CHAPTER 8

Rise of the Radicals (2008–)

As in 1929, at first it seemed as if the country were facing a serious but not catastrophic recession. In 2006, a bubble in the housing market—fueled by a deregulated financial sector willing to issue a mortgage to virtually anyone—began to burst, causing home prices to tumble. Millions of Americans found themselves owing considerably more on their mortgages than their homes were worth. The most vulnerable defaulted, many just walking away from their houses. In the old days, the banks that had made foolish loans would have been the ones punished, but in the deregulated environment of the previous decade, the loans had been rolled into securities, stamped “safe” by incompetent or unscrupulous auditors, and sold to other banks and investors, while their future failure or success was bet upon by other investors through arcane new financial products. The “innovative” products had been marketed as hedges against the risk that a mortgage might collapse, when in fact they concentrated the risk and injected it in potentially lethal doses to banks around the world. When the first large investment banks began to face trouble in early 2008, few took the matter seriously.1

Then, on a mid-September weekend, the world nearly came to an end. Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States, went bankrupt after both the government and Barclays declined to rescue it. Simultaneously, Merrill Lynch, the nation’s largest retail securities brokerage, was absorbed by Bank of America to prevent its immediate failure. On Monday, September 15, the stock market took the largest fall since the September 11 attacks. On Tuesday, AIG, the world’s largest insurance group, was taken over by the government and rescued from collapse with an $85 billion emergency loan. The six largest surviving U.S. banks—J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley—were so vulnerable the Federal Reserve secretly gave them $460 billion in emergency, below-market-rate loans to ensure their solvency, a fact hidden from the public and Congress until 2011, when a Bloomberg news service lawsuit forced disclosure. Overall, the Fed secretly committed $7.7 trillion over the months that followed to rescue the financial system. This commitment was in addition to the $700 billion taxpayer bailout the public was aware of, and furious about: the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which also saved the automotive industry. “All these institutions were about to collapse, and they never would have survived but for the trillions of dollars afforded them by the taxpayers,” the chair of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Phil Angelides, later told PBS’s Frontline. Blythe Masters, a top executive at J.P. Morgan, put it this way: “The Great Depression would have looked like a small event by comparison to what I think would have happened had that process continued unrestricted.” Bush administration officials called Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama and warned him, “Look, we think the world is close to coming to an end, and we really need your support” for the bailout.2

The banks had been allowed to grow so big they could not be allowed to fail, meaning they had succeeded in privatizing their profits (when they won their bets) while socializing the risks (when they didn’t). Six months after what had become a $170 billion taxpayer rescue, AIG executives gave $165 million in bonuses to executives of the very unit that had driven the company to disaster, an act the chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers would later say deserved “the Nobel Prize for evil.” No one in Washington felt empowered to stop the bonuses, even though the federal government now owned 80 percent of the company.3

The consequences of the collapse were profound, both economically and politically. It triggered the Great Recession, the most severe economic downturn since 1932, wiping out 5.5 million American jobs, $7.4 trillion in stock values, $3.4 trillion in real estate value, and $648 billion in lost economic growth in less than a year. Politically it had several effects. It marked the final verdict on George W. Bush’s crony capitalist administration, whose approval ratings matched those of Nixon at the depths of Watergate. Even former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, whose lax monetary policies had fueled the housing bubble, found himself in “a state of shocked disbelief” that the deregulated bankers hadn’t regulated themselves. It propelled a political neophyte, Barack Obama, to the White House bearing a message of hope, change, and bipartisanship. The most significant political effect, however, was the radicalization of the Republican Party’s base, a development with lasting and corrosive effects on the Republic.4

Most Americans were infuriated by TARP, which was seen as fundamentally immoral because it rewarded those who had brought about the disaster. “I don’t think a single call to my office on this proposal has been positive,” Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, said as Congress hastily debated passage of the measure in the final weeks of the Bush administration. Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, noted the administration’s plan was “aimed at rescuing the same financial institutions that created this crisis, with the sloppy underwriting and reckless disregard for the risks they were creating, taking or passing on to others. Wall Street bet that the government would rescue them if they got into trouble. It appears that bet may be the one that pays off.” Chris Dodd, chair of the Senate Banking Committee, noted TARP “would do nothing to help a single family save a home” or “stop the very authors of this calamity to walk away with bonuses and golden parachutes worth millions of dollars,” but voted for it anyway. Fearing the entire global economy could collapse without a prompt government bailout, they had little choice. Government intervention, long derided by the business lobby, was suddenly the only thing that could rescue Wall Street from its self-inflicted destruction.5

