“Parker and Barreto have conducted exacting research to probe the contours of support for the Tea Party, and their innovative, scientific, and critical book highlights how Tea Party sympathizers differ from mainstream conservatives in crucial ways. The authors demonstrate that despite the public image of the Tea Party, its supporters cannot be characterized as either patriotic or freedom loving. This is a must-read for all students of American politics and anyone concerned about democracy in America.”–Michael C. Dawson, University of Chicago

“This original and important book is the most well-researched and significant scholarly study of the Tea Party movement and its members yet to appear. Unfolding a profile of Tea Party activists threatened by liberal changes and ill-formulated images of big government and state regulatory power, Parker and Barreto tease out core beliefs and views, ranging from commonplace conservatism to racist antagonism. Their book is an outstanding contribution to understanding American politics.”–Desmond King, University of Oxford

“The Tea Party has attracted a great deal of attention since it burst on the scene in 2010, but few books about the movement have rested on as impressive an empirical foundation as this one. The portrait Parker and Barreto paint of the model Tea Party sympathizer is chilling and sure to anger movement apologists who insist the group is made up of typical patriotic conservatives. This timely, important work deserves the widest audience possible.”–Doug McAdam, Stanford University

“Through a statistically and historically informed analysis of the views of Tea Party sympathizers, Parker and Barreto show that at bottom, many condemn America as it has come to be: a country in which white straight Christian men do not set standards for all. Precisely because their American dreams must go unfulfilled, the passions of these sympathizers will remain forces in American life for years to come.”–Rogers M. Smith, University of Pennsylvania

“This book’s main contribution to the growing literature on the Tea Party movement is its focus on the characteristics and political beliefs of Tea Party supporters–rather than activists–and its theoretical framework, which locates the Tea Party in the broader structure of far-right social and political movements in the United States.”–Alan Abramowitz, Emory University

Christopher S. Parker is the Stuart A. Scheingold Professor of Social Justice and Political Science at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of Fighting for Democracy (Princeton). Matt A. Barreto is associate professor of political science at the University of Washington, Seattle, and director of the Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Sexuality. He is the author of Ethnic Cues.

Change They Can’t Believe In

THE TEA PARTY AND REACTIONARY POLITICS IN AMERICA

By Christopher S. Parker, Matt A. Barreto

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15183-0

Contents

List of Figures and Tables………………………………………….viiPreface and Acknowledgments…………………………………………xiiiINTRODUCTION Who Is the Tea Party and What Do They Want?……………….11 Toward a Theory of the Tea Party…………………………………..202 Who Likes Tea? SOURCES OF SUPPORT FOR THE TEA PARTY………………….663 Exploring the Tea Party’s Commitment to Freedom and Patriotism………..1024 Does the Tea Party Really Want Their Country Back?…………………..1535 The Tea Party and Obamaphobia IS THE HOSTILITY REAL OR IMAGINED?………1906 Can You Hear Us Now? WHY REPUBLICANS ARE LISTENING TO THE TEA PARTY……218CONCLUSION………………………………………………………..241Appendix………………………………………………………….261Notes…………………………………………………………….307Index…………………………………………………………….351

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Toward a Theory ofthe Tea Party

We opened the book with a comparison of two TeaParty meetings. There were vast differences betweenthe meeting held in Oregon and the one convenedin Idaho. The gathering in Oregon was, at its core, about somebasic conservative principles: small government and fiscal responsibility.The one in Idaho appeared to be little more than anexpression of intolerance and bigotry in which President Obamawas painted as an alien of some kind. As we mentioned, thesecurrents have been part of the American social and political milieufrom the beginning. Indeed, we freely acknowledge that acommitment to conservative principles may well be associatedwith sympathy for the Tea Party. Similarly, we think it likelythat hostility (resentment, anger), largely based on intolerant attitudesthough not exclusively so, also motivates people to supportthe Tea Party. Still, we think there’s room for an alternativeunderstanding of Tea Party support, one that stands analyticallyapart from politics and racism, though for all practical purposesmay be related to both.

