Is the Anti-Trump 'Resistance' the New Tea Party?
Bob Bennett didn’t think the new president was such a bad guy. To be sure, Bennett, a Republican senator from Utah, had a lot of policy differences with Barack Obama, the Democrat who had just won the 2008 election in a landslide. But just because Bennett was a conservative and the president was a liberal didn’t mean they couldn’t find common ground, or share an interest in governing the country he believed they both loved. Bennett had always worked across the aisle, and he didn’t see why that should change.
He was as surprised as anyone by the uprising that followed—and cost him his job. The tea party, a mass movement that hadn’t even existed two years earlier, had rallied activists and dealt him a humiliating defeat from within his own party.
Today, a new movement—loosely dubbed “the resistance”—has suddenly arisen in visceral reaction to Donald Trump’s election as president, with thousands taking to the streets. For those who remember the tea party, it feels like deja vu.
The parallels are striking: a massive grassroots movement, many of its members new to activism, that feeds primarily off fear and reaction. Misunderstood by the media and both parties, it wreaks havoc on its ostensible allies, even as it reenergizes their
