Tea Party for the Left?

Don't write off the idea too quickly.

source: Anne Rearick

I’ve read quite a bit recently about the idea of a left-wing Tea Party. The original right-wing Tea Party arose after Obama’s rise in 2008 and the fall of the Bush-era GOP. As David French pointed out in an Op-Ed this week:

The Tea Party was never a formal organization; it was a collection of organizations, of local clubs and grass-roots groups, from across the nation that had a common ethos and — this is key — attitude. And it’s the angry defiance of the Tea Party that Democrats most seek to emulate.

Senator Chuck Schumer’s decision last week not to filibuster a Republican continuing resolution perfectly illustrates the contrast. We know from the Obama years that Tea Party conservatives were [happy to shut down the government](https://www.texastribune.org/2016/02/16/ted-cruz-2013-obamacare-shutdown-was-defining-mome/) to try to coerce concessions from Obama — even if they had no hope of achieving their ultimate aim, repealing the Affordable Care Act.

Countless Democrats were (and are) furious at Schumer. They wanted to force a showdown with the administration, even if a government shutdown might empower President Trump in the short term to fire or furlough even more government employees and shutter even more government programs.

And perhaps those ‘countless Democrats’ are even angrier about the snow job that party Democrats pulled off in the past years:

You can see the same appeal for the Democrats. Many members of the Democratic base aren’t just furious that Schumer supported the continuing resolution; they’re furious at the establishment decisions — including initially closing ranks behind an infirm President Joe Biden — that they believe led to defeat.

The Democratic Party’s approval rating is 27 percent, a record low. Only 7 percent of voters are very pleased with the party. A party doesn’t achieve a rating that low unless millions of its members turn on the leaders of their tribe.

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When people are furious, they might leave the tribe altogether.

What French fails to focus on is all the former Dems who — in effect — did leave the party fold and voted for Trump. In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, David Shor presented a magisterial analysis of why Harris lost and what segments of the former Obama coalition shifted to Trump. Education polarization — highly educated are solid Dems, less educated whites have shifted strongly to the GOP — is the most important political trend in the past 30-40 years. After that, we saw a rightward shift in groups that historically were very solid Dem:

There’s no shift in white, self-described conservative voters between 2016 and 2024. Democrats are winning 85 percent of Black conservatives in 2016 but only 77 percent in 2024. They were winning 34 percent of conservative Hispanics in 2016, but that falls by half, to 17 percent, in 2024. They were winning 28 percent of conservative Asians in 2016 — which falls to 20 percent in 2024. […] What we’re seeing among nonwhite voters is people voting more by ideology and less by their ethnic group. | Ezra Klein

David Shor lays out the central dilemma:

The lower your political engagement, education level or socioeconomic status, the less engaged you are in politics, the more Trumpy you are. And that just wasn’t true four years ago.

Those Trumpy folks don’t follow conventional media, and they become much more Republican in recent years. And a high-water mark was reached.

If only people who had voted in 2022 had voted, Harris would have won the popular vote and also the Electoral College fairly easily. But if everyone had voted, Trump would have won the popular vote by nearly five points. And generally what you see now is that every measure of socioeconomic status and political engagement is just monotonically related to your chance of liking Trump.

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The bottom line: The Democrats can’t win if those who shifted right aren’t returned to the fold or unless a lot of Trumpy voters decide not to vote.

So, imagine a group of younger, anti-establishment Democrats, that reject some of the key tenets of the Democratic Party, such as:

1. They argue to counter or halt the leftward shift in the party over the past 10 years (while the country has shifted right).

2. They demand that all the 70- and 80-year-old committee chairs and party leaders, like Schumer, step down for a new generation. (Term limits, please?)

3. They aggressively and explicitly align policy with the issues and positions that ‘ordinary people’ — the working- and middle-class voters — believe are important and which are more conservative than those that well-informed, elite, cosmopolitan, highly educated, wealthy Dems support.

To expand on that last point, I mean conservative in both senses:

• aspiring to retain the earlier values of the Democratic Party, like The New Deal and The Great Society, and the post-WWII expansion of the American middle class, and

• centralizing the party's focus on working-class and middle-class concerns ('ordinary people'), such as distrust of institutions; opposition to immigration, neoliberal free trade, and unfettered markets; and, most importantly, the need to dramatically lower the cost of living.

These are attributes of the American conservative left, which I call the ‘off left’. (For political theory folks, this is in distinction to the failed ‘post-left’ that went through the to-be-expected horseshoe turn into far right. ‘Off left’ is loosely adapted from Svetlana Boym’s ideas of the ‘off modern’ .)

This is already happening, with figures like Marie Gluesenkamp, Ruben Gallego, and others winning in Trump districts, operating very close to their constituents’ interests. They haven’t found a term for their movement, and I bet it won’t be ‘Tea Party’. I bet you’ll soon hear terms like ‘conservative left’, and maybe my ‘off left’.

And remember, the truth will out. Lanae Erickson, senior vice president at Third Way, a centrist Democratic organization, said this:

The far left has seriously damaged the Democratic Party brand, making it unpalatable as an option to many swing voters, even if the alternative is Trump and his MAGA crew. Kamala Harris lost in large part because she took positions that were substantively wrong and politically toxic in 2019 on the promise from far-left groups that they would deliver her a primary win. But she learned as well as anyone that the chasm between the far-left, hyper-online activists and Democratic primary voters is as wide as the Grand Canyon, and she lost both the nomination in 2020 and the general election in 2024 because of it.

We need a new coalition of the ‘off left’ to attack the shibboleths of the party and the entrenched failed policies of the Biden era. We need to attract the defectors to win, even if we lose some of the old Obama coalition's elite, wealthy, highly educated leftovers. (They were traditionally Republicans, anyway.) The needs of that vestigial rump party can’t define the Democratic Party’s future policies. Not if we are going to win.

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