We have two objectives in the present chapter. First, we outlinea theory of why people support the Tea Party. We arguethat one of the reasons why some folks are sympathetic to thegoals and objectives of the Tea Party rests upon their discomfortwith Barack Obama as the president. Before going any further,we wish to make it clear that the president isn’t the only reasonwhy people support the Tea Party. In fact, in chapter 2, weshow that many other factors push people to support, if notnecessarily join, the Tea Party movement. Our point is simplythat in addition to ideology and, say, partisanship, the fear andanger associated with the presidency of Barack Obama is anadditional factor. We argue that similar to the Klan, who believedthat Jews, Catholics, and blacks threatened to subvert theAmerica to which they had become accustomed, and the JohnBirch Society, who worried about communists destroying theircountry, so, too, is this the case with the Tea Party and Obama.

In fact, this is a consistent theme at Tea Party rallies and onTea Party websites, with signs depicting Obama and proclaiming,”Socialism is not an American value,” and bumper stickersreading, “Al-Qaeda wants to destroy America—Obama isbeating them to it!” In short, we entertain the possibility thathe represents a threat to the America they’ve come to know,in which American identity is commensurate with being white,male, native-born, English-speaking, Christian, and heterosexual.Ultimately, we draw on social psychology to illustrate whyPresident Obama is believed to be an agent of change in whichneither the Tea Party nor its supporters can believe.

Using the Tea Party as an example, we ask the following: Areright-wing movements merely conservative? In other words, arethey about maintaining order and stability while allowing atleast incremental change as a means of avoiding revolutionarychange? Or are they radical, even extreme reactions to changeof some kind in which the preferred course of action isn’t thestatus quo but regression to the past? Our second objective inthis chapter is to test an oft-made claim of the Tea Party andtheir sympathizers: that they’re simply conservative, nothingmore. The Tea Party’s rhetoric suggests otherwise. Many yearsago, long before the rise of the Tea Party, Richard Hofstadter,drawing on the work of Theodor Adorno and his colleagues,pointedly charged that right-wing movements were “pseudo-conservative.”We take this to mean that they used conservativerhetoric as a means of pursuing nonconservative ends, ones atodds with timeless conservative principles such as order and stability,among others.

Hofstadter went on to argue that a telltale sign of pseudo-conservatismis reliance on conspiratorial discourse in whichthe “enemy” is out to destroy society. This is fairly close to ourclaim that the Tea Party represents a reaction to the election ofBarack Obama and the perceived threats of the policies he seeksto implement. We entertain the possibility that the fear and anxietyassociated with Obama’s presidency generates a paranoiathat is easily observed through the conspiratorial discourse employedby Tea Party activists, something we investigate in somedetail below.

Drawing on content analysis of elite discourse, and a survey-basedexperiment, we conduct a preliminary test of these alternativepoints of view in this chapter. In short, if the Tea Partyand its supporters are conservative, we should see no differencebetween what they say and believe and what conservatives sayand believe. If, however, we observe a marked difference betweenthe groups, it suggests that conservative journalists, suchas Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker, are correct forworrying about the ways in which the Tea Party may be damagingthe conservative brand. Indeed, if her observation that “thebehavior of certain Republicans who call themselves Tea Partyconservatives makes them out to be the most destructive posseof misguided ‘patriots’ we’ve seen in recent memory” representsthe sentiments associated with mainstream conservatives, weshould witness discernible differences between Tea Party conservativesand conservatives that remain unsympathetic to themovement. After comparing the discourse of Tea Party activist-elitesto conservative elites, we find no support for the propositionthat the Tea Party adheres to more mainstream conservativeprinciples. This general conclusion is reinforced among themasses, where Tea Party conservatives are far more likely thanmore mainstream conservatives to believe that the president ofthe United States is out to “destroy the country.”

But before we take a stab at explaining our version of whypeople support the Tea Party, and subjecting it to preliminarytests, we first need to prepare the way by placing the Tea Partymovement in historical context. This serves at least two purposes.First, it demonstrates that the emergence of the Tea Partyas a right-wing, reactionary movement is nothing new. Second,drawing on the two most influential right-wing movements ofthe twentieth century, the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and theJohn Birch Society, provides the grist for a much-needed analyticalframework on which to base our appraisal of the TeaParty movement and its supporters. To the extent that rightwingmovements are, at least in part, fueled by conspiracy theories,we stress the emphasis that the Klan and the JBS placedupon perceived subversion of some kind. As suggested by thelate conservative political theorist Clinton Rossiter, such paranoiais indicative of the reactionary tendencies of right-wingmovements, impulses driven by the inability of some people toaccept the reality of social change. These are people who longfor a bygone era in which American society, in some way oranother, was better, and who refuse to accept the social and economicchanges that have been essential to American progress.

