The Tea Party
Avery Coffey
AAAS 150x: Race, Racism, and American Politics
15 October 2016
Change They Can’t Believe In Book Review
Scholarly writing on the Tea Party seem to have many key unresolved questions: is the Tea Party the latest episode in the larger story of American conservatism and the metamorphosis of the Republican Party? If not, then what are the true origins? Is it an economic movement or a manifestation of white racism and dissension? Has the conservative establishment orchestrated the Tea Party, or is the Tea Party truly a grassroots movement? In Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America, by Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto, the authors offer some new insight for the aforementioned questions. …show more content…
They argue that the only sub-grouping of conservatism is between “mainstream” versus “reactionary,” and for Parker and Barreto, Tea Party support is a proxy for reactionary conservatism, which is at odds with mainstream conservative ideology and its media. In advancing their reactionary versus conservative framework, Parker and Barreto compare the spirit of Tea Party to those of two earlier examples of similar movements in American history: the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society–both of which, they argue, are departures from “mainstream conservative” values in that they undermine public order and social unity. In the case of the John Birch Society, its anticommunist doctrine was “a flagrant violation of freedom, a chief goal of [mainstream] conservatism” (254). Through linking past and present reactionary movements, Parker and Barreto rigorously examine the political motivations and implications associated with the modern Tea Party, and they develop a framework that transcends the Tea Party to shed light on its current and future consequences. The authors speculate that the Tea Party supporters may perceive social change as subversion, and based on their research and interviews, they suggest that racism and the desire for social dominance drive the Tea …show more content…
They dismiss any economic “causality” of reactionary movements: “it appears that the state of the economy can tell us little about the likelihood of [their] emergence” (pg. 34). This dismissal of an economic role rules out a key dimension emphasized in much of the tea party scholarship, including the role of political and economic elites in fostering and maintaining the appearance of the tea party movement. Second, the authors draw from social psychology in their analyses of reactionary social movements. Their use of childhood psychology to explain reactionary conservatism as “guided by the social learning to which the individual is exposed in childhood” does not seem persuasive (101, 103, 224,
AAAS 150x: Race, Racism, and American Politics
15 October 2016
Change They Can’t Believe In Book Review
Scholarly writing on the Tea Party seem to have many key unresolved questions: is the Tea Party the latest episode in the larger story of American conservatism and the metamorphosis of the Republican Party? If not, then what are the true origins? Is it an economic movement or a manifestation of white racism and dissension? Has the conservative establishment orchestrated the Tea Party, or is the Tea Party truly a grassroots movement? In Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America, by Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto, the authors offer some new insight for the aforementioned questions. …show more content…
They argue that the only sub-grouping of conservatism is between “mainstream” versus “reactionary,” and for Parker and Barreto, Tea Party support is a proxy for reactionary conservatism, which is at odds with mainstream conservative ideology and its media. In advancing their reactionary versus conservative framework, Parker and Barreto compare the spirit of Tea Party to those of two earlier examples of similar movements in American history: the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society–both of which, they argue, are departures from “mainstream conservative” values in that they undermine public order and social unity. In the case of the John Birch Society, its anticommunist doctrine was “a flagrant violation of freedom, a chief goal of [mainstream] conservatism” (254). Through linking past and present reactionary movements, Parker and Barreto rigorously examine the political motivations and implications associated with the modern Tea Party, and they develop a framework that transcends the Tea Party to shed light on its current and future consequences. The authors speculate that the Tea Party supporters may perceive social change as subversion, and based on their research and interviews, they suggest that racism and the desire for social dominance drive the Tea …show more content…
They dismiss any economic “causality” of reactionary movements: “it appears that the state of the economy can tell us little about the likelihood of [their] emergence” (pg. 34). This dismissal of an economic role rules out a key dimension emphasized in much of the tea party scholarship, including the role of political and economic elites in fostering and maintaining the appearance of the tea party movement. Second, the authors draw from social psychology in their analyses of reactionary social movements. Their use of childhood psychology to explain reactionary conservatism as “guided by the social learning to which the individual is exposed in childhood” does not seem persuasive (101, 103, 224,