Ironically, the first significant call to resist government intervention came not from a person who had lost his home or job because of the recklessness of the banks, but from a career commodity trader turned financial journalist in a rant against the banks’ victims. Standing before cheering derivatives traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on February 19, 2009, CNBC’s Rick Santelli held forth against the new Obama administration’s plan to reduce the mortgage payments of some distressed homeowners. Santelli said he and the traders didn’t want to “subsidize the losers’ mortgages” and would rather “buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give ’em to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water.” He said that he and the traders were going to organize a “Chicago Tea Party” that summer to protest what he characterized as a Cuba-like descent into collectivism. A few hours later, Fox News’s popular conservative firebrand Sean Hannity replayed footage of what would soon be called “the rant heard round the world,” and the following day his Fox colleague Glenn Beck began promoting the idea of tax revolts. By then, FreedomWorks, a Washington, D.C.–based laissez-faire advocacy organization founded by the Koch brothers and run by former Republican House majority leader Dick Armey, had created a “I Stand with Rick” Web site to help inspired citizens organize protests. On February 27, fifty-one synchronized “tea parties” occurred in cities across the country, with an average attendance of just under six hundred at each. People brought flags and homemade signs with slogans like “Your Mortgage Is Not My Problem” and “Free Markets, Not Freeloaders.” Something was brewing.6

Anger at the plan to rescue some people who were losing their homes proved ephemeral. But when news of the AIG bonuses broke in March 2009, all hell broke loose. The Connecticut headquarters of the guilty AIG division started receiving death threats, prompting some senior managers to resign from the firm, and others to post guards outside. “Never before or since have I seen vehement, universal public anger reach such a white-hot level,” recalled Representative Barney Frank, then chair of the House Financial Services Committee, likening it to the torch-bearing mob of villagers marching on the laboratory in the 1931 movie Frankenstein. “I feared we were in danger of losing our capacity to govern—not just to enact a national financial reform bill but also to pass any legislation that required public trust in elected officials.” Although TARP would succeed in its aims—and taxpayer loans would be completely repaid—AIG’s actions discredited the bailout in the public eye, leading many to conclude that the government was coddling criminals and picking ordinary people’s pockets to enrich them.7

Dick Armey himself said it was the “Wall Street bailout that ignited the firestorm.” FreedomWorks, one of the few groups to have opposed TARP all along, was ready to capitalize on the rage. It was, as Armey later recalled, “at the center of the activism.” The group’s plan was to educate “Tea Party” participants in the long-standing laissez-faire agenda and then mobilize them to engineer a “hostile takeover” of the GOP. “By seizing control of the party, we can spend our time focused on ideas and use the party infrastructure that has been built over the past 156 years,” he counseled in a self-described “Tea Party Manifesto” published in the summer of 2010. This effort to guide the ideological and strategic direction of the surging protest movement was largely though not completely successful, and led to the seizure of great swaths of the county- and state-level party machinery by Tea Party activists and the election of dozens of radical antigovernment ideologues to Congress.

FreedomWorks’s role was facilitative, providing Web site tips on organizing and locating rallies and supporting and guiding the early activities of a grassroots umbrella organization, the Tea Party Patriots. Armey and other FreedomWorks officials served as spokesmen for the movement, shaping how the outside world perceived it. They formed alliances with Fox News and other conservative media outlets and even sponsored Glenn Beck’s nationally syndicated radio show. (In 2012, the organization would pay Beck over $1 million to, as Armey later put it, say “nice things about FreedomWorks on the air,” an arrangement that was later extended to Rush Limbaugh.) In March, FreedomWorks’s staff of former corporate lobbyists—Armey himself had represented Raytheon and Verizon until 2009—began organizing Beck’s “9/12” rally in Washington, D.C., applying for the appropriate permits while Beck promoted the event on air. The group also urged its followers to set aside social issues and embrace their libertarian economic platform, summed up in the group’s motto: “Lower Taxes, Less Government, More Freedom.”8