Right-Wing Movements in theTwentieth Century

Leaving aside for the moment the social and demographic factorsthat motivate involvement in political participation ofany kind, including age, education, and income, most of thescholarly work on right-wing movements boils down to anxietyassociated with change of some kind as the principal ingredient,one that pushes people to join such movements. Morepointedly, right-wing movements are driven by a reaction towhat is perceived as threatening change, a sentiment capturedby Hofstadter, who said that members of the “right wing …[feel as though] America has been largely taken away from themand their kind, though they are determined to try to repossessit and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” Forthis reason, right-wing movements are, to borrow a term fromLipset and Raab, “preservatist” in that they seek to “narrowthe lines of power and privilege.” Right-wing movements areoften mobilized by conflicts in which fundamental values areat stake—ones, as history suggests, bounded by perceptions ofwhat Americans should believe, how Americans should behave,and how, phenotypically, Americans should look. Right-wingmovements and their supporters are committed to the preservationof these ideals.

Anxiety associated with perceived change was clearly manifestin the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, the largest and mostinfluential of the Klan’s three incarnations. William Simmonsof Stone Mountain, Georgia, founded the Second Klan in 1915.Members of the Invisible Empire, an alternative moniker bywhich the Klan was known, were relatively well educated, heldrelatively high occupational-status jobs, tended to be familymen, and were native-born. In fact, at least one person referredto Klan members as “if not the ‘best people’ at least the nextbest … the good, solid middle-class citizens.” Unlike its late-nineteenth-centurypredecessor or the mid-twentieth-centuryversion that succeeded it, the Second Klan was truly a nationalmovement. At its zenith in the mid-1920s, it boasted a membershipof one to five million and had spread to all forty-eightstates. (Alaska and Hawaii both joined the Union in 1959.) TheSecond Klan claimed to represent “pure Americanism, patriotism,old-time religion, and morality.”

According to its worldview, threats to these values hadcropped up everywhere, coming particularly from blacks, Jews,women, and Catholics. World War I had transformed blacks intothe “New Negro,” more race-conscious and therefore more assertivethan ever. Blacks—especially veterans—refused to “stayin their place” after the war, and the fact that black soldiers hadbeen intimate with French women didn’t help matters. Blackmigration to southern cities, and to places beyond the Souththreatened white dominance. So called “race mixing” posed anotherthreat to it. Ultimately, Klan members feared black mobility,black assertiveness, and interracial relationships wouldtopple white supremacy.

The Klan also feared Jews and Catholics. Klan members ascribedall sorts of nefarious motives and actions to Jews. Firstand foremost, Jews served as scapegoats for the vicissitudes ofcapitalism. They were accused of putting profit before anythingelse, including the country, as well as cheating “hardworking”Americans. The Klan charged that Jews limited the economicopportunities available to Christians, and were taking overAmerica through their dominance in the financial sector. Fortheir part, Catholics were feared not for their religious practices,but for their allegiance to the Old Country, particularlyto the pope. The Klan imagined the possibility of papal influencein American politics, arguing that the pope wanted to playa role in American politics. Believing that Catholics voted inaccordance with the wishes of the Vatican, the Klan held Catholicismto be anti-Democratic, at odds with political freedom.It didn’t help matters much that Jews and Catholics hung onto Old World habits, established foreign-language newspapers,and were perceived to support what many thought were corruptpolitical machines.

Klan members were also concerned about maintaining theireconomic position. Concentration of capital in the hands of industrialistsfrom above and the increasing power of labor frombelow frightened Klan members who were, by and large, drawnfrom small business and skilled labor. Those who were membersof the skilled-labor class worried about decreasing demandfor their skills due to mechanization, and the small-businessclass grew nervous over competition with large chain stores capableof taking over market share even at a distance from theircentral hubs in the big cities.

