It has only been hibernating.
I have been poring over reports just back from the Words Edgewise Lab in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and they confirm what we already knew: Dan McLaughlin is right 99.7 percent of the time. The man is uncanny. But for all his brilliant breaking analysis, Dan may have been slightly off the mark when he wrote here earlier this month that “The Tea Party Movement Is Dead.”
The Tea Party has been hibernating, to be sure, ever since Donald Trump descended the golden escalator and declared that the era of big government was back. You may remember that Democratic regulars — momentarily — unclenched their jaws, and the nonprofit sector gathered itself for further incursions into the productive economy. Nothing is quite so enervating to American dynamism as bipartisan consensus. But had the Tea Party movement just died? I don’t think so.
One thing we know from the long record of our national politics is that, somewhat like the weather in Hawaii, you need wait only a few moments for dramatic change to arrive. Just when you think that the centripetal forces in American life — call them the Hamiltonian impulses — have seized the high ground, the centrifugal forces — call them the Jeffersonian impulses — come roaring back to life. Order and liberty move in constant tension, back and forth, but with no final victories for the one over the other. The Tea Party in its countless permutations enjoys eternal American life, just as do its indefatigable opponents, the socialists of all parties.
The Tea Party of the early Obama years, in point of fact, was one of the few political movements of my lifetime that was genuinely organic, genuinely spontaneous. It had no sugar-daddy funding, no charismatic leadership, no big-ticket consultants, no tax-exempt buildings in northwest Washington. It left behind not a trace of Astroturfed infrastructure but, rather, a scrapbook bulging with the stories of inspiring citizen action.
My favorite story involved a woman named Jane Freeman. One day in 2010, she flew to Washington, D.C. She and her Tea Party posse had traveled there to persuade undecided congressmen to oppose Obamacare when it came to the House floor for a vote.
As representatives filed into the Capitol to cast their votes, the cable networks began to buzz with “reports” of Tea Partiers shouting ethnic and racial slurs. That didn’t sound like the Tea Party. Mrs. Freeman made the rounds of the available entrances, observed the encounters up close, recorded the louder exchanges, called in to a live broadcast, and, one by one, calmly refuted the false claims.
Thank you for your service, Jane Freeman. (I should note for the record that Mrs. Freeman had served some years earlier as headquarters manager for the Buckley for Mayor campaign in New York and, following a whirlwind office romance, had married the campaign manager. I’m told that she lived happily ever after.)
And a historical footnote: Those of you with long memories may recall that Obama’s principal (public) rationale for socializing American medicine was to reduce costs. After witnessing the explosion in health-care spending over the past decade, I recall the prescient words of my late pal P. J. O’Rourke during the debate over Obamacare: “If you think health care’s expensive now, wait until it’s free.”
The Trailblazer. Peter Wright was one of the good guys during the Cold War. He was a senior officer at London’s MI5 and devoted his distinguished career to counterintelligence, which meant that for multiple decades, he searched for Soviet agents buried inside the security services of the Western allies. I always thought of him as an Oxbridge version of America’s own James Angleton — a shade less brilliant, perhaps, but considerably less tormented.
I was reading Peter’s stunningly candid 1987 memoir, Spy Catcher, the other night and came across his account of how the Brits tracked Soviet illegals inserted into the United States. Did the Soviets drive their agents across the Canadian border, 9/11 style? Or walk them over the bridge at Calais into Downeast Maine? Did they smuggle them ashore at a deepwater port in California? Or drop them off on a sandy beach in south Florida? No, no, no, and no. The Soviets had a high-volume operation in mind and thought they needed a reliable, long-term pipeline. They made the appropriate arrangements with local crime lords — as also, presumably, the inappropriate arrangements with local officialdom — built the pipeline, and shipped their agents across the border from (as you will have guessed by now) Mexico.
Illegal immigrants pouring across our southern border on a mission to destroy the United States of America? What might you call such people? I guess you could call them gotaways.
And there’s a kicker in Peter’s account, as there almost always is in the mirrored world of counterintelligence. During those early days, when the rudiments of a high-volume pipeline for illegal immigrants were being installed, the head of MI6’s Iberian section, which at the time included Mexico, was an officer named Harold Adrian Russell Philby. Yes, that would be Kim Philby.
A Summer Breeze. I am indebted to the legendary newspaperman, Larry Thornberry, for putting me on to his favorite novelist, Donna Leon. An expat who has lived in Venice for many years, the lambent Ms. Leon writes police procedurals with pith and grace and case-closing narrative drive. Pick up one of her more than 20 books on the mesmerizing Commissario Guido Brunetti — you can start anywhere in the series — and a long airplane ride will simply fly by. You have the full Words Edgewise guarantee on this one.
Neal B. Freeman, a former editor of National Review, served as senior adviser to the Tea Party Patriots.