Beck also played a key role in the political education of his Tea Party admirers. His primary contribution was the tireless promotion of the works and ideas of W. Cleon Skousen, a right-wing extremist whose views were so fanatical he’d been ousted by the John Birch Society and placed under scrutiny by both J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the Mormons’ Quorum of Twelve Apostles. A Mormon and former FBI agent himself, Skousen had started developing complex conspiracy theories while serving as police chief of Salt Lake City in the 1950s. The Council on Foreign Relations, the American banking establishment, and the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie foundations, he believed, were all in on “a paroxysm of world-wide political subversion” to “push the United States into a collectivist one-world society.” The Rothschilds and Rockefellers were directing a grand conspiracy involving OSHA, the EPA, the fairness doctrine of the Federal Communications Commission, the Social Security Administration, and the United Nations, the unraveling of which became a central mission of his National Center for Constitution Studies. Skousen’s seminal work, The 5,000 Year Leap, proclaimed that the U.S. Constitution was inspired not by the Enlightenment philosophers but by the Old and New testaments and that its divinely inspired authors believed in a minimal, laissez-faire government and a merging of church and state. Another of Skousen’s books, The Making of America, argued that slave owners were the “worst victims” of the southern slave system, the slaves themselves being full of good cheer.9

Skousen had died in 2006, and his books and ideas had long since been forgotten. But in the aftermath of the financial meltdown, Beck began endorsing his work on air, touting The 5,000 Year Leap as “essential to understanding why our Founders built this Republic the way they did.” Local Tea Party groups placed bulk orders for their Constitution study groups, sometimes bringing in “scholars” from the National Center for Constitution Studies to lead the sessions. The center’s curriculum encouraged activists to embrace the view that the 1789 Constitution prohibited not only the institutions and programs of the New Deal and Great Society, but also federal income, corporate, and capital gains taxes, the national park and national forest systems, the separation of church and state on the state level, and the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Twenty-Fifth amendments, which provided for the popular election of U.S. senators, direct federal taxes, and clear procedures for replacing a dead or incapacitated president. Such a program would return the United States to the Gilded Age, with the added possibility of state theocracies. Beck wrote the foreword to the new edition of The 5,000 Year Leap, saying it was “divinely-inspired.”10 The book soon shot to number 1 on Amazon.com, selling a quarter million copies in the first half of 2009.

Grassroots Tea Party activists ultimately had to decide for themselves what they stood for. The propaganda they received from FreedomWorks (and an existing Republican PAC, rebranded the “Tea Party Express”) was libertarian in the Goldwater-Gingrich sense, while the messages coming from Beck and Skousen’s center were socially theocratic and economically libertarian. Not surprisingly, polls, interviews, and intensive scholarly studies have revealed a bifurcated Tea Party movement, with social conservatives of the Beck and Sarah Palin variety dominant in the Deep South, Tidewater, and Greater Appalachia, and libertarians of the Ron Paul and FreedomWorks variety holding the upper hand in the Far West and Yankeedom. Many local Tea Party groups experienced power struggles between these factions, especially in Yankeedom and the Far West, where libertarians often struggled to keep Christian conservatives from splitting the movement with regionally unpopular policies. However, members of both factions had a number of characteristics in common: They were overwhelmingly white, over forty-five years old, comfortably middle class, and self-identified as “extremely conservative.” Polling and research showed the typical Tea Partiers took a Skousen-like view of the 1789 Constitution and a social Darwinist view of society that pits the worthy and hardworking (themselves) against the lazy and undeserving (the poor, the young, the uninsured). They departed from the teachings of both Clousen and FreedomWorks in that they felt the “deserving” were justly entitled to the big-government benefits of the New Deal and Great Society: Social Security, Medicare, and Veterans Affairs programs. In their view, they’d worked for them, they’d earned them, and the nation should provide them. “Almost all Tea Partiers favor generous social benefits for Americans who ‘earn’ them,” Harvard University sociologists Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson concluded in an in-depth study of the movement. “Yet in an era of rising federal deficits, they are very concerned about being stuck with the tax tab to pay for ‘unearned’ entitlements handed out to unworthy categories of people,” including health insurance, student loans, and mortgage relief. They were twice as likely than other Americans to agree that providing government benefits to the poor “encourages them to remain poor” and significantly more likely to believe blacks and whites had equal opportunities to be successful.11

