PARTIES AND ELECTIONS
The Soul of the Tea Party by Colin Woodard December 01, 2010
NEWSWEEK
Now that the election is over, an uneasy libertarian–Christian conservative alliance shows its cracks.
Earlier this month, a group of Tea Party activists put Congressional Republicans on notice with a terse letter reminding them not to take their eyes off the ball. The elected officials’ mission, the activists wrote, is to reduce spending, taxes, regulations, and the deficit, not to further the social-issues agenda of the Christian right. “We urge you to stay focused on the issues that got you and your colleagues elected and to resist the urge to run down any social issue rabbit holes in order to appease the special interests,” said the letter signed by 17 leading Tea Party activists and a conservative gay group and sent to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the incoming House speaker, John Boehner, earlier this month. “The Tea Party movement is not going away and we intend to continue to hold Washington accountable.”
The activists—including statewide coordinators from Arizona, Florida, Ohio, Nebraska, and Maine—had begun to worry about a social-values coup. In the days after the midterms, Senator Tea Party, as Jim DeMint of South Carolina is called, had been on Fox News saying, “You can’t be a fiscal conservative and not be a social conservative.” (The Washington-based Family Research Council backed him up, calling on “one million Americans to pray on a regular basis for Sen. DeMint” as he faced his critics.) On Nov. 3, 65 leading conservatives—including Family Research Council head Tony Perkins, Eagle Forum leader Phyllis Schlafly, Tea Party Express chair Amy Kremer, and Edwin Meese III—wrote Rep. Boehner, Sen. McConnell, and Republican Governors Association chair Haley Barbour urging them to renew their “commitment to restoring traditional moral values” by banning abortion and same-sex marriage.
And so, the fight is on for the soul of the Tea Party. On one