It's taken the better part of a decade, but the tea party is finally getting some respect from a cable network that has long demonized it.
The few conservatives inclined to cringe through a broadcast of MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show on Jan. 4 were surely surprised to hear both its host and one of her guests say flattering things about tea partiers.
In the wake of Donald Trump's stunning upset victory over heir apparent Hillary Clinton, liberals are looking back at the tea party's opposition to President Obama as a template for thwarting Trump.
Here is Maddow describing one such effort from Trump's opponents in the form of an "organizing guide" making the rounds online --
MADDOW: What is "Indivisible"? This is "Indivisible" (holds up copy of the document). This is kind of, I think, it's kind of the secret sauce that explains what is bubbling up as what may be the start of the anti-Trump movement. It's called "Indivisible" (subtitle: "A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda") and you should know this is out there because if there is going to be an anti-Trump movement in this country, particularly one akin to the kind of anti-Obama movement that afflicted the last presidency at the outset of their time in Washington, if there is going to be an anti-Trump movement I think right now this is going to explain a lot about what its early stages look like over these next couple of weeks.
This started as an online Google document last month. It has now evolved into this slim little 25-page organizing guide. It's not a complicated thing. It was written, interestingly, by former congressional staffers basically advising people all around the country who are anti-Trump for whatever reason that they should learn from the tactical success of the tea party as they went up against Barack Obama.
It was written, unsurprisingly, by former congressional staffers now facing the chilling prospect of working in the private sector.
I'm going to quote from the guide here -- "The authors of this guide are former congressional staffers who witnessed the rise of the tea party. We saw these activists take on a popular president with a mandate for change and a super-majority in Congress. We saw them organize locally and convince their own members of Congress to reject President Obama's agenda. Their ideas were wrong, cruel and tinged with racism -- and they won."
So the reason I'm talking about this tonight, the reason we are going to talk with one of the authors of this guide in just a moment is because this has not really been cooking openly, right, in the Beltway media and on cable TV news and on places we usually look for news about politics.
Translation: No one cares about this and they desperately need my help.
MADDOW: It has really been cooking online where it has taken off.
Maddow then speaks with "Indivisible" co-author/professional pajama-boy Ezra Levin, who candidly admits that he has "basically no skills" except to comprehend the byzantine machinations of Congress (Obvious solution: apply at MSNBC) --
MADDOW: Why did you decide to do this and how many people were involved in creating this?
LEVIN: Oh, there were at least two or three dozen people involved in doing this. We decided to do it because we were going through the stages of grief as many liberals were after the election, and we were also hearing these stories of people starting up new organizations to actually push against Trump. These were secret Facebook groups or they're mailing lists and we were trying to figure out what can we do to make sure that Congress doesn't enact Trump's agenda. They knew about the petitions, they knew about maybe calling their members of Congress, but they didn't really know what the next step was beyond that. As a former congressional staffer I have basically no skills but I do know how Congress works, and I and a lot of other congressional staffers got together and said, look, we know what works, we saw the tea party rise up, we saw them implement really effective strategies and tactics to prevent an incredibly popular president's agenda from being implemented. This could work for us, the progressive movement today, if it worked for the tea party eight years ago.
Quite the contrast with how Maddow persistently denigrated the tea party during its heyday, to the point of being called out on it by Daily Show host Jon Stewart in November 2010 (starting at 6:15 in the video or here on this audio clip) --
MADDOW: I mean, the people interrupting meetings and interrupting rallies are direct-action activists who are doing stuff to be purposely disruptive and a pain in order to sort of throw a wrench in the works.
STEWART: OK, right.
MADDOW: And then on the other side (alluding to leftist activists) ...
STEWART: So you're saying that it's really nothing.
MADDOW: Well, it's not that it's nothing, it's just not being done with the same level of authority as it is on the right. Like, the Second Amendment remedies thing, that's people running for Senate.
STEWART: But how did you handle town hall meetings when tea partiers interrupted the town hall meetings? With the same level of dismissiveness? (As Maddow accorded Code Pink, which was cited earlier in the conversation). Or did you handle it with the sense that -- what's going on here with these angry people? Who are these angry people?\
MADDOW: Well, my coverage of that was about it being organized.
STEWART: OK.
MADDOW: Yeah.
STEWART: But again, that is, your coverage of it was to delegitimize it, that is was actually not real, it was astroturf.
MADDOW: No, actually no. It was, I think my approach to that was to say this is being used as a widespread political tactic by people with a lot of money and a lot of stake in the policy issues and they're sort of deploying direct-action activists in a way that we haven't seen before.
Vintage Maddow -- Stewart accurately points out that she condemned the tea party as astroturf and not grassroots, Maddow denies it, then tries to rephrase what she actually did while using a textbook definition of astroturf. I'll venture a guess that nearly every conservative reading this has had the same disingenuous exchange with a liberal, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Still, it's refreshing to see Maddow finally come around on the tea party, to the point of allowing herself to be used as a cheerleader by leftists desperate to emulate its success.
