The Meaning of the Tea Party

By William Voegeli
May 27, 2010

One point about the tea party movement is not in dispute: it was triggered on the morning of February 19, 2009, by Rick Santelli, a correspondent for CNBC. Speaking from the trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, Santelli responded to a question from his studio anchors by denouncing a proposed $75 billion government program to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. As the traders around him began to look up from their computers to listen, then to applaud and cheer, Santelli turned to them and asked, "How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage who has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills?" Getting more worked up, Santelli said, "We're thinking about having a Chicago tea party in July. All of you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I'm going to start organizing it."

Santelli, it turned out, didn't need to do any organizing, or to wait five months for people to take action. The Tea Party movement was born. CNBC and YouTube viewers launched websites and Facebook pages within hours of the rant heard 'round the world. Within weeks, a new factor in American politics emerged, a "right-wing street-protest movement," according to the liberal journalist Michael Tomasky, something unprecedented in modern American politics. Following Santelli's famous outburst the Tea Party movement "materialized...out of nowhere," Tomasky reported forthrightly but regretfully, "with an intensity no one would have predicted." As one consequence, "the degree to which self-identified independent voters flipped on health care...from support to opposition, in part because of the toxic town-hall protests, was astonishing." the rest

The phenomenon is especially hard to describe precisely because it is so decentralized, a movement with "no headquarters to visit, no chairman, no written platform and no chosen candidate," as Time magazine observed.