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Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of February 2, 2026
Contributions for the week of February 9, 2026
@clo:
Natalism & Co.
@gog:
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Notes -
I still don't understand what the Tea Party was angry about, except that Barack Obama was a Democrat and the Democratic Party had a trifecta.
That was... a read. "I'm right because I'm right, if you disagree with me it's because you're wrong." Holy question-begging, batman!
You could make a ton of really good arguments about the particular issues she discusses, like arguing that employer-provided health insurance is a standard product and it's an implicit religious test for employment to provide non-standard health insurance that doesn't include certain treatments based on religious values, which discriminates against employees who don't share the owners' religious views and thus violates civil rights law.
But you're right, this is proto-woke; instead of actually making the argument, she just assumes her argument is correct and proceeds to shame people who disagree instead of trying to build a moderate coalition. This is "the OU student who wrote a college reflection assignment on how trans is demonic"-tier writing.
They were mad about what the Democratic party used that to cram through. Obamacare was a gigantic restructuring of about 1/10th of the economy, a part that basically everyone has to interact with from time to time. It also was a large tax increase for most working Americans. There was also Dodd-Frank which seized additional control over banks, ARRA which was one of the largest spending packages in history at the time, and several follow up large spending bills.
The Tea Party movement began shortly before Obama was elected, based on opposition to the 2008 bank bailouts. At that point most of the participants were Ron Paul libertarians, although the movement was nominally bipartisan (and probably actually bipartisan - I'm not sure). It got a big boost after Rick Santelli's viral rant (broadcast live on CNBC from the CME floor in Chicago) against the Obama admin's homeowner bailout in February 2009. I was watching from the London trading floor of a European bank which had not (yet) needed a bailout, and the dominant reaction was that the American traders cheering Santelli were hypocrites because they were opposing Obama's homeowner bailout at a time when the only reason most of them were still employed was Bush's bank bailout. This was also the reaction of the pro-establishment left.
In the first half of 2009, the Tea Party was a libertarian-coded anti-bailout movement, with "bailout" defined broadly to include any kind of support for troubled banks, any kind of support for troubled homeowners, the welfare state, fiscal stimulus, efforts to protect jobs at GM etc. It quickly became de facto a partisan Republican thing because a Democratic trifecta was doing the bailouts, and the Republicans who had supported the 2008 bailouts were no longer relevant. It is unsurprising that a pre-existing libertarian-coded Republican movement would lead the opposition to Obamacare.
There was a lot of anti-establishment horseshoing going on in 2009-10, with Occupy, the Tea Party and the emerging alt-right (particularly via Milo Yiannopoulos) all swapping ideas and people with Ron Paul libertarians (though not, I think, Paul himself) at the centre of the network.
I'm not sure how or exactly when the Tea Party transitioned from being a somewhat focussed libertarian movement that was only incidentally a partisan Republican or Red Tribe thing to a proto-MAGA movement of generically pissed off Red Tribers that was only incidentally libertarian and could plausibly be accused of "just hating the idea of a black President". But there is an obvious route - as the movement grew the average IQ dropped, and below a certain IQ threshold any vaguely right-coded popular movement will pick up support from confederate flag-wavers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy-theorists etc. and at that point everyone who isn't a MAGA-type conservative started leaving.
Yes, skipped over the initial stuff that was a backlash against Bush and the Democrats doing Swampy uni-party things because it didn't really address the point he was making which urquan phrased as
But I've seen often described less charitably as "mad he was black and president."
And my point was well he was actually doing a lot of bad things.
I think this is too uncharitable to the tea partiers and FARRR too charitable to their enemies. A Democrat accusing their political opponents of racism is synonymous with them talking. The media treating these accusations as "plausible" is no different, they are largely DNC stenographers and have been for decades. Maybe there was degradation of the tea party's intellectual movement as it got larger, but mostly IMO it lost any momentum it had when Romney/Ryan lost while acting nerdy and not actually fighting during the campaign. Thats what opened up the opportunity for MAGA/Trump because the only appetite left on the right was for someone who actually fights and didn't care about fake rules made up by liberal media.
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