The movement grew rapidly, particularly after Obama announced an $800 billion economic stimulus package and a plan to extend health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans. Tax Day protests organized by FreedomWorks in April 2009 saw crowds of a few dozen to a few thousand gathering in 750 cities. In August, members of Congress confronted angry crowds of Tea Partiers at health care “town hall” meetings in their home districts who shouted them down as traitors and even executed some in effigy. Glenn Beck’s “9/12” rally attracted between sixty and seventy thousand to the Washington Mall (although organizers would claim a million) to listen to Beck and Armey protest government overreach. In January 2010, Tea Party activists and donations propelled a Republican, Scott Brown, to an upset victory to take the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the death of national liberal lion Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. The political establishment—both Democrats and Republicans of the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush school—didn’t know what had hit them.12

In keeping with Armey’s vision, Tea Party activists began taking over the GOP apparatus from the bottom up. They signed up to be party precinct leaders, a low-level position that often remained vacant, but conferred the power to vote for party officials, approve platforms, and endorse candidates. Their mantra, New York Times reporter Kate Zernike reported, was, “Take the precinct, take the state, take the party.” Coached by a group called the National Precinct Alliance, they seized control of the party in the Las Vegas area, the largest in Nevada, giving them the leverage to elect a Tea Party slate to the leadership of the state party. They followed the same program in the Phoenix area, leading not-always-libertarian senator John McCain to set up an entity to allow national party donors to bypass hostile state party officials and give directly to his reelection campaign. At Utah’s state convention, Tea Partiers defeated the nomination of incumbent U.S. senator Bob Bennett—a conservative who had voted for TARP—in favor of one of their own, Mike Lee. In Maine, long a bastion of old-school national liberal consensus Republicans, Tea Partiers took over county committees and then the state convention to pass a platform calling for a “return to the principles of Austrian economics,” the elimination of the Department of Education and Federal Reserve, prosecution of those participating in the “global warming myth,” and resistance to the establishment of a “one-world government.” “The people who come from the traditional conservative Reagan wing of the Republican Party have lost control of it,” said moderate state senator Peter Mills, who was soundly defeated in the gubernatorial primary that year by Tea Party favorite Paul LePage. “Somehow Obama has morphed into George III, the Congress is the British Parliament, and the Tea Party is the Minutemen with their long rifles. I don’t think people have thought through where that all leads.”13

In the short term, the Tea Party’s contribution was ambiguous, because support for its agenda was anything but broad-based. In the 2010 midterm elections, it failed to defeat a single Republican incumbent save Senator Bob Bennett. It nominated a cohort of radical laissez-faire candidates to the House and Senate, and won seats in the Deep South (including those of senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Marco Rubio of Florida), Far West (Mike Lee), and Greater Appalachia (Rand Paul). The Tea Party wave helped the GOP retake the House with a net sixty-three-seat gain, and unseated Democratic senators in Wisconsin and Arkansas. In Pennsylvania moderate Republican incumbent Arlen Specter switched parties to avoid a Tea Party primary challenge, only to lose the Democratic nomination; a Tea Party favorite, Pat Toomey, won the general election. At the same time, Tea Party activists nominated extreme Senate candidates in three states that otherwise would have almost certainly gone Republican—Delaware, Colorado, and Nevada—and forced the national party to divert resources to help rescue moderate incumbent Lisa Murkowski of Alaska from a Tea Party challenger.14

