Next week (Tuesday, December 16) will mark the 252nd anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Beginning in 2009, another group of patriots organized against bank bailouts, the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and big government in general. As an homage to history, they called themselves the “TEA Party,” the “TEA” being an acronym for “Taxed Enough Already.”
The 1773 Tea Party was obviously successful in the long run, but for the TEA Party, history’s judgment is less clear. They are widely credited with the 2010 Republican takeover of Congress, but afterwards they forgot what “TEA” stood for and got bogged down in social issues and “birther” conspiracy theories.
Even the TEA Party’s detractors give them credit for that early success. One of these is Indivisible. The left-wing pressure group has been at the forefront of the “No Kings” protests and other demonstrations this year against Trump, Tesla, federal crime suppression in the nation’s capital, and whatever else the supposedly awful orange old man is up to.
Indivisible traces its founding back to the first Trump administration, and its inspiration was the TEA Party.
Following Trump’s first election win in November 2016, a group that described themselves as “former progressive congressional staffers who saw the Tea Party beat back President Obama’s agenda,” released Indivisible: A Practical Guide For Resisting the Trump Agenda.
The first section of the Indivisible guide is an argument that the left-wing should replicate what the TEA Party accomplished. It is often ill-informed and insulting regarding what made the TEA Party tick, failing, for example, to properly identify, let alone explain the “TEA” acronym.
But the Indivisible authors also provided backhanded compliments to the movement they were hoping to emulate:
The authors of this guide are former congressional staffers who witnessed the rise of the Tea Party. We saw these activists take on a popular president with a mandate for change and a supermajority in Congress. We saw them organize locally and convince their own members of Congress to reject President Obama’s agenda. Their ideas were wrong, cruel, and tinged with racism – and they won.
We believe that protecting our values and neighbors will require mounting a similar resistance to the Trump agenda – but a resistance built on the values of inclusion, tolerance, and fairness. Trump is not popular. He does not have a mandate. He does not have large congressional majorities. If a small minority in the Tea Party can stop President Barack Obama, then we the majority can stop a petty tyrant named Trump.
Did they succeed?
Obviously, the Trump agenda, while resisted by Indivisible and others since late 2016, is back with us. Which brings us to Indivisible: A Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink, the 2024 revision of the 2016 Indivisible guide. To confront what they call “Trump 2.0,” the Indivisible team had to concede past failures:
But the painful 30,000-foot reality we see clearly in the results is that we simply were not able to convince enough people that the threat posed by Trump to democracy, to abortion, and to all our rights and freedoms outweighed their frustration with the status quo.
What this means for our next steps. Let’s be real: Trump won a narrow victory in the swing states. It feels shattering because we hoped to see a national rejection; instead, he made gains.
And then there’s this. The phrase “Tea Party” appears 24 times in the first Indivisible guide, and four times on the first page, but does not appear even one time in the 2024 update. The historical template Indivisible was built to replicate has been totally scrubbed. Indivisible’s effort to replicate the success of the actual TEA Party appears to have created a “Weak Tea Party.”
On one level, however, Indivisible has been a resounding success. Since its founding, the Indivisible advocacy empire has raised at least $145 million.
So, it should not be ignored.
Indivisible network coverage at InfluenceWatch includes the following:
Here are some examples of Indivisible coverage from the Capital Research Center:
