The Tea Party movement has a funny way of being much less dead than the media and GOP Establishment told us it was.
The GOP should have embraced and absorbed the Tea Party, but instead, the Establishment joined forces with the media to destroy it. That was the fundamental mistake that shaped everything that happened after the GOP-E declared final victory over the Tea Party insurgency.
At its core, the Tea Party was about challenging the Beltway consensus on certain issues. The GOP Establishment believed those issues were settled in the Democrats' favor forever, and wanted to focus its energies on the terrain that could still be contested.
And yet, the Establishment candidates still told their voters they were ready to fight, fight, fight on policy ground they had actually conceded. The "populist" surge in the GOP began because a critical mass of Republican voters stopped believing them.
The defining characteristic of candidates who tend to succeed with the post-Tea Party GOP electorate is their willingness to challenge Beltway dogma, to contest issues that are supposedly permanent left-wing victories, to move the political center of gravity back to the right.
This is sometimes derided by Establishment-leaning pundits as absurdly cheering "HE FIGHTS!" about pugnacious politicians who actually do retreat and make compromises. The important thing, however, is what they're willing to fight ABOUT.
Behind all the sturm und drang (and we sure are getting lots of it!) Trump has done some things that actually challenge settled political "consensus" and the capitulations Establishment Republicans denied making. He constantly presents himself as a consensus-buster.
And he's setting the stage for bigger challenges to come. For example, the economy is now just shy of a growth rate that might be POLITICALLY self-sustaining - i.e. voters instinctively reject left-wing policies that would damage growth to achieve socialist objectives.
Gov't spending is way out of control and Trump hasn't been good on that so far, but maybe you have to achieve that level of politically self-sustaining growth to really sell smaller government to people - drain the fear of unemployment and ruin that fuels socialist appeals.
That's a lesson Trump and/or his strategists might have learned from watching what happened to the Tea Party, and what happened to Mitt Romney, who got walloped for presenting capitalist growth as better than comfortable socialist decline.
It might not be Trump who achieves what the Tea Party wanted, but he might be able to set the stage for a successor who can, and make it more likely for such a successor to be elected. That's what conservatives should be working for. This is no time to go wobbly. /end
