Flush with electoral success and a new Gallup poll that shows 7 in 10 Americans want Republicans to heed its small-government ideas, the tea party movement is on a roll toward its ultimate prize: determining the 2012 presidential election and becoming, in Sarah Palin's words, "the future of politics in America."

But the tea party phenomenon teeters at a critical point in its rags-to-riches two-year history. In fact, the future of the tea party could largely be determined in the next few months as its willingness – or not – to compromise on key issues comes into sharp focus.

"The big question is whether the tea party is politically savvy enough and realistic enough to realize that democracy works through incrementalism, or are we going to see this passion that says, 'If you compromise, you're done,' which is basically forming a circular firing squad," says Robert Watson, a political scientist at Lynn University, in Boca Raton, Fla.

American history shows that populist political insurgencies can burn out as fast as they flare up, either absorbed into a major party or shunted to the ineffectual fringes of the American mainstream.

The 19th century's anti-immigration Know-Nothing movement dissipated after striking deals with Democrats and losing the 1896 presidential election. At the other end of the spectrum, the 1960s John Birch movement, which also began as a right-wing Republican reaction to a Democratic president, remains a constituency for some Republicans today.

So far, the tea party has managed to emerge as a quixotic, if amorphous, force largely focused on economic issues, but imbued by strains of past xenophobic movements and simmering with culture war issues like "God, guns, and gays," says Professor Watson. Before the November election, USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham predicted that these views spelled its doom. "Left alone, there's a good chance that the tea party will sputter out of existence as quickly as the Know-Nothing movement did," he wrote last September.

But in a poll released last week, the Gallup organization found that the tea party has moved toward the mainstream of the political debate, reporting that 71 percent of Americans said the Republican party should take tea party positions into account when crafting new policy.

Many Democrats still hope the tea partyers can be sidelined, and would gladly see Republicans nominate more candidates in the Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell vein – two tea party-backed candidates who won Republican primaries but failed to muster enough votes in Nevada and Delaware general elections for the US Senate.

In the 2012 election, Americans will see just how pragmatic the tea party is willing to be and, thus, "how long it will last," says Seth Masket, a political science professor at the University of Denver. (Source: Christian Science Monitor)

Story Date: February 7, 2011