On October 15th, devoted C-SPAN viewers were treated to a quietly significant moment in recent political history, in the guise of a debate between candidates running for Congress in Virginia’s Seventh District. The Democratic challenger, a thirty-nine-year-old former C.I.A. official named Abigail Spanberger, is an upbeat, steely woman whose approach to the debate suggested a high degree of faith in the fact-packed three-minute briefing. The Republican incumbent, Dave Brat, is fifty-four and has been an economics professor for most of his adult life. He came to prominence in 2014, as an icon of the Tea Party, when he defeated Eric Cantor, who was then the Majority Leader for the Republicans, in the primary, despite being outspent by millions of dollars. In the debate this year, however, Brat looked like an ordinary Republican, while Spanberger expressed the vitality of the female-led resistance—the first political movement since the Tea Party to rival its energy.

The district usually votes Republican, and so the dynamic that developed in the debate was a bit of a surprise: Spanberger gave compact accounts of her biography, her devotion to public service, and her belief in the optimism of the American spirit, while Brat—who has been personally endorsed by the President and is a member of the party that controls all three branches of government—opened by attacking her. Some of these attacks were absurd. Brat said that Spanberger had endorsed open borders, which isn’t true and would be surprising, considering that she used to work on counternarcotics strategy. Although he is a member of the House Freedom Caucus, and voted many times to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Brat insisted that he, and not Spanberger, would protect coverage for people with preëxisting conditions.

Brat also ignored both the movement he’s a part of and the one Spanberger represents, arguing against her as a simple partisan, R. versus D. He mentioned Nancy Pelosi’s name twenty-five times; the audience began audibly groaning. Spanberger was fed up, too, and gave a stem-winder of a closing argument. “I am not the Democrat who supported single payer in the primary, I am not Nancy Pelosi, and I am not President Barack Obama,” she said. She then gave the speech the punctuation mark that made it go viral within hours: “Abigail Spanberger is my name.” Brat may still win the race—the Cook Political Report considers the district a toss-up—but Spanberger won the microphone.

The Tea Party, at its most energetic, had a distinct style. It was paranoid, but it was also pedantic. Great emphasis was placed on the full reading of legislative texts. Hundreds of groups, spread across the country, held committee and subcommittee meetings. Whenever I went to a campaign rally or town hall during the Obama years, the scene was dominated by conservatives with pocket Constitutions.

While I was thinking about Dave Brat, I returned to a book called “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” written by the Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol and her colleague Vanessa Williamson (who is now at Brookings), during Obama’s first term, at the height of the movement’s influence. In retrospect, its continuity with Trumpism leaps off the page. “The generational perspective of most Tea Partiers is unmistakeable,” Skocpol and Williamson write. Many people in the movement were over fifty, and fixed in their certainty that immigrants and young people are scamming benefits from the welfare state, their entwinement with an earlier generation of conservative media misinformation, and the intensity of their dyspepsia. Tea Partiers were even more likely than other conservatives to attribute the struggles of members of racial minorities to “their own personal failings,” but, the authors point out, they were also more likely to believe the same of whites. “Tea Partiers,” they conclude, “have negative views about all of their fellow citizens.”

The Tea Party was branded as a libertarian movement, and as an uprising of the politically unaligned, but Skocpol and Williamson see its deep roots in earlier conservative movements. They find that “a surprising number of people we met dated their first political involvement to the Goldwater campaign,” and hear echoes of other conservative traditions, most of all evangelicalism. When a representative of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers’ libertarian group, speaks to local Tea Party groups, he takes pains, the authors notice, to sprinkle his account with testaments to his personal religious faith. By the end of Skocpol and Williamson’s account, it is less surprising that the movement eventually made its way to Trumpism than that it lingered in libertarianism at all. This is part of what Trump understood: the rage of the conservative grassroots was not primarily about the government; it was about the country.

A few months ago, just after Paul Ryan announced that he would leave Congress, I spoke with a woman named Nancy Milholland, who co-founded the Tea Party in Racine County, Wisconsin, and had been a grassroots ally of Ryan’s, even as she found much of the Tea Party movement to be too radical. What was remarkable about Milholland’s account of her participation in the Tea Party was just how active she was: she helped to organize countless demonstrations, arranged speeches by up-and-coming politicians and by Ryan, and had a role in sending advice up to the political ladder about what the grassroots actually wanted. Politics had become a way of life. When I asked Milholland what she and others had expected from the movement, she gave a very mainstream, one-word answer: “Reform.”

Further Reading New Yorker writers on the 2018 midterm elections.

Did they get what they wanted? If the measure is how much power conservatives accrued, then probably so. The wave of teachers strikes across the country was one sign of how successful conservatives have been at stripping down government; the Republican dominance of the political system at every level is another. But the past year has helped prove how unable the Tea Party was to persuade the wider public. Its battle cry, to repeal Obamacare, has mostly failed, and in campaigns this year ideologues such as Brat and Governor Scott Walker, of Wisconsin, have argued that they had defended coverage for preëxisting conditions all along. This is a lie, of course, and it is also a measure of the movement’s failure.

Meanwhile, the average Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives has raised roughly seven times as much money as the average Republican, and conservative legislators have largely stopped holding town-hall meetings, because they are so often overrun by liberal activists. Skocpol and Williamson recount in their book that many people said they joined the Tea Party because they were sick of yelling at their television screens. Now it is liberals who are out in the streets, and conservatives who are home with Sean Hannity again.

The chasm in energy between the left and the right was on display in the debate between Spanberger and Brat. She spoke fast, pressured by the need to concisely introduce herself, lay out her ideas, and account for the movement behind her. There isn’t much about the resistance that parallels the Tea Party, but Spanberger might have noticed, looking across the debate stage, how quickly the Tea Party collapsed. Four years ago, Brat was an outsider with a movement at his back, and Paul Ryan represented the obvious future of the Republican Party. Democrats have been taking comfort in the demographic transformations taking place in the country, confident that the future is on their side. But political energy of the kind that liberals have right now evaporates quickly. There is a reason that Spanberger was speaking so fast.