Where Is the Anti-Biden Tea Party?

Barack Obama had only been president for a few months when the Tea Party roared onto the American political stage. Conservative activists have gathered and organized in the hundreds of thousands against his stimulus plan and health reforms. Their efforts drove the Republican Party to the right and made their profits in the 2010 midterm elections.

Eight years later, Donald J. Trump faced a similar grassroots opposition. Liberal “Resistance” protested and organized itself into thousands of volunteer-led local groups, helping to halt Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and help Democrats retake the House of Representatives in 2018.

But for more than half of President Biden’s first year in office, there is little evidence that a mass movement is mobilizing against him or his policies. While the government is calling for trillions of dollars in federal spending, the Tea Party has not made a second appearance. And the conservative protests that did take place – although sometimes aggressive in new ways – tended to target a range of political and cultural issues rather than Mr Biden himself.

“Yeah, we’re going out, we’re against some of Biden’s policies, we disagree,” said Debbie Dooley, an Atlanta-based activist who co-founded the Tea Party in 2009. “But you don’t see any major protests out there.”

The number of nationwide conservative demonstrations since the Biden’s inauguration remains a fraction of the liberal demonstrations since Trump’s inauguration in 2017, according to data from the Crowd Counting Consortium, a public and scientific project led by researcher Erica Chenoweth of Harvard and Jeremy Pressman from the University of Connecticut.

While left-of-center demonstrations accounted for three-quarters of all demonstrations in the United States in the six months following Mr. Trump’s inauguration, conservative demonstrations since Mr. Biden account for just 10 percent of the total (anti-racism and police protests make up the majority) . And only a few dozen of them explicitly criticized Biden according to the mass census, in contrast to the hundreds of Obama-critical tea party events in the summer of 2009.

Understand the Infrastructure Act

• • A trillion dollar package passed. The Senate passed a comprehensive bipartisan infrastructure package on Aug. 10 that concludes weeks of intense negotiations and debates on the largest federal investment in the nation’s aging public construction system in more than a decade.
  • The final vote. The final balance in the Senate was 69 to 30 votes against. Legislation, yet to be passed in the House of Representatives, would touch almost every facet of the American economy and strengthen the nation’s response to planet warming.
  • Main areas of expenditure. Overall, the bipartisan plan focuses on spending on transportation, utilities, and removing pollution.
  • transport. About $ 110 billion would be used on roads, bridges, and other transportation projects; $ 25 billion for airports; and $ 66 billion for the railroad, which gives Amtrak most of the funding it has received since it was founded in 1971.
  • Utilities. The Senators have also raised $ 65 billion to connect hard-to-reach rural communities to high-speed internet and attract low-income urban dwellers who can’t afford it, and $ 8 billion for western water infrastructure.
  • Cleaning up pollution: Approximately $ 21 billion would be used to rehabilitate abandoned wells and mines, as well as Superfund sites.

Why has Mr. Biden – until now, at least – escaped the type of base fermentation that haunted his two immediate predecessors?

One possibility is that it may simply be perceived as less antagonistic. Most political scientists agree that the Tea Party was driven more by fear and resentment about a demographic changing country that had just elected its first black president than by fiscal conservatism.

“I don’t think it was just Obama personally; it was what he represented, ”said Theda Skocpol, a Harvard politician who has investigated both the Tea Party and the anti-Trump resistance. “It feels like people who don’t seem like America to you are taking responsibility.”

As a white man, Mr. Biden is less attracted to this racial backlash. And where Mr Trump’s personal conduct and combative political style have fueled the indignation of liberal activists, Mr Biden’s more reserved, more moderate reputation may be less open to attack.

“It wasn’t that easy to have some kind of second tea party with him in the White House just because he doesn’t upset people that much,” says Seth Masket, who heads the University of Denver’s Center on American Politics and wrote a book has about why Mr Biden won the Democratic primary last year.

Mr Biden’s agenda offers another option. Surveys consistently show that his pandemic relief package and infrastructure plans are valued more positively than Obama’s 2009 incentives and Affordable Care Act ever, and cheaper than Mr. Trump’s ACA repeal plans and 2017 tax bill. All four of these bills sparked opposition the base.

