Videos: Whither the Tea Party after the wave?

The big question after the midterms is how the Tea Party stays coherent and effective after their big victory in the midterms. Glenn Reynolds and PJTV hosts a discussion with Tea Party organizers Mike Wilson and David Kirkham about this very issue in a rare, free release from the subscriber channel.  Glenn talks more about how the Tea Party succeeded in the first place in this seventeen-minute panel discussion on the topic, and what lessons that success holds for keeping the movement alive:

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Earlier in the week, I appeared at Heritage for a similar discussion, which I discovered just before was broadcast live by C-SPAN on its main channel.   Byron York, Tea Party organizer Billie Tucker, and I discussed how the future looked for the Tea Party movement.  Unfortunately, C-SPAN hasn’t made the video embeddable (at least not yet), but the entire hour can be seen here:

In the video, I explain that the closest analogue I can find to the Tea Party’s bottom-up generation and massive success was the Proposition 13 tax revolt that started in California and ended up sweeping the nation.   Like the Tea Party, it started as an organic reaction to overreaching government and arrogance in the governing class in dismissing the legitimate complaints of taxpayers.  It found its own leaders and sustained itself into a low-taxes movement that lasted for years — almost for a generation, only fading recently.  The movement helped propel Ronald Reagan into the GOP nomination, and while it didn’t lead to Congressional majorities for the GOP in the 1980s in the aftermath of Watergate, the same sense of out-of-control government did help Newt Gingrich do that in 1994.

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The Proposition 13 movement changed the paradigm of national policy on economics and taxation.  The Tea Party has at least as good of a chance of doing the same and having the same lasting impact — if its activists remain engaged and demand accountability from the entire governing class, not just Democrats.

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