THE RAGE AGAINST DEMOGRAPHY:

[T]he Tea Party groups had genuine grass roots. More than 500,000 people joined over 500 rallies; 250,000 would join Tea Party groups. Most already belonged to pro-life, gun rights, anti-immigrant, or white nationalist groups. They gained momentum with funding from the Koch brothers and their allies, and from Fox News's most prominent personalities broadcasting from their protests. The Tea Party leaders were replete with "birthers" who wanted to "take our country back." The members were infused with a deep anti-Obama venom, deep racial resentment. Stopping Obama meant repealing Obamacare--the new federal entitlement to health insurance.

The marches and protests translated into organization that elected a whole class of Tea Party members to the Congress and governors' offices. Two-thirds of the House members first elected in 2010 supported the Tea Party; they took office with a mandate "to go nuclear," to stop government spending and repeal Obamacare.

The Tea Party wave elections allowed Republicans to gridlock government, to shut down the federal government time and again, to force the acceptance of spending caps and fiscal austerity that slowed President Obama's efforts at economic recovery. They demanded votes to "repeal" Obamacare, and in the states, their leaders blocked all efforts to set up health care exchanges and expand Medicaid. Nationally, they blocked Obama's efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform, and in the states, blocked undocumented immigrants getting any public benefits.

What animated them most of all was the legal and illegal immigration of the past three decades--a surge that had been welcomed and legalized on a bipartisan basis by Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, working quite publicly with Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton.

Reagan legalized millions of the undocumented, the first President Bush joined with Kennedy to massively grow legal immigration, and George W. Bush tried to pass comprehensive immigration reform. Even after the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee and establishment Republican leaders in the Congress still called for immigration reform.

Imagine the building anger in Tea Party ranks when they watched the metropolitan elites and national leaders of both parties take irreversible actions that grew the percentage of foreign-born Americans every year, and saw that a growing majority of Americans since Obama's re-election welcomed a multicultural America replete with and open to immigrants.

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