"The party of white people": How the Tea Party took over the GOP, armed with all the wrong lessons from history

There was an emerging disagreement among conservatives, one that grew out of differing dispositions, if not principle. It had been clear for some time that the Tea Party combined legitimate outrage over Democratic policies with more disreputable elements that tended toward extreme directions, a dialectic that the conservative columnist Matthew Continetti called “the two faces of the Tea Party.” One side sought to repair various “deformities” in American politics. As former House majority leader Dick Armey had said at a Tea Party rally, they needed to follow the Founders and the Constitution without thought or equivocation—“This ain’t no thinkin’ thing,” he said. “You have to kowtow to the Tea Party,” a spokesman for Richard G. Lugar of Indiana said, summarizing the view of many Republican politicians. “In retreat,” Tanenhaus argued, “the nullifying spirit has been revived as a form of governance—or, more accurately, anti-governance.” Led by the Tea Party, Republicans stumbled into a series of unwinnable fights over the budget, the debt ceiling, and Obamacare, each justified, according to Tanenhaus, “not as a practical attempt to find a better answer, but as a ‘Constitutional’ demand for restoration of the nation to its hallowed prior self.” But now that approach had come to its logical endpoint after the 2012 election.