0857249118 by Julian Go

Author:Julian Go [Go, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-09-04T16:44:46+00:00

The

Tea

Party

in

the

Age

of

Obama

129

Fig. 1.

Public Support for Tea Party and Out-Group Attitudes. Source: 2010 Multistate Survey on Race and Politics Pilot Study.

130

MATT A. BARRETO ET AL.

able to detain terror suspects as long as they wish without putting them on

trial. Although just 7% of those who disapprove of the Tea Party agree with

suspending trials, 39.5% of Tea Party supporters agree with unlimited

detentions. On other civil liberties topics such as profiling, phone taps, and

police searches, our pilot study finds Tea Party supporters are consistently

willing to give the federal government more authority to intervene in

people’s lives.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Over the past few decades America has experienced many social, demo-

graphic, and political changes. In particular, the minority and immigrant

population has grown dramatically, and this has culminated in the election of

many prominent African American, Latino, and Asian American candidates

to office. At the same time, minority groups have continued to promote equal

rights, especially civil rights, for a range of groups including racial/ethnic

minorities, but also women, gays and lesbians. To an extent, the shock of

these social changes to the dominant in-group was absorbed by the previous

eight years of the Republican presidency of George W. Bush. Even as society

and demographics changed, calling into question the perceived social order of

yesteryear, political control of the country rested in the hands of a Republican

administration. In 2008 everything changed, with the election of Barack

Obama as the first African American president in America’s history.

Although this alone was not the sole inspiration of the Tea Party movement,

the election of Obama provided an opening for his staunchest critics to reach

out to those disaffected by the social change in America, and to perhaps

question, ‘‘what happened to my country?’’ Not only did the social and

demographic landscape of America look different in 2008 than it did a

generation before, but so too did the President of the United States.

In this chapter, we set out to assess the extent to which Richard

Hofstadter’s pseudo-conservative framework fit with the Tea Party.

Ultimately, we observed a fairly snug fit. The Tea Party, as the contemporary

representation of the extreme right, is pretty consistent with its predecessors,

sharing with them the major tenets of right-wing extremism. All share an

aversion to social change, and tend to transform the manifestly political into a

crusade of good versus evil, often White heterosexual versus other. These

groups also share a preference for maintaining the status quo, and tend to

subscribe to conspiratorial thinking, demonizing their ‘‘enemies.’’ Though

many pundits describe the Tea Party as the conservative wing of the

The Tea Party in the Age of Obama

131

Republican Party, we find that conservatism alone is not driving the Tea

Party. At a much deeper level, Tea Party sympathizers are concerned with the

distribution of goods and rights in a changing America. Although spending

on Social Security is something that must be protected at all costs, spending

on public education, English as a second language, or health care for all must

be avoided at all costs.

With the analyses, insofar as it’s possible to do so, we sought to explore

the contours of pseudo-conservatism. If, as many sympathetic to the Tea

Party claim, they are really simply die-hard conservatives, and not

extremists, this should have evident in the content analysis.

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