How the Tea Party 'abandoned its small-government principles' and became a Trump 'personality cult'

15 July

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Dispatch correspondent Kevin D. Williamson said the U.S. political system has no room for Elon Musk’s new political party. It’s got four already.

“[I]t gets confusing because the two smaller ones share their names and P.O. boxes with the two larger ones,” said Williamson. “Each of our major parties has within it two major factions, one dominant and one subordinate.”

The transformation of the GOP over the past 15 years didn’t begin with Donald Trump, for example, and it will not end with him. It began with the Tea Party movement, which loathed the GOP “establishment” almost as much as its hated Barack Obama in the White House.

But the Tea Party went from the minority faction in the minority party to a majority faction at the helm of government quickly “by abandoning its small-government principles and embracing a low-rent demagogue and building a c around him,” said Williamson.

“Note that the most abject Donald Trump sycophants on the scene today — Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Mike Lee — were Tea Party insurgents back in the day. Same ol’ politicians, brand-new set of unshakeable principles that will be traded in for fresh ones when the winds shift,” Williamson said.

Over the course of their journey, Tea Party Republicans became “an even worse version of the establishment they claimed to despise,” said Williamson, and the recent split within the Trump movement is just another “piece of evidence that the old conservative movement is dead, leaving room for a new faction to emerge through the usual mechanics of intra-party polarization.”

“Expect to end up with a GOP with an anti-war welfare-chauvinist faction and a more hawkish welfare-chauvinist faction, which may prove durable enough to last until its fiscal imbecility drives the federal government into a credit crisis,” Williamson said.

The “establishment” over in the Democratic Party is similarly under attack from the Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) “populist left.” And what that means for Musk is that he is “hunting in vain for a fifth quadrant in our two-by-two political grid,” only “there is no fifth quadrant.”

In the meantime, Williamson said demagogues and demagogic movements prevail “when one side is operating in sluggardly satisfaction (2016 Democrats led by Hillary Rodham Clinton) and the other is riven by an urgent discontent" that party leaders are failing to acknowledge and adopt.

“If the more sensible kind of Democrat or Republican is to prevail, then they will have to understand the nature of the coalition politics of the moment we are in,” said Williamson. “Understanding that we have a four-party system rather than a two-party system is the place to start."

Read the full Dispatch report at this link.

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