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Summary
Summary
On February 19, 2009, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli stood on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and delivered a rant against government programs to shore up the housing market in the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression. Ridiculing "losers" who could not pay their mortgages, Santelli invited America's "capitalists" to a "Chicago Tea Party." Less than a month after Barack Obama's inauguration, activists seized the opportunity to crystallize a nationwide Tea Party that has shaken American politics ever since.In this penetrating new study, Theda Skocpol of Harvard University, one of our leading political scientists, and co-author Vanessa Williamson go beyond the inevitable photos of protesters in tricorn hats and knee breeches to provide a nuanced portrait of the Tea Party. What they find is sometimes surprising. Drawing on extensive interviews in many parts of the country, they find that grassroots Tea Partiers - who are mostly white, older, and middle class - typically support Social Security, Medicare, and generous benefits for military veterans, despite their professed hatred of "big government." Echoing longstanding conservative complaints, Tea Partiers are fiercely hostile to paying taxes to help people they consider "undeserving." They especially worry about claims by immigrants and younger people they believe have not paid their dues. Across America, Tea Party networks tie free-market elites and funders to energized citizens who attend regular meetings, lobby legislators, and get out the vote. Although its popular appeal is limited to older conservatives, the Tea Party has shaken American politics by pulling the Republican Party sharply to the right. Public debates are increasingly bitter; and government finds it harder to get things done. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism combines fine-grained portraits of local Tea Party members and chapters with an overarching analysis of the movement's rise, impact, and likely fate. Thoughtful, perceptive, and impartial, it provides precisely the study we need as another presidential campaign looms.
Author Notes
Theda Skocpol is professor of government and sociology at Harvard University and the author of Boomerang: Health Care Reform and the Turn Against Government.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Harvard political scientist Skocpol and grad student Williamson conduct a journalistic study of the Tea Party, combining "publically available evidence with in-depth personal interviews and local observations." The Tea Party, they contend, is made up of well-off white Republicans fiercely protective of their social security and Medicare benefits and fiercely against social spending on "undeserving" younger people and immigrants; they are canny about politics but misinformed about public policy, and unalterably opposed to the very concept of a black president . While the movement is genuinely grass-roots, the authors argue, it is swayed by conservative media and "highly ideological right-wing billionaires," the result is a fragile coalition-initiatives to cut their entitlements don't sit well with Tea Partiers-that is nonetheless shoving the Republican party into a corner of unpopular extremism. The authors confirm the conclusions reached liberal journalists about the Tea Party, but they do it with a fine-grained nuance and thoughtfulness that resonates. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Shortly after the election of Barack Obama in 2008, grassroots activism by conservatives spawned the Tea Party, which two years later quashed any hopes that the Democrats were about to take firm hold of government. Political-science scholars Skocpol and Williamson examine how the Tea Party has been able to take command of the political landscape and influence decisions by Republicans and Democrats. They start by studying the election of Scott Brown, with Tea Party support, to replace liberal icon Ted Kennedy and then move on to closely examine the demographics, aspirations, and strategies of Tea Party groups in Virginia and Arizona. Beyond the typical demographics (white male, middle age, middle class, churchgoer), the authors profile the individuals attracted to the movement, including a sizable number of women. The range is from libertarians to social conservatives, from benign believers in less government to extremists who don't eschew violence in getting their point across. They also examine the opposing views and internal conflicts within the party on issues from abortion to drug laws to gay marriage. An interesting look at an influential political movement.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Half a century ago Republicans were a respectable but slightly boring presence on the political scene. Wary of excessive government, they were nonetheless reconciled to its expansion under Franklin D. Roosevelt and were mainly concerned with keeping it lean and solvent. Their beau idéal was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who in 1952 became the first Republican in 24 years to be elected president. His principa] opponent for the nomination, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, had opposed the New Deal and was a staunch isolationist who opposed supporting Britain in the first years of World War II. Eisenhower represented a more pragmatic strain of conservatism, internationalist when it came to foreign policy and willing to accept a larger government role at home. He called it "modern Republicanism." With Eisenhower's landslide re-election in 1956, his gospel looked like the future, at least for the G.O.P. Of course it wasn't. The familiar narrative is that William F. Buckley Jr. chipped away at it, starting in 1955, when he founded National Review; that after 1960 it was rendered irrelevant by the vitality of President John F. Kennedy and his cold war liberalism; and that it collapsed entirely in 1964 when the Republicans' hard-right wing secured the nomination for Barry Goldwater. But were things really so simple as that? In "Rule and Ruin," his wonderfully detailed new history of moderate Republicanism, Geoffrey Kabaservice makes a strong case that modern Republicanism was hardier than we remember. Kabaservice acknowledges its eventual defeat but argues persuasively that Republican moderates remained a powerful, even dominant, political force well into the 1970s. THE story begins at the Eisenhower era's end. Writing in 1961 about the return of "action and political dialogue to the college campus," the young activist Tom Hayden cited three examples. The first was the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (which Hayden helped found), remembered today as a primary vehicle for campus protest against the Vietnam War. The second was the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom (which Buckley helped found), remembered today for advancing the political careers of Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The third was Advance, a magazine published by two Harvard undergraduates, Bruce Chapman and George Gilder. Today no one remembers Advance. Gilder and, to a lesser extent, Chapman are familiar names, but they're known mainly as right wingers. Back then they were Rockefeller Republicans who played a significant role in rallying Republican Congressional support for the civil rights movement. When the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, Kabaservice reports, it had proportionally greater support among Republicans than among Democrats (who had to fend off opposition from Southern segregationists). But Goldwater, the party's "presumptive presidential nominee," voted against the bill. The Goldwater forces rolled over the moderates that year, with a fervor that their Tea Party legatees would find difficult to match. At the Republicans' California state convention, moderates barely managed to block a platform resolution to "send Negroes back to Africa." However extreme the conspiracy-minded Glenn Beck may seem, he was outdone by Robert Welch, the conspiracy-minded founder of the John Birch Society. Kabaservice argues that Goldwater's landslide defeat by the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson (which also helped reduce the number of Republicans in the House to its lowest level in nearly 30 years) actually strengthened the leverage of Republican moderates. In the next few years, liberal Republicans came to the fore, including John Lindsay, who was elected mayor of New York (defeating Buckley, who ran on the Conservative Party ticket); Edward Brooke (of Massachusetts), who became the first popularly elected African-American senator; George H.W. Bush, who won a House seat in his adopted state of Texas; and Michigan Gov. George Romney (father of Mitt), who briefly posed a serious threat to Richard Nixon's presidential ambitions - a 1966 Harris poll had him leading the Republican field and defeating Johnson 54-46 - until he blew it all by attributing his initially favorable view of the Vietnam War to "brainwashing" from generals and diplomats. "In hindsight," Kabaservice pointedly notes, "Romney was the G.O.P. moderates' last and best chance to elect one of their own to the presidency." The Nixon presidency initially seemed a boon for modern Republicans, since Nixon had been Eisenhower's vice president. His cabinet appointments included moderates like William Rogers, Elliot Richardson, Melvin Laird and Walter Hickel. His national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, a longtime associate of Nelson Rockefeller, was widely deemed a moderate, too. And much of Nixon's domestic agenda flirted with outright liberalism, particularly the poverty program devised by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a career Democrat. But Nixon himself was not at heart an Eisenhower Republican so much as a calculating practitioner of realpolitik, and as he increasingly honed his message to appeal to conservative Southern Democrats (aided by his ex-moderate vice president, Spiro Agnew) he grew estranged from moderate Republicans - even as he often pursued liberal policies. Then came Watergate, which alienated moderate donors in the '70s; direct-mail campaigns for the Republican Ripon Society, an influential liberal group, soon began losing money. At the same time, wealthy conservatives like Joseph Coors, John Olin and the Koch brothers were stepping up their contributions to conservative causes. With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the party lurched farther right, and modern Republicans became scarcer still. Today, nearly all political centrists are Democrats. And with the rise of the Tea Party, Republicans are experiencing another 1964 moment. Indeed, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson report in their exceptionally informative book, "The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism," more than a few Tea Partiers "dated their first political experience to the Goldwater campaign." But there are important differences between the two movements. For one, the Tea Party, unlike the Goldwater insurgency, has