Indeed, while the Tea Party established a presence throughout the country, its success on the political stage was concentrated in certain regions. Of the sixty members of the House Tea Party caucus in the 112th Congress (2011–12), only three hailed from Yankeedom, and none from the Left Coast or New Netherland. The three Yankees did not achieve victory easily; in the seven races they had collectively won, only twice had any of them achieved a margin of victory of greater than 5 percent (Minnesota’s Michele Bachmann, in 2006 and 2010). One, Illinois freshman Joe Walsh, had won his seat by just 291 votes and was gerrymandered into lame-duck status by local Democrats. In Massachusetts, Scott Brown disappointed Tea Party activists by legislating as a Yankee moderate, while movement governors Paul LePage (in Maine) and Scott Walker (in Wisconsin) faced sustained resistance to their efforts to dismantle environmental, labor, and consumer safety protections. In 2012, the Republicans were swept in New England, losing every major federal and statewide contest, including Scott Brown’s Senate seat, the lower chamber of the New Hampshire State House, and every one of the region’s twenty-one House seats and electoral college votes for president; they also lost every Senate race in the rest of Yankeedom and a majority of Yankee-controlled House seats in Illinois, Minnesota, New York, and Iowa. From the Puritan migration of the 1630s to the debt ceiling debate, Yankees have championed individual self-denial for the common good, investment in strong public institutions, and governmental projects to improve society. The Tea Party was unable to take deep root in such inhospitable soil, and its partial takeover had driven the Republicans to near extinction in the region of their birth.15

By contrast, the Tea Party encountered little resistance to its agenda in the Dixie nations and the Far West, largely because its political agenda matched that of the Deep South: Reduce taxes for the wealthy and services for everyone else; crush the labor unions, public education, and the regulatory system; and suppress the turnout of immigrant, youth, and nonwhite voters. The four nations accounted for fifty-one of the sixty members of the House Tea Party caucus—85 percent of them—with the Deep South alone accounting for twenty-two. In the 2012 election, a referendum on Tea Party policy, Republicans had a net loss of eight seats in the House, but actually had a net gain of ten in the Deep South and Greater Appalachia.16

Once in office, Tea Party members of Congress quickly discredited the movement by threatening to destroy the world economy if their radical libertarian demands were not completely and immediately met. The first crisis came in the summer of 2011, when the Tea Party crowd announced they would block what had been a routine exercise to raise the ceiling on the national debt, enabling the United States to pay the bills Congress had already authorized in its budget. If the ceiling wasn’t raised, the country would default on its national debt, an event most economists agreed would cause a world economic collapse that would have made the crash of 2008 seem trivial. Yet the Tea Party congressmen—especially the twenty freshmen who’d just been elected—announced they would not do so unless Congress cut spending by some $2 trillion to balance the budget without raising taxes. Obama, a pragmatic national liberal in the mold of Eisenhower, began secret negotiations with House Speaker John Boehner (Appalachian Ohio) and came up with a $4 trillion “grand bargain” that would have increased taxes, cut entitlement spending, and simplified the tax code.

While the compromise was a victory for deficit reduction, the Tea Party contingent refused to endorse Boehner’s deal because it raised taxes on the wealthy, bringing the country within hours of a default, which downgraded the U.S. government’s credit rating and cost taxpayers $1.3 billion in added interest.* “I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said of the world economy. “Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this—it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming.”

Indeed, after Obama decisively won reelection in 2012—over the overwhelming opposition in Greater Appalachia and the Deep South—the radicals repeated the exercise, bringing the country to the brink of default again in January 2013 in an attempt to force the defunding of the president’s health care reform program. That fall, they forced a sixteen-day government shutdown, costing taxpayers another $2 billion and increasing the animosity directed toward the radicals. “We now have a group of US politicians seeking political purity, who seem to have much in common with the Taliban,” wrote former Democratic representative Martin Frost during the 2011 debt ceiling crisis. “They are Tea Party members; and because of blind adherence to smaller government, they seem intent on risking destroying what American political leaders have constructed in more than two centuries of hard, often painful work.”17

The effect of the movement’s economic policies was clearest in places where they actually did control the government. In Kansas, Governor Sam Brownback in 2012 enacted a $1.1 billion tax cut benefiting the wealthy, while slashing spending on education, social services, and the arts and fully privatizing the Medicaid system. “We’ll see how it works,” he told CNN at the outset. “We’ll have a real-live experiment.” Two years later, the verdict was in: a $700 million plunge in state revenues in a single year and a staggering $1 billion revenue hole projected for the next two; a downgrading of the state’s credit rating; lower job growth than any of its peer states; and public school cuts so severe that the state courts ruled them unconstitutional because they were “destructive of our children’s future.”

