive educated-class neoliberalism, as embodied by Kamala Harris, seems exhausted and discredited. A charismatic “transformational” president from the other party aims to make Democrats a minority indefinitely with the new blue-collar coalition he’s building—or, perhaps, by accruing autocratic power incrementally until the constitutional order disintegrates.

Into that crucible walks the Senate Democratic leader, the very face of the liberal establishment, declaring that he won’t use the one bit of leverage his party still has over federal policy. He prefers to work with Republicans, however reluctantly, instead of confronting them aggressively in the name of achieving some goal that not only won’t be achieved but that no one seems able to define.

The left is spoiling for a fight to solve its morale problem, and Chuck Schumer won’t give them one. The “out of touch” Democratic establishment begins to look like as much of a problem as Republicans are. (The numbers don’t lie!) To force that establishment to take a more combative attitude toward the enemy, the base reasons that it may have no choice but to primary Schumer. We’ve seen this movie before.

There are other symmetries. Angry audiences at congressional town halls? The original Tea Party had plenty of those. So does the new one. Performative outbursts during presidential addresses to show defiance for the cameras? Tea Party 1.0 and Tea Party 2.0 have that in common as well. Scapegoating a Senate leader as the establishment villain-in-chief? The original Tea Party had that. Ditto for Schumer and the new version. Orchestrating a government shutdown that won’t accomplish anything useful except to show how angry the out-party is?

The first Tea Party gave us that in 2013 and it ended up making a national figure of one ambitious populist. The new Tea Party wants another with a hero of its own.

The Tea Party of 2009 to 2015 didn’t crave more conservative government. It craved resistance. It was born in a spirit of resistance and thus it expected its representatives to resist always and everywhere. It was an expression of populist id, and so naturally it came to despise the institutional superego in all forms. Its core belief was that politics is a matter of will: All it had to offer was will, therefore every political problem became a test of conviction.

In time it betrayed everything it claimed to stand for and, in its current decrepit authoritarian form, has driven the country to the brink of economic and civic ruin. Can you sense how excited I am to see the Democratic analogue?

In fairness, it isn’t a perfect analogue.

Differences.

One difference between the old Tea Party and the new one is the circumstances of its birth. 

Unlike in 2008, the losing party wasn’t bludgeoned at the polls last November and relegated to a filibuster-proof rump in the Senate. The president may be under the impression that he won the biggest, strongest, most beautiful landslide ever, but the hard truth is that he failed to reach 50 percent against a lackluster opponent who was saddled with inflation and a dead-weight incumbent.

Democrats have real policy failures to address, starting with their negligence on the border and their indulgence of “woke” shibboleths that many Americans find alienating. But unlike the GOP 17 years ago, they have nothing on the order of the Iraq war, the Hurricane Katrina debacle, or the financial crisis to answer for. Because they’re not as desperate for a radical change in direction as the original Tea Party was, their new Tea Party might not be as radical in nature. 

A second difference, related to the first, is that Democrats seem to understand that they need to move to the center. That wasn’t so for the first Tea Party.

The swerve back toward Reaganite conservatarianism in 2009 was driven by a sense that Republican leaders had too often painted in ideological “pale pastels” instead of the “bold colors” that the Gipper endorsed. George W. Bush was a center-right establishment dynast, son and heir to a “pale pastel” president, and his job approval stood at 25 percent on Election Day 2008. The GOP’s candidate on the ballot that year was John McCain, a soft-on-immigration Senate dinosaur, and his opponent ended up winning the largest number of popular votes in American history to that point. Then, in 2012, with the Tea Party dominant, Republicans somehow nominated a former governor of Massachusetts(!) who had pioneered a health-insurance reform that inspired Obamacare.

Right-wingers could look at Bush, McCain, and Mitt Romney and reasonably surmise from election results that centrism was a loser. Bolder ideological colors of the sort that produced midterm landslides in 2010 and 2014 for the Tea Party were the trick. And so, in 2016, Republican voters chose bolder colors. Boy, did they ever.

The lessons are different for modern liberals. Joe Biden was a “pale pastel” compared to the boldly colored Bernie Sanders and not only did he defeat Trump, he set a new record for popular votes in doing so. Meanwhile, below the surface, blue-collar voters who had dependably voted Democratic in the past were beginning to drift right, scared off by creeping left-wing radicalism about open borders, defunding the police, and transgenderism. That nearly cost the party a victory in 2020 and quite possibly did cost it a victory in 2024.

The sense that Democrats have moved too far left is shared by Democrats themselves. Last month Gallup found that the share who believe the party should become “more moderate” had jumped since 2021, rising from 34 percent to 45 percent. The share who said that it should become “more liberal” declined over the same period, from 34 percent to 29.

Even if a new left-wing Tea Party gets off the ground, political reality should make it less likely to radicalize than its right-wing forebear. To win a Democratic primary, a Tea Party candidate will presumably need to meet the growing demand for moderation among the party’s voters that was absent in the GOP circa 2009. As the progressive activist I quoted earlier told the Times, the new movement “is not going to be ideological. It’s going to be style.” 

It’s a nice thought, at least. Others seem to share it. I hope it works out for them! But I don’t think it will.

Inevitable radicalism.

I find it hard to believe that an insurgent political movement bent on dethroning its party’s establishment can be aggressive “stylistically” without becoming aggressive ideologically too.

The fact that the primary challenger of choice for Chuck Schumer looks to be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proves the point. If all liberals are looking for is a pugnacious contrast in “style” with the senator, it seems weird that they’re rallying behind the most prominent young socialist in the country, no?

The nature of a Tea Party points remorselessly toward policy radicalism. Imagine how absurd it would be if Schumer’s challenger declared during a primary debate, “I agree with him on everything, except that we really need more shutdowns.” Try as one might to be radically combative about tactics yet substantively moderate about policy, the ethic of “fighting” on which such movements are founded—especially fighting members of their own party establishment—will inevitably encourage “fights” over policy as well. Inevitably, the challenger’s need to distinguish himself as a “bold” alternative to the incumbent will lead him to endorse bolder colors on policy as well.

And if you end up getting elected for your willingness to “fight,” you can’t be a voice of restraint in Congress without betraying your mandate. That probably explains why so many right-wing Tea Partiers slid easily from “constitutional conservatism” into whatever the hell Mike Lee is now. Trump’s politics work just as well as Reagan’s if all you’re looking to do is fight, so it was easy for Tea Party populists to shift from one to the other despite the ideological incongruity. When you’re in Congress to stick it to the enemy, the important thing is to stick it to them; it doesn’t much matter what shape the stick happens to take.

So if Republicans propose a reasonable-ish compromise in some policy dispute that establishment Democrats are inclined to accept, a Tea Party Democratic congressman sent to Washington to “fight” will reflexively conclude that that compromise is a nonstarter.

The ethic of resistance becomes an end in itself. After 16 supremely moronic years, I think our country has had more than enough of it.

Combative contrarianism wouldn’t be the only radicalizing influence on a Democratic Tea Party either. Age gaps will also be a factor. Given the public’s post-Biden disquiet about American gerontocracy, it’s a cinch that left-wingers recruited to challenge figures like Schumer will be much younger in order to underline how “out of touch” the current Democratic leadership is. Young politicians aren’t prone to restraint and moderation in the best circumstances, but the age difference will further encourage them to offer fresh, daring, exciting ideas on policy in contrast to the elderly incumbent’s pale pastels.

And then there’s Trump.

Fundamentally, the left’s desire to oust Schumer is driven by the sense that, like Michael Corleone, they need a “wartime consigliere.” Trump is waging a war of sorts on the federal government and will wage one in due course on the entire constitutional order, and an old man who feebly chants “we will win!” yet shirks from the first opportunity for battle just ain’t gonna cut it as commanding general. Even more so than in his first term, Trump is destined to negatively polarize liberals against his policy positions. Which means that a Tea Party candidate will have cover to tack to the left in a Democratic primary—and possibly even an incentive to do so—despite any early vows of moderation.

“Is this a crisis or not?” a frustrated David Graham wrote of Schumer’s decision to oppose a shutdown. That’s the unofficial motto of any insurgent political movement that prioritizes “fighting” over the goals it’s ostensibly fighting for. And the thing about a crisis mentality is that, once you adopt it, every form of radicalism is justified in the name of ending the crisis, including radicalism on policy. You would think Americans would have learned their lesson by now, but evidently not. Here we go again.