managed to win elections and thereby obtain some power at the national and state level. For another, the Tea Partiers' anti-government ideology is tempered by quiet support for Social Security and Medicare. That's because the activists themselves tend to be middle-aged or older. Tea Partiers aren't opposed to government benefits per se, according to Skocpol and Williamson; rather, they're opposed to "unearned" government benefits, which in practice ends up meaning any benefits extended to African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants (especially undocumented ones) and the young. A poll of South Dakota Tea Party supporters found that 83 percent opposed any Social Security cuts, 78 percent opposed any cuts to Medicare prescription-drug coverage, and 79 percent opposed cuts in Medicare reimbursements to physicians and hospitals. "So much for the notion that Tea Partiers are all little Dick Armeys," Skocpol and Williamson write. The small government Tea Partiers favor is one where I get mine and most others don't get much at all. This poses a particular problem for a conservative Republican like Rep. Paul Ryan, who favors privatizing Medicare and shifting more of the financial burden onto recipients. But it's also a problem for anyone seeking to lower the budget deficit, because it's the "earned" benefits like Social Security and Medicare that are mainly responsible for runaway government spending. On the other hand, although Tea Partiers, who tend to be comfortably middle class but not wealthy, hate paying taxes, they don't necessarily mind when other people pay taxes; the South Dakota poll had 56 percent of Tea Party supporters favoring a 5 percent increase in income taxes for people who earn more than $1 million a year. ON some level, then, the Tea Party is a product of the very welfare-statism that the hard right sought to smother in 1964 and that so many Tea Partiers profess to loathe today. "U.S. taxpayers subsidize their incomes and well-being, and hence give them the time and capacity to organize protests and Tea Party groups," Skocpol and Williamson observe wryly. Government supplies the leisure that makes possible fervid and angry opposition to government. The Democrats built this Rube Goldberg structure, but they couldn't have done it without help from "modern Republicans." In at least that narrow sense, their legacy lives on. Aher Eisenhower's landslide, his pragmatic conservatism looked like the Republican future. Of course it wasn't. Tea Partiers aren't opposed to government benefits per se, just to 'unearned' benefits that go to others. Timothy Noah is a senior editor at The New Republic, where he writes the TRB column. His book "The Great Divergence," about America's three-decade rise in income inequality, will be released this spring.
Choice Review
This timely volume offers a glimpse inside the American Tea Party movement. To decipher this phenomenon, Skocpol (Harvard Univ.) and Williamson (PhD candidate, Harvard Univ.) combine firsthand observation with extensive interview data. Their analysis paints a nuanced picture of the Tea Party. Confirming existing theory, Skocpol and Williamson find that Tea Partiers are more likely to be white, older, and male. Their political involvement is largely motivated by deep suspicions that America is under attack by forces determined to steal from hard-working people in order to redistribute dollars to "undeserving" minorities and illegal immigrants. The lightning rod for Tea Party mobilization is President Obama, who is seen as leading the charge to subvert American values and the market economy. Herein lies the central paradox of the Tea Party, and the major contribution of this volume: as a force for participatory democracy, the Tea Party has energized Americans to engage in politics in direct and creative ways. But at the same time, as Skocpol and Williamson illustrate, the agenda sparking this mobilization is plagued by inaccuracies, and movement members have no interest in building a more complete and complex understanding of contemporary US politics. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers and undergraduate students. D. R. Imig University of Memphis
Kirkus Review
Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life, 2003, etc.) and Williamson research the Tea Party from the ground up, rooting their study in focused fieldwork surrounding three local Tea Party groups in Massachusetts, Virginia and Arizona. The authors pepper firsthand anecdotes with extensive--and at times weighty--statistical and polling data. The perspectives and opinions of the subjects are skillfully interwoven with analysis of their civic habits, economic status, religious inclinations and ideologies. After a thorough background in the demographics of Tea Partiers, as well as their shared passions and sources of discord among this fledgling movement, the authors investigate the fascinating, and often unlikely, pairing of grassroots organizers and wealthy investors, politicos and influence peddlers who are seeking to capitalize on the media spotlight currently shining on the Tea Party. Credited with dramatically influencing the 2010 midterm elections, expectations are high as to how Tea Partiers and their core group of middle-class, volunteer-oriented proponents will affect the 2012 presidential election. According to the authors, one thing is certain: The anger many Tea Partiers express is aimed squarely at President Obama, raising the stakes for both grassroots organizers and those flush, politically minded groups seeking to ally themselves with the Tea Party. