“Steep brings together many of the leading scholars on modern, U.S.-right-wing politics. An exceptionally important and timely collection that sheds new light on the Tea Party phenomenon.” - Kathleen Blee, author of Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement

"Steep is deep. Its contribution of genuine interdisciplinary scholarship to the phenomenon of the Tea Party is one the best things to happen to our understanding of contemporary right-wing politics. This is an outstanding place for concerned citizens to understand the movement, whether it ends up rising or falling." - Rick Perlstein, author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

Dr. Lawrence Rosenthal is Executive Director and Lead Researcher of the Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements.
Dr. Christine Trost is Program Director of the Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements at UC Berkeley. She also serves as Assistant Director of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI).

Steep

The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party

By Lawrence Rosenthal, Christine Trost

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27423-5

Contents

List of Illustrations, vii,
Introduction: The Rise of the Tea Party Christine Trost and Lawrence Rosenthal, 1,
PART ONE. WHAT MANNER OF MOVEMENT?, 23,
1. The Tea Party in Historical Perspective: A Conservative Response to a Crisis of Political Economy Charles Postel, 25,
2. Reframing Populist Resentments in the Tea Party Movement Chip Berlet, 47,
3. View from the Top: Report on Six National Tea Party Organizations Devin Burghart, 67,
4. Astroturf versus Grass Roots: Scenes from Early Tea Party Mobilization Clarence Y. H. Lo, 98,
PART TWO. "THE REAL AMERICANS": MOTIVATION AND IDENTITY, 131,
5. The Tea Party: A "White Citizenship" Movement? Lisa Disch, 133,
6. The Past and Future of Race in the Tea Party Movement Joseph Lowndes, 152,
7. Of Mama Grizzlies and Politics: Women and the Tea Party Melissa Deckman, 171,
PART THREE. NEW ON THE BLOC: POLITICAL IMPACT, 193,
8. Grand Old Tea Party: Partisan Polarization and the Rise of the Tea Party Movement Alan I. Abramowitz, 195,
9. The Future of the Tea Party: Scoring an Invitation to the Republican Party Martin Cohen, 212,
10. The Tea Party and the Religious Right Movements: Frenemies with Benefits Peter Montgomery, 242,
Epilogue: A Tale of Two Movements, 275,
About the Contributors, 283,
Index, 287,

CHAPTER 1

The Tea Party in Historical Perspective

A Conservative Response to a Crisis of Political Economy

CHARLES POSTEL

On February 19, 2009, Rick Santelli, an entertainer and financial commentator on CNBC cable news unleashed his now famous scream against the Obama administration's economic policies. In the months leading up to this episode, presidents Bush and Obama had provided hundreds of billions of dollars under the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the Bank of America, Citibank, and other giants of American finance. But what pushed Santelli over the edge was word that the Obama administration might provide mortgage relief to distressed homeowners. Fox News proceeded to explain what had happened: The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) had conned the American taxpayers into subsidizing mortgages for people that Santelli defined as "losers," that is, mainly new homeowners that managed their money badly and did not deserve to own a home in the first place. ACORN, with the aid of its liberal supporters in Congress, had brought the American economy to its knees. Fox News and its viewers had had enough. The Tea Party movement burst onto the national stage on Tax Day 2009.

In the midst of the most severe financial and economic crisis in over seventy years, the Tea Party has been able to tap deep veins of resentment and anger over potential shifts in the post-World War II political economy. Since the Second World War, mainly white homeowners—beneficiaries of federal subsidies for mortgages and suburban development—had counted on rising home values to anchor their economic security. As home values tumbled in 2008 and 2009, the federal government contemplated coming to the aid of distressed homeowners, including African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities historically excluded from the web of federal support. Although such aid was never forthcoming, the mere suggestion provoked a storm of opposition. The ensuing debates about health care reform poured gasoline on the fire. At a time of declining retirement portfolios, rising health care costs, and fears about the viability of Social Security and Medicare, the administration's efforts to extend a health safety net to the forty million Americans without protection appeared as a bitter betrayal of those who already had such protections.

Santelli's scream also provides clues as to the historical context of the Tea Party. It sounded an alarm with deep resonance in conservative politics in America, and especially with the far right that has been locked in a trial of strength for the control of the Republican Party since the 1940s. The Tea Party has tapped into fear and anger over potential shifts in political economy to form a grassroots movement following in the historical traditions of the anti–New Deal American Liberty League, Joseph McCarthy and the witch hunts, Robert Welch and the John Birch Society, and Barry Goldwater and the right-wing Republicans of the early Cold War.

"POPULIST RAGE"?

Since the Tea Party emerged on the national scene, its members have made great efforts to maintain the public appearance of being a movement without leaders, without a defined ideology, and without history. Much of this effort has an instrumental value in terms of Republican Party politics. And much of it has been facilitated by the media's treating the Tea Party phenomenon as an enigma best explained by the term populism. Indeed, much of the print, online, and televised media has discovered that the country has entered a season of "populist" discontent, where angry folk wielding sharpened pitchforks threaten to storm the gates of power. A striking example of this commentary is the cover of Newsweek from March 2009. Under the title, "The Thinking Man's Guide to Populist Rage," the cover is a photo of an angry mob brandishing torches. The photo, of course, is not of populists, but comes from the 1931 movie Frankenstein.

