Comment by pear01

Just to address parts of this where we may have some small slice of agreement:

No kings might be cringe in that way, but then again can you really say that the tea party wasn't? Are Sarah Palin and the like effective avatars for intelligent government reform? It seems to me evoking 1776 and literal revolution because idk the government might subsidize healthcare is about as silly as calling an opposing president a king. To be clear, I'm also going out of my way to be extremely charitable to your position despite my personal beliefs. And assuming you will also in good faith attempt a willingness to assess protests movements along lines that go beyond your individual sympathies.

I would contend the reason the tea party was "successful" is because mainstream Republicans co-opted it and thought they could control it to temper an extremely charismatic incumbent Democrat who they wanted to weaken as they feared the extent of his mandate. Cue mitch mcconnell saying he will make Obama a "one-term president". Fox News and others became incessant boosters of it. Of course, this turned against them in 2016 when their plans to nominate another Bush collided with Trump riding the grassroots insurgency, which now somewhat controls them (we'll see what happens in the coming post-Trump era).

Democrats have simply not had such an insurgency, although it seems obvious given the failures of both sides of the mainstream that such a thing is coming. In some cases vis a vis "the deep state" (as vacuous as I find that term) those farther from the center agree, even if from opposite sides of the spectrum. If nothing more one can say a move to populism on either side is self evidently a move to some shared common representation of "populism", even if both left and right strenuously disagree on implementation and so on.

So anyway, I wouldn't pat the tea party on the back too hard. Their success has more to do with institutional Republican hubris than their own effectiveness. It's not like the current administration is actually implementing limited government, if you haven't noticed. But I suspect any hope we have of a good faith discussion will quickly evaporate if I stray any closer to that topic. Fwiw I think the collapse of successful civil movements has far more to do with trends we see causing other declines in our society, that is the collective elevation of self-interest, greed, bombast and mob makes right. In that way, perhaps the lack of success of some movements - given the environment in which they operate - is actually in a weird way a credit to them. If you are successful in an increasingly inane society, what does that say about you? What benchmark would you even articulate to define a successful protest movement in the modern United States?