By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Where’s the Tea Party conservative political movement headed? Events can turn on a dime these days. Is the Tea Party a spent force? Or does it have a future you can bank on?
When curiosity about the answers arises from state to state, local conditions enter into the evaluation, as well as the difficulty of getting an accurate view if many avenues of communication are distorted.
Moreover, the rise of worldwide Islamist terrorism injects deadly new uncertainties in life, politically and on every other front, and potentially on every doorstep.
On November 20 Fox News, citing Arizona’s porous border with Mexico, reported, “Phoenix flagged as potential ‘hotbed’ for terror recruiting.”
Alert Americans fear how accessible their country is to foreign terrorists.
However, the establishment elite of both major U.S. political parties and Big Business, as well as lobbying groups including the Arizona Catholic Conference and U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, have a sorry record of opposing the strengthening of border security being given priority.
Improving border security has been a major Tea Party aim, but so far the bishops and their allies have had their reckless way on this issue instead.
The Fox News story said the FBI briefed Phoenix police recently about an area of the city where two jihadi radicals had lived who were fatally shot after driving from Phoenix to Garland, Texas, earlier this year. The young men were killed by Texas law enforcement on May 3 when they arrived to ambush a defiant contest drawing cartoons of Muslim prophet Mohammed.
The two jihadis had worshipped at northern Phoenix’s Islamic Community Center of Phoenix (ICCP).
Fox said FBI agents “said ‘ISIS was recruiting high-school age students and the bureau wanted us to know what to look for,’ said a (police) source, who was not authorized to speak for the department. He said the briefing was unusual in that it only applied to high schools in a small area of north Phoenix.”
On May 29 more than 250 people outside the ICCP had protested Muslim violent radicalism, while a slightly smaller group of mosque defenders asserted Islam’s peaceful intentions. The Wanderer attended this rally and reported on it in the June 11 issue (p. 8B), under the headline, “Phoenix mosque rally: What dangers to society lurked here?”
The ICCP is less than nine miles across the huge Phoenix metropolitan area from the headquarters of one of the dedicated local Tea Party groups, the Arizona Project, which met on November 16, a few days before this Fox News story broke, to discuss what future the Tea Party movement may face.
In addition to the other challenges it faces, maybe add the threat of Sharia law, which didn’t seem to loom so menacingly against the U.S. only a few years ago.
The Tea Party’s swift rise in 2009 was generated by horrified reaction to new President Barack Obama’s impatient, radical spending agenda. His aggressive plan to subjugate the United States’ entire system of medical care to his control further empowered this grassroots opposition to grim government.
People signing on to the Tea Party rebellion seemed to share the view that the United States had been pulled far from its historical foundations.
The dominant liberal media sized up the Tea Party as potential potent opposition to Obama’s agenda, so these media started trying to write off this conservative force, even though they attempted to pump life into the self-indulgent, inchoate Occupy Wall Street movement that elite editors hoped would be a puissant counterforce to the Tea Party.
However, Occupy Wall Street shriveled thanks to its own indiscipline while the Tea Party energized much of the electorate that had been turned off by the elite establishment of both major political parties and their media allies.
Left-wing editors who kid themselves that they’re disinterested moderates had kidded themselves about just how much heft they had — although their agenda-setting abilities to focus on issues how, when, and where they want can’t be written off.
Obama, seeing how the Tea Party and kindred spirits threatened his war on the American people, summoned up some of his federal minions like the IRS and FBI to combat such challengers. Obama certainly didn’t stop these challengers in their tracks. But one wonders how much more they could have accomplished without his harassment.
Still Alive?
When conservatives made big political gains by decisively wresting control of the U.S. House from Obama’s Democrats in the November 2010 election, “I was just floating on Cloud Nine, thinking we’re going to change things,” Ron Ludders said at the November 16 meeting of the Arizona Project Tea Party, of which he’s chairman.
Not much resulted from that major 2010 victory despite the campaign rhetoric, Ludders recalled, certainly not the beginning of the end legislatively for Obamacare, which Obama had signed into law in March 2010.
Conservative activists can lose interest when their efforts don’t seem fruitful, Ludders said.
In the next midterm election, in November 2014, “Those of us who were left said, ‘We’re gonna do the Senate’,” he said.
They did. The upper chamber of Congress strongly shifted to GOP control, too, in what was called a wave election. But, he said, results there also were meager.
“Most of us don’t feel that we’re being heard,” Ludders said.
This may be an overly pessimistic assessment, considering that the large majority of Republican presidential aspirants for 2016 at least express strong sympathy for conservative goals if not 100 percent support. Blatant liberalism dare not boast its name on the Republican street.
However, the political establishment continues to have clout even if it has to conceal it, the better to exercise it.
Later during the meeting, Ludders pointed to notable conservative success in this year’s November 3 off-year elections, including the victory of statewide candidates in Kentucky favored by Tea Partiers, Matt Bevin for governor and running mate Jenean Hampton for lieutenant governor.
Still, Ludders wondered, “Is the sentiment still out there for our cause?. . . Is the movement still alive out there?”
The Arizona Project’s meeting room that seats about 100 people was about one-third full as the Tea Party’s future was being weighed on November 16 — although Ludders conceded that an important legislative district meeting being held elsewhere the same evening could have attracted some who otherwise would have attended.
It’s not as if the conservative Ludders is a table-pounder who insists on total victory or else says everything has been lost. Some people even have accused him of being a RINO, a Republican in Name Only, Ludders said, shaking his head at the very idea.
Ludders tossed out a number of possibilities for discussion about the Tea Party’s fate. Among them: Have the media caused this damage? Has the GOP establishment? Has the Tea Party’s own factionalism?
The Democrats marshal a united front while their foes don’t, one woman in the audience said. With the Democrats, “everybody’s on the same page,” but on the other side, “everyone’s on a different page.”
“The Tea Party needs a leader,” she said. “. . . Not having a leader, this is what you get, factions all over the country.”
Later in the discussion, a man replied, “I’m glad there’s not a national leadership because issues are local.”
A different man, who popped into the meeting wearing a tricorn hat, symbolic of the American revolutionary era, noted that progress was being made against the establishment.
“We’re getting these people, one at a time,” he said, mentioning the recent resignation of U.S. House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) and suggesting Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) could be ousted, too.
Still, Ludders noted, politicians make promises that don’t come true, like frequent declarations in favor of building a better fence for border security.
The Power Of Small Groups
On another topic, Ludders suggested that offering to help politicians in office could leave the public officials pleasantly surprised.
After the 2010 elections, he said, he and some others went to the Arizona legislature not to make demands but “to ask how we could make their jobs easier,” and “their jaws dropped to the floor.”
Don’t think that just because they’re officeholders, they’re all-knowing and all-capable, Ludders said. “I wouldn’t hold these people on a pedestal for being knowledgeable. They’re just like you and me.”
After Ludders noted that the Arizona Project meeting room was far from full, another man recalled a quotation often attributed to 20th-century anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only group that ever has.”
Whereupon Ludders pointed out that powerful U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost the Virginia Republican primary in June 2014 to little-known, heavily outspent challenger and Tea Party economist Dave Brat.
Many GOP voters thought Cantor had lost touch with them and catered to the establishment, so they waved him farewell.
As the discussion drew to a close, one man summed up: “I think our cause is the same. We’re still trying to preserve the republic.”
However, that American republic seems to have picked up a new foe or two, including militants who turn toward Mecca.
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