In North Carolina, meanwhile, Republicans took control of both the governor’s mansion and the legislative branch for the first time since Reconstruction and enacted sweeping Tea Party reforms. Drastic cuts were made in unemployment benefits in a state with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, because the state Chamber of Commerce objected to paying more taxes to keep the program solvent. Education budgets were stripped back, resulting in salary cuts to teachers, the elimination of ten thousand pre-kindergarten slots, and cuts in services to disabled children. Even though North Carolina’s population had been rapidly increasing, lawmakers cut tens of millions from the budget for its court system, forcing 10 percent of its workforce to be laid off (including translators for Spanish-speaking defendants and victim’s advocates) and a reduction in funds for public defenders. Lawmakers also scaled back early voting (popular among Democratic voters) and refused to expand Medicaid, even though 90 percent of its cost would be borne by the federal government. The New York Times editorial board called the moves “a demolition derby, tearing down years of progress in public education, tax policy, racial equality in the courtroom and access to the ballot.”18

The movement espoused a radical form of libertarianism not seen since the late nineteenth century. In a particularly infamous incident in September 2011, Representative Ron Paul was asked at a CNN/Tea Party Express presidential debate in Tampa, Florida, how far his ethic of individual responsibility extended: If an uninsured thirty-year-old had a catastrophic illness requiring six months of intensive care, should society let him die? The crowd suddenly burst out in cheers, yelling, “Yeah!” Paul himself waffled, but essentially agreed: “That’s what freedom is all about—taking your own risks.” In another incident in October 2010, firefighters in rural Tennessee stood by while a man’s house burned to the ground with all his possessions, a cat, and three dogs inside, because he hadn’t paid a seventy-five-dollar annual fee. This position was denounced by the head of the national firefighters’ association, and others pointed out that the department could have developed policies to recover their expenses and incentivize compliance while still saving the man’s home, such as putting a lien on the property for the costs of response. Glenn Beck, however, took to the airwaves to defend the department’s position, insisting that it was necessary to prevent people from “sponging off” their neighbors, while his on-air sidekick mocked the victim for begging firefighters to save his home. Social justice advocates, he said, would demand the department put out the fire. “They will push it up to a government responsibility instead of the individual’s responsibility.” Society, he said, was going to have to implement the fire department’s tough-love approach to its job: “We are going to start to have to have these kinds of things.” Tea Party Web sites and forums enthusiastically echoed his line.19

Tea Party politicians and activists also displayed an anger toward Obama’s policies so vitriolic that it often defied logic. He was constantly attacked as a socialist, a Marxist, a dictator, or an alien hell-bent on destroying America by turning it into a West European–style social democracy. In fact the president was, by West European standards, a center-right politician, and a liberal Republican by U.S. metrics, more akin to Eisenhower or the first Bush than to Vladimir Lenin, Che Guevara, or even Roosevelt, Kennedy, or Johnson. He continued the hawkish national-security-state policies of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, devoted more than a third of his emergency stimulus bill to tax cuts (despite evidence that infrastructure spending is a far more effective form of stimulus), reduced the federal budget deficit from $1.4 trillion to $506 billion in his first five years in office, agreed to a compromise proposal with Boehner that would have slashed the social safety net, appointed moderate-to-conservative individuals to the Federal Reserve, Treasury, and National Economic Council, and was soundly criticized by liberals for letting Wall Street off the hook for the financial crisis. His only significant contribution to the New Deal agenda, a 2010 reform of the health insurance market, took the preferred national liberal solution of a universal Medicare-like “single payer” system off the table in favor of a market-based system modeled on the laissez-faire Heritage Foundation’s 1989 proposal and the system created by his corporate Republican rival, Mitt Romney, when he was governor of Massachusetts. “Obama has governed as a moderate conservative,” former Reagan aide Bruce Bartlett observed in late 2014. “He has been conservative to exactly the same degree that Richard Nixon basically governed as a moderate liberal.” Indeed, actual left-liberals from the Kennedy-Johnson-McGovern tradition were generally unhappy with Obama’s essential conservatism, and bona fide socialists were disgusted. “He posed as a progressive and turned out to be a counterfeit,” political philosopher Cornel West, honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, said of Obama in 2014. “We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency. . . . [I]t turned out that he’s just another neoliberal centrist.”20