In reality, the depiction of populism as an out-of-control or Frankenstein mob is a crude caricature of the original Populists. According to today's pundits, the Populists represented the reactive, unthinking politics of blind rage, the politics of the gut instead of the head. But this has no connection to the historical Populism of the 1890s, a vast movement of rural education; nor to the process whereby millions of Populist men and women, as C. Vann Woodward put it, started to "think as well as to throb"; nor to the central Populist premise that if ordinary citizens gained knowledge of the workings of political economy, they could shape a more equitable and just society.

Numerous commentators have presented the Tea Party as the latest incarnation or twist in the evolution of American populism. The key idea here is taken from the work of Richard Hofstadter. Over fifty years ago in his extraordinarily influential work, The Age of Reform, Hofstadter suggested that the right-wing and intolerant followers of Joseph McCarthy were the historical heirs of the farmer and labor Populists of the 1890s. Presumably, Populism represented an irrational and highly malleable ideology that had gone sour and turned into bitter and paranoid right-wing extremism.

The problem in Hofstadter's analysis is that it did not happen. The political scientist Michael Rogin tested Hofstadter's theory in his 1967 work The Intellectuals and McCarthy. What Rogin confirmed was that, yes, there were Populists in Wisconsin in the 1890s. And, yes, there were followers of Joseph McCarthy in Wisconsin in the 1950s. But beyond the fact that they were both in Wisconsin, there were few ideological, political, sociological, or demographic connections between Populism and McCarthyism. Walter Nugent, C. Vann Woodward, and other scholars confirmed much the same thing. Nonetheless, the notion stuck, and Hofstadter's thesis continues to cast a shadow over the national discussion about the Tea Party and its historical meaning. Perhaps it is a losing proposition to protest the indiscriminate use of the word populism. But the present employment of the term obscures more than it clarifies about the historical roots of the Tea Party.

The purpose of this distinction is not to idealize the original farmer Populists. To paraphrase Linda Gordon's question about the Progressive movement, if the Populists were advising us today, should we listen? Populism of the 1890s was a democratic movement for economic justice. But there were also currents within the Populist movement that were authoritarian, exploitative, patriarchal, and white nationalist. From that perspective, it makes sense that a spectrum of political phenomena has been described as left- or right-wing populism. But the Tea Party suggests the limits of the usefulness of the term. In this time of crisis of political economy, where is the populism in a movement that demands hard money and to revert to the gold standard? That seeks to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment and the graduated income tax? That seeks to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment and the direct election of senators? That seeks to remove funding from public education? That seeks to lift regulations on bank and corporate giants? In short, where is the populism in a movement that seeks to repeal everything that the original Populists stood for?

The political theorist Margaret Canovan observes that populism takes different forms and shapes in different times and countries. In the late nineteenth-century United States, for example, the farmer-labor People's Party, otherwise known as the Populist Party, emerged soon after the formation of the Narodnik movement among Russian intellectuals. As Canovan aptly points out, the most important connection between the two was the quite accidental translation of the Russian word narodnik into the English populism. Although they may have shared a common name, the American and Russian variants of populist were distinct and incompatible species. The American form, according to Canovan, was a variety of farmer-labor redistributive politics that had some relation to social democracy. The Eastern European form often appeared as peasant traditionalism. And in Western Europe today, we have right-wing movements driven by xenophobia that are often described as populist. So in that sense, populism is an elastic term that covers a wide array of phenomena.

In the U.S. historical context, the Populism of the 1890s was the ancestor of forces that would influence American politics deep into the twentieth century. Populism tilled the soil of rural socialism in Kansas, Oklahoma, and other rural bases of the Socialist Party in the new century's first decades. As Elizabeth Sanders has persuasively demonstrated, the Populist farm and labor movements led to the emergence of the reform or progressive wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties that would enact the reforms of the Progressive Era, and whose influence would reverberate through the New Deal. Huey Long's campaign to "Share the Wealth" also reflected the Populist tradition, despite Long's autocratic methods of running Louisiana as his private fiefdom. In the postwar period, Lyndon Baines Johnson pursued his vision of the Great Society, a vision that he inherited from his grandfather, Sam Johnson, who was a bona fide Populist politician among the cotton farmers of central Texas. Perhaps George Wallace also inherited something of the Populist tradition in that, along with his racist demagogy, he also accepted elements of redistributive social justice (at least among white people) that the Populists had introduced into Alabama politics.

It is difficult, however, to trace Populist ancestry in the Tea Party because it belongs to a different branch on the tree of American politics. While pundits and media analysts may describe the Tea Party as populist, the Tea Partiers call themselves conservatives. And to examine their historical roots, we have to look at the traditions of the conservative movement. Since the 1990s, Alan Brinkley, Heather Thompson, Leo Ribuffo, and other historians have challenged their colleagues to take more seriously the study of the conservative movement. A great deal has been learned, and that historiography has the greatest bearing on the Tea Party phenomenon.

