“I’m a big fan of Charles Koch. I think he’s a brilliant guy and very well read, and he gets it,” Lonegan recalled. “He said, ‘The problem we have is not the Democrat Party. They’re doing what Democrats do. Our problem is the Republican Party. We’ve got to make Republicans act like Republicans.’ ”
Koch and Americans for Prosperity pressured the Republican party from the right, steering it away from the compromises of neoliberalism and pushing it toward a vision that was espoused by Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek. It gained more volunteers every day, and it steered them toward one target: Republican politicians like Bob Inglis.
* * *
Bob Inglis’s congressional district in South Carolina contained the tiny town of Boiling Springs, located just a little bit north of Spartanburg. The town was easy to miss. Its most prominent feature was a strip of stores near Highway 9 and a Walmart Supercenter on the north end of town. But Boiling Springs became an important landmark on the political map in 2009, when a woman named Maria Brady had a vision from God. The vision arrived when she was at work, and it would set her life on a direct collision course with Bob Inglis.
Brady and her husband, Michael, owned a printing company in Boiling Springs that published the local newspaper, Boiling Springs Today. Maria was working from home when she had the epiphany, sitting in front of the computer. She heard a voice in her head that said very clearly: “Quit complaining. Quit complaining and do something.”
Brady had been complaining a lot during that winter of 2009. Business at the printing shop collapsed after the financial crash. The company printed advertising circulars, and local businesses cut their advertising budgets sharply during the deep recession. Maria and Michael laid off workers, scaled back production, and worried about paying the bills. Yet whenever Maria turned on the television news, she saw that the same Wall Street CEOs who’d caused the crash were getting multibillion-dollar rescue packages from the government. They weren’t even losing their bonuses.
After she heard God’s voice, Brady fell down on her knees and prayed, asking what He meant and what He wanted from her. When Michael returned from the printing shop later that day, he looked like he’d seen a ghost. He told Maria that God had just spoken to him and told him that he needed to do something to help his country. Maria shared her own vision. It was clear: they were being called to do something.
Maria began to scour the Internet. It was April of 2009. She came across mentions of a new form of revolt by people fed up with the condition of America. She heard about events that people were calling Tea Parties. The notion of throwing a Tea Party was romantic. Patriotic. It conjured images of the earliest American revolutionaries throwing off the yoke of imperial Britain.
Tea Parties first became part of the national conversation in February of that year, during a broadcast on the financial news network CNBC. The anchors were discussing the Obama administration’s proposal to modify many consumers’ mortgages after the crash made millions of houses worth less than the debt that was owed on them. The anchors cut to a commentator named Rick Santelli, who was reporting live from the trading floor of the CME Group in Chicago. Behind Santelli were rows of traders at desks, buying and selling futures contracts and other derivatives. They did not appear happy. Santelli was highly agitated, and expressed his contempt at the idea that the government might bail out homeowners who found themselves trapped in expensive mortgage agreements.
“The government is promoting bad behavior!” Santelli shouted into the camera. He mocked the Obama administration while the traders around him clapped and cheered him on. Santelli turned and gestured back behind him toward the trading floor and shouted, “This is America!” And then he yelled to the traders: “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”
The traders booed loudly, and Santelli turned to the camera to ask, “President Obama, are you listening?”
“We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July,” Santelli continued. “All you capitalists that want to show up at Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing. I think we’ll be dumping in some derivatives securities. What do you think about that?”
The idea of throwing Tea Parties began to spread. The movement was organic and improvised, driven by people like Maria Brady. Ordinary people who had never been politically active reached out to friends and formed e-mail chains to stay in touch. Middle managers, housewives, plumbers, and even commodities traders began to organize.
Maria and Michael Brady assembled an e-mail list of friends and neighbors and helped form the Boiling Springs Tea Party. They planned a Tea Party for Tax Day in mid-April. Maria ordered a costume for Michael, with a tricornered hat and an elegant jacket with golden lapels. When he wore the outfit, he looked like he’d stepped straight out of 1776. Hundreds of people showed up for the protest, even though it had been organized on short notice. Maria was amazed. When she held a placard in public for the first time, she felt more than happy. She felt a sense of belonging.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she recalled. “I loved it. It was a trip. It felt good to realize that ‘Hey, I’m not by myself.’ ”
In the weeks after the protest, members of the newly formed Tea Party chapter of Boiling Springs stayed in close contact. They planned a bigger rally, this one to be held on the Fourth of July.
This time Maria and Michael had help. They connected with the South Carolina chapter of Americans for Prosperity. Tea Party groups around the nation were doing the same thing. Maria and Michael Brady were neither directed by Americans for Prosperity nor even inspired by Americans for Prosperity. But AFP provided its Tea Party groups and others with concrete means of assistance that amplified their message and energy in vitally important ways.
Americans for Prosperity’s South Carolina chapter formed a Facebook page and website that became a central clearing hub for Tea Party activists. When people like Maria Brady threw up their arms and went to the Internet, they found the Americans for Prosperity site. It listed ways that they could get involved. It provided a platform to connect with fellow activists.
The site promoted Maria and Michael’s upcoming Fourth of July protest, and it included Michael Brady’s name and telephone number for anyone interested in attending. The page also included a long list of other activists planning to hold protests on Independence Day. The AFP site also included a nationwide database listing the times and locations of town hall meetings that Congress members planned to host, encouraging the activists to attend. Bob Inglis’s town halls were on the list. The website included a form to fill out that automatically sent letters to member of the US Senate informing them to “vote no on cap and trade.”
AFP chapters in New Jersey and elsewhere offered free chartered bus rides to protestors to attend a rally in Washington, DC, that summer. Once in Washington, protestors were given free box lunches and glossy protest signs. The protestors were joined by Tim Phillips, AFP’s president, who gave rousing rally speeches.
This close coordination masked key points of disagreement between Tea Party activists and the political vision of Charles Koch. One of the very few rigorous studies of the Tea Party found that the political beliefs of the group were far from libertarian. Tea Party activists strongly supported popular entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security, for example. They weren’t animated by a hatred of big government but by the belief that entitlement benefits were being unfairly diverted to people who didn’t work hard and didn’t deserve them. Their grievance was the exploitation of the middle class, not the existence of robust New Deal–era safety net programs. The racial tinge to the grievance was unmistakable, but also complicated. Many Tea Party chapters took great pains to avoid any racist language at their protests and welcomed minority members. But it was unmistakable that the unworthy beneficiaries of entitlements, in their eyes, were Hispanic immigrants and African-American residents of the inner city.