Finally, Tea Party ideas began to infect the Republican Party as a whole, prompting even its allegedly non–Tea Party leaders to adopt radical libertarian positions that would have given 1950s archconservative Robert Taft pause. In 2012, Republican representative Paul Ryan, chair of the House Budget Committee and self-described Ayn Rand devotee, proposed a budget featuring big tax cuts for the wealthy and draconian cuts in benefits and programs for middle- and lower-income people, excluding (in a nod to the Tea Party) retirees. The Urban Institute determined that its provisions would cause fourteen to twenty-seven million poor people to be dropped from Medicaid while cutting reimbursements to doctors and hospitals that treated those who remained by 31 percent. “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependence,” Ryan explained, adding that his Catholic faith inspired the plan. The U.S. Conference of Bishops disagreed, writing Congress that the “central moral measure of any budget proposal is how it affects ‘the least of these’ . . . those who are hungry and homeless, without work or in poverty.” Ryan’s “budget resolution fails to meet these moral criteria.” A group of Jesuit scholars and Georgetown University faculty members informed Ryan that his proposal “appeared to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

The plan was thereafter embraced by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who picked Ryan as his running mate. So radical was the proposal that when the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA explained to focus groups what it actually entailed, the New York Times later reported, “respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.” At a nationally televised primary debate in August 2011, all eight Republican presidential candidates were asked to raise their hands if they’d refuse a deficit reduction deal that cut ten dollars in spending for every dollar in new taxes. All eight candidates—including Romney and alleged moderate Jon Huntsman, former governor of Utah—raised their hands.21

Much of the country did not support the Tea Party, as evidenced by Mitt Romney’s selection as the party’s presidential nominee in 2012 over a variety of Tea Party favorites; Obama’s fairly easy defeat of Romney in the general election (again opposed by a majority of voters only in the Deep South, Greater Appalachia, and the Far West); Democratic gains in the 2012 congressional midterms; and establishment Republican victories in the 2014 congressional primaries. In national polls conducted over a span of thirty years, clear majorities of Americans have consistently expressed support for raising taxes on the wealthy, preventing cuts to Social Security benefits, the continued existence of labor unions to protect working people, and maintaining the government’s role in assisting those who can’t help themselves and ensuring that everyone has enough to eat and a place to sleep. In 2012—two years into the Tea Party ascendance—63 percent of Americans agreed that “a free market economy needs government regulation in order to best serve the public interest,” a central plank of national liberalism; an even more striking finding was that 62 percent of self-described “non–Tea Party Republicans” felt the same, as opposed to just 29 percent of Tea Partiers. The same survey found that 72 percent of Americans believed that Wall Street “only cares about making money for itself,” with little difference in the opinions of the working, middle, and upper middle classes. Furthermore, the trends were all against the laissez-faire movement. A 2014 Pew Research Center survey found that only 38 percent of millennials—people born after 1979—wanted a small government providing less services, and a majority believed it is government’s responsibility to ensure all Americans have health insurance. David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, called them “the most pro-government generation the United States has seen since the generation that voted for President Franklin Roosevelt exited the stage.”22

As the nation limped toward the 2016 presidential contest, its government was nearly paralyzed, starkly divided on a largely regional basis between radical libertarians and anyone who felt even a passing commitment to shared institutions and a sense of common purpose. Neither of its two main political formations, now starkly divided into ideological camps for the first time since the Jacksonian era, was able to muster the electoral supermajority required to overcome the other’s resistance.

A new set of political ideals was desperately needed. The future of not only the United States but the world stood in the balance.