Like political competition, economic competition became intertwinedwith nativism, insofar as the new wave of immigrantsdidn’t speak much English and tended to retain traditions fromthe Old Country. Jews, as we have already mentioned, representedthe scourge of capitalism and big chain stores. Ethnicand religious economic threats from above and below preventedserious class divisions from taking place among Klan members,who rallied around their identity as white native-born Protestants.Still, even as the bulk of Klan members were squeezedbetween capital and labor, many of them held fast to the tenetsof economic individualism and the sanctity of private property,both of which were seen as part of the great American tradition.

Finally, the Klan appointed itself a moral police force. To theextent that drinking affected a man’s family and his ability toshow up to work every day, and was linked to ethnicity (i.e.,immigrants), the Klan tried to curb this type of vice. Memberssimilarly policed the sexuality of females in their respective families.Male family members were charged with maintaining familyhonor, a significant portion of which rested upon the sexualconduct of the family’s women. In short, for the Klan of the1920s, men were responsible for maintaining the integrity ofthe family name.

Some thirty years later, the John Birch Society (JBS), anothernational mass movement, resisted the erosion of what membersheld to be society’s most sacred values. Named in honor of anAmerican missionary murdered by Chinese communists in thedays following World War II, the organization was founded byretired candy manufacturer Robert Welch in 1958. At its height,the John Birch Society boasted a membership of eighty thousandand had four to six million sympathizers. In the mid-1960s,the JBS spread from coast-to-coast, divided into approximatelyfive thousand local chapters. Its members andsympathizers were firmly middle-class. Approximately 33 per centof JBS activists had completed college, and almost two-thirdshad attended some college, versus 10 percent and 12 percent,respectively, among the general public. Occupationally,only 14 percent of JBS members were classified as manual laborersversus 49 percent of the general public, and approximately51 percent were forty years of age or older.

Welch preached small government, but it was his insistenceupon the existence of a vast communist conspiracy that broughthim the most notoriety. He believed the federal government wasfull of communist agents who were actively attempting to subvertthe American people and their way of life. Almost no onewas spared being tarred with the JBS brush, including sittingpresident and war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, and every justiceon the Supreme Court. Welch accused the president of treasonousbehavior based in part on Eisenhower’s decision to settlefor peace instead of victory in Korea. He charged the court, andChief Justice Earl Warren in particular, with treasonous activity,mostly because of how it ruled in Brown v. Board of Education,which outlawed segregation in public schools. Welch arguedthat the court had sided with the communists because the civilrights movement was nothing more than a communist plot tosow dissent in America.

Beyond serving as an ideological competitor to Western emphasison the free market, communism did a lot of work forthe JBS. Many right-wingers, including Welch and his followers,labeled as “communist” any values and policies with which theydisagreed. During the heyday of the JBS, right-wingers lay theblame for moral decay, the rising crime rate, pornography, lackof respect for authority, and the avoidance of individual responsibilityat the feet of communism. These were said to be un-American,as were social welfare policies that aimed to amelioratethe underlying conditions that produced poverty and racialinjustice. Communism became the proxy with which middleclass,suburban, relatively educated whites on the right attackedthe move away from traditional American values toward newlifestyles and distributions of prestige. In sum, for “Birchers,”communism threatened to subvert American economic, political,and social life.

This brief survey highlights a few themes around which theKlan and the JBS appeared to coalesce. Clearly, each group perceiveddifferent threats. For the Klan, the threats were primarilyethnocultural, stemming from concerns about the actions ofblacks, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants. The JBS was motivatedby the perception that an alien ideology would transform Americainto a totalitarian nation-state. Still, these movements hadmuch in common. Each was organized around the basic principleof defining and policing who and what counted as “American.”The Klan emphasized ethnocultural traits and consideredideology only secondary. For the JBS, the emphasis was theother way around. Race was relevant to the JBS only insofar as”Birchers” believed communists used it as a tool to undermineAmerican social, political, and economic life. Regardless of therelative priority of social difference, it was a driving force forboth movements. Another important factor the Klan and the JBShad in common was their appeal to white, Protestant, middleclassmales. As we outline in chapter 4, these three groups tend toconverge upon an exclusive sense of American identity in whichdepartures from membership in these categories are rejected.
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