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Aug. 23, 2021, 5:41 p.m. ET

But a president who dampens rather than stirs grassroots anger is only part of the answer. The issues the Conservatives have protested over the past six months suggest other reasons for the lack of the Anti-Biden Tea Party.

One of them is the pandemic. Protests against public health restrictions, masks and Covid vaccines have been responsible for a large number of conservative demonstrations since Mr Biden’s inauguration, according to data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a non-profit group that has demonstration events in more than 190 countries tracked and territories. In many cases, these demonstrations have criticized governors, employers and public health officials more than Mr Biden.

The pandemic – coupled with high deficit spending under Mr Trump – may also have shielded Mr Biden’s ambitious agenda from the kind of conservative criticism that welcomed government spending in 2009.

“We are still concerned about a lot of tax issues,” said Ms. Dooley, the Tea Party activist. “But then Covid struck, and that turned everything upside down because there are people who are injured and whom you have to help.”

The transformation of the Republican Party since 2009 offers another possible explanation. The rise of the Tea Party “marked the beginning of a mainstreaming of right-wing resentment politics,” said Rachel Blum, a political scientist at the University of Oklahoma, that paved the way for Mr. Trump’s presidency.

Their success in redesigning the GOP in particular would have made a renewed strengthening of the base on the right-hand side superfluous. “There doesn’t have to be another tea party because Trumpism is the downstream display of that,” said Professor Skocpol. “Trump leads himself, front and center, a much more personality-centered embodiment of the same urges.” Where Obama caught the attention of activists in 2009, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project documented more than four times as many pro-Trump demonstrations as anti-Biden demonstrations by July 20.

In some cases, Mr Trump’s influence has fueled opposition to the Republicans rather than the Democrats. “Much of the anger is centered on Republicans who betrayed Trump, who threw Trump under the bus,” said Ms. Dooley, mentioning Rep. Liz Cheney, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. “That’s what a lot of people are focusing on compared to 2009.”

Trump-affiliated Republicans are mimicking the Tea Party in some ways: They transform local party committees, take over school councils, and run for office. A recent wave of protests against critical racial theory has drawn comparisons with the Tea Party, although the number of demonstrations has so far been far fewer.

Not having a version of the Biden-era Tea Party can’t do much political harm to Republicans. The party only needs to flip a handful of seats over the next year to retake Congress. Biden’s approval rating has dropped in recent weeks, and the US’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan could continue to weigh on them. And a broad grassroots backlash could arise if Mr Biden’s legislative agenda becomes less popular.

It is also possible that the Trump era changed the tactics and goals of conservative organizing. Although some Tea Party events occurred with guns and violent language, the movement influenced the political process primarily through protests, legislative pressures, and votes. In contrast, some Trump-supporting activists have resorted to implicit threats (such as armed anti-lockdown demonstrations), conspiracy theories (such as QAnon and false claims about the 2020 election), or overt violence (such as the January 6 attack on Congress) .

“The messaging is not about” using the traditional grassroots tools “like going to ward meetings and contacting your elected officials,” said Dana Fisher, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. “It’s more like intimidating your elected officials by packing assault rifles.”

Far-right militant groups whose members participated in the Capitol attack, such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, have attended more than 300 (some peaceful) events in the six months following Mr Biden’s inauguration, according to Armed Conflict Event data project. And sizable proportions of Republicans have downplayed or apologized for the January 6th events. In a Quinnipiac poll earlier this month, 75 percent of them said it was “time to move on.” More than half of Trump voters called the uprising “patriotism” and “defense of freedom” in a July poll by CBS News / YouGov.

In some cases, the Tea Party has embodied that shift. One of their founding organizers spoke at the rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol. Local tea party groups that remain active have accepted Mr Trump’s election lies, Professor Skocpol said. And groups like FreedomWorks and the Heritage Foundation’s political arm, which fueled the tea party movement, are now pushing for restrictive electoral laws.

That suggests that if the next sustained grassroots conservative movement breaks out, Mr. Biden may not be in focus – and it may not look very much like the tea party. “We are in uncharted waters in many ways,” said Professor Fisher. “I’m not sure what we’re going to get.”