Sarah Palin's endorsement of The Donald has been hailed as either the inevitable result of political celebrity or the death of the Tea Party political movement depending on whether or not you believed Palin to be a symbol of Tea in the first place. It was, perhaps, a watershed moment in a Republican primary race that's been more reality TV than serious politics, a symbol of the current regression that the GOP is experiencing in serious debate.
If Sarah Palin could see Putin from her home in Alaska, imagine what she'll see from the top of Las Vegas' Trump Tower?
In many ways, I agree that the Tea Party, as we know it is dead. I'll go even further. The Tea Party as we currently like to define it never really existed. The Tea Party movement began and ended during the first set of rallies that occurred almost immediately after the Bush Administration announced the TARP bailouts. THAT Tea Party, the angry people holding up misspelled signs and wearing gaudy clothes was a lashing out, a Right version of Occupy without all of the rape in tent cities that accompanied the latter. It was a catharsis by predominantly Caucasian self-identified conservatives that led commenters, incorrectly, to assume that a great (little l) libertarian wave was crashing on the shores of Big Government.
It was almost immediately co-opted and absorbed by other political movements looking for a ready-made base from which to draw funds. What emerged was not the anti-government Tea Party, but a political hissy fit controlled by some formerly on the fringes of the conservative movement who understood the value of PR.
The Evil Koch's bought in, but not because they wanted to create an "Astroturf" organization (as the left claims) but because their small-government, light-regulation leanings initially identified with the movement. This has done more good than harm as groups such as Americans for Prosperity harnessed Tea Party members to promote free-market ideals in a manner which they had not been promoted before. AFP also developed State branches which took the Tea Party limited government message, and focused it on a much more local level through groups such as Texans for Fiscal Responsibility.
The successes of these groups have been legion, as State houses across the nation became increasingly conservative, and more and more of their governments turned red.
But the National Tea Party never really solidified. It flirted with Sarah Palin and turned a blind-eye when she went off the reservation into reality TV land. It allowed itself to be claimed, and then dumped, by a variety of National political figures who used it for money and press, and then went back to business as usual or a talking head career.
In Texas the Tea Party movement allowed itself to be hijacked by then-State Senator (Now Lt. Governor) Dan Patrick, who founded what he called the "Tea Party Caucus" despite having no real connections to the group.
Almost a decade in, and the National Tea Party is nothing more than a loose collection of political fund-raising organizations and PACs who have very little in common. They have championed and then abandoned several politicians (Marco Rubio being the most notable) who failed to meet impossible to define purity tests only to be led chanting down the path to the next 'anti-establishment' figure.
While it's true there is still meaningful Tea Party action taking place at the State and municipal level, Sarah Palin's silly endorsement of Trump will have little-to-no effect on that. What Sarah Palin has proven is not that the Tea Party is dead, but that what we, and the original organizers, thought it to be never existed.
