Joe’s good post on the Tea Party got me thinking about something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while: the Tea Party and abortion.

Let’s start with Roe v Wade. Overall, I think this decision was bad for Democrats, but good for women. The reason it was bad for Democrats is because it really fed into the idea that Democratic legislators wouldn’t have to work too hard. As long as the apolitical legal superheroes on the Court were appointed by Democratic Presidents, they would serve to uphold what we thought were the generally-agreed-upon liberal principles that all right-thinking educated people accepted. And, until the Trump disaster, they weren’t wrong. Obergefell is another example. Democratic politicians didn’t have to get their hands dirty doing the hard political work of advocating for abortion or gay marriage, the court and its right-thinking heroic justices would do that for them.

In fairness to Democrats, they saw what happened when they legislated in the wake of a court decision. After Brown vs Board, the Civil Rights Act lost the South for Democrats for generations. We’re still dealing with the fallout from that.

Prior to Trump, the Republican Party was governed by elites who pandered to their base but didn’t give them the results they wanted. Reagan, Bush I and Bush II didn’t really care about abortion or gay marriage. Reagan and the elite Bushes lived in a world where abortion and homosexuality were quietly accepted. They didn’t really give a shit if non-elite women had abortions or if homosexuals were allowed to marry — their concerns weren’t social issues, but rather that they and their cohort could make as much money with as little tax as possible, all while raping the environment. They also weren’t overt racists and, in general, considered racism a bit gauche. (Of course they were structural racists, since they wanted the brown and black poor to stay subjugated to the white elite.) Bush II also realized that racism against Mexican-Americans was stupid, because a lot of the immigrant Mexicans were pretty conservative and amenable to Republican policies.

So, up until the election of Barack Hussein Obama, the Republican Party was able to placate their base in much the same way that establishment Democrats placate theirs: by saying things they agree with, but not executing on their major policy preferences, most notably abortion. Obama’s election changed all that. We can argue about whether the Tea Party movement was a Fox News Frankenstein that got out of hand, or if there was a group of Republican elites who wanted this radical faction to rule the party. No matter what the genesis of the Tea Party, when Trump latched onto it, that’s all she wrote for the white Republican educated elites. Their party was taken over by the voters that they thought they could manipulate and control.

As Joe pointed out in yesterday’s post, this hyper-motivated group controls the Republican Party by a couple of percentage points in low-turnout primaries. Still, they’ve gotten what they wanted. Abortion has been repealed in their benighted states, and their elected representatives and court are working to deny that right to most women. Using the wedge issue of trans rights, they’re working up the anti-LGBTQ+ hatred that will justify the denial of gay marriage in their states after the Court inevitably overturns Obergefell.

In short, it’s pretty good times for the white reactionary Tea Partiers, not that you’d be able to tell from their constant whining. The statistically significant decline in the standard of living, lifespan and quality of life in their strongholds means little to them because they’d rather have a dime instead of a dollar if they can be sure that poor brown and black people have only a couple of pennies.

The Republican base got what they wanted. The Democratic base hasn’t. If Democrats win in 2028, we’ll be in the same place that the Republican base was during the Bush administration: we "won” but we probably won’t get our preferred policies. If, as Joe suggests, we start our own version of the Tea Party, we’d better be sure that our electeds get the messages about our pet issues, which include health care and making sure that the Trumpers pay for what they did. And we also better be patient and play the long game, since it took Republicans 50 years to repeal Roe.