THE CONSERVATIVE TRADITION

In the 1930s, America's business leaders sharply divided over Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Some corporate executives expressed gratitude to Roosevelt for what he had done to save capitalism and accepted the advent of the New Deal political economy. But a critical group of business leaders vehemently rejected the new order. They viewed the administration's efforts towards the legalization of industrial trade unions and the initiation of a federal social safety net as grave threats to American freedom. They called Roosevelt a socialist, a fascist, a dictator, and a tyrant. In 1934, led by the DuPont brothers of the DuPont chemical company, business and political elites organized the American Liberty League with the stated aim of restoring constitutional government and reversing the power grab of the New Deal. The Liberty League boasted that it was entirely nonpartisan since it was led by Republicans as well as disaffected Democrats such as one-time presidential candidate Al Smith. The Liberty League also understood the political necessity of presenting itself as an organization of ordinary citizens motivated by their commitment to constitutional principles. Roosevelt, nonetheless, successfully attacked the Liberty League and similar opponents as "economic royalists" seeking to protect the power and wealth of the few. And the Liberty League failed to gain political traction.

In the 1940s and `50s, the right wing of the Republican Party, led by Senators Robert Taft of Ohio and Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, took up where the Liberty League left off. Much of their wrath was directed at New York Governor Thomas Dewey, California Governor Earl Warren, and other moderates who reflected the reform traditions of an earlier Republican Progressivism, and who accepted much of the New Deal order. Taft sought the recriminalization of trade union activism, a goal that was partly realized with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. And McCarthy made dark charges of treason against both the Democratic administration of Harry Truman and the administration of the moderate Republican Dwight Eisenhower.

In 1958, business executives from the National Association of Manufacturers came together to form the John Birch Society (JBS). Led by the candy manufacturer Robert Welch, the JBS sought to liberate America from the slavery of trade unions, labor regulations, minimum wages, the Social Security Act, and other instruments of "collectivism" and "socialist tyranny." The JBS attacked the civil rights movement as part of the "communist conspiracy." And Welch branded President Eisenhower, who had served as the commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, as a communist dupe in a plot to subjugate America under "one-world government." The JBS took its paranoia to extremes, as when it famously uncovered the hand of the communist menace in municipal plans to fluoridate public water supplies.

However weird its claims, it would be a mistake to underestimate the historical role of the John Birch Society. In its heyday, the JBS was a broad grassroots movement. It probably had over 100,000 members, but those were the relatively dedicated activists who formed the semisecret cells of the JBS organization. Its influence spread further. The JBS organized in local chambers of commerce, parent-teacher associations, churches, and within the Republican Party. In conservative middle-class suburbs, housewives organized luncheons to do their part to free America from "socialist tyranny" and "one-world government." Indeed, the mobilization of women activists within conservative networks represented a signal success of the JBS. By the early 1960s, the JBS had its greatest strength in such Sunbelt states as Texas, California, and Arizona. It had sufficient grassroots support on a national scale to help secure the nomination of Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) as the Republican candidate for president in 1964. In his famous acceptance speech at the Republican convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, when Goldwater declared that "[e]xtremism in defense of liberty is no vice," he was paying tribute to the JBS foot soldiers who had made his nomination possible.

At the time, commentators on the national television networks and other media painted John Birch Society members as "extremists." New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and other moderate Republican leaders agreed. Significantly, William Buckley, Jr., the dean of the rising conservative movement, viewed Robert Welch as a liability to their common cause. In Buckley's estimation, when Welch painted moderates and liberals such as Eisenhower and Kennedy as "communists," he only undermined the anticommunist struggle. Buckley and his allies demanded Welch's excommunication from the conservative flock, and the JBS faded from its prominent place in public life.

But the John Birch Society is in the midst of a revival. In 2008, Ron Paul, a Texas congressperson who is a Tea Party favorite and a campaigner for the Republican nomination for president in 2012, delivered the keynote address at the society's fiftieth anniversary celebration. In 2010, the JBS cosponsored the CPAC conference, a national gathering of conservatives. On September 16, 2010, Sharron Angle, the Tea Party candidate in Nevada for the U.S. Senate, took time out from her campaign to address a "United Freedom Rally" in Salt Lake City, sponsored nationally by the John Birch Society and the National Center for Constitutional Studies. The event also had the support of local Birch societies and 9/12 groups inspired by the radio and television host Glenn Beck. The National Center for Constitutional Studies was founded by the late Cleon Skousen, a close political ally of Welch who was if anything yet more paranoid and extreme in his views. Glenn Beck, who many Tea Partiers consider their intellectual guide, promotes the books of Cleon Skousen on his radio and television shows; Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and other Tea Party politicians are devotees of Skousen's work; and local Tea Party study groups have made Skousen's book The 5000 Year Leap required reading.

(Continues...)Excerpted from Steep by Lawrence Rosenthal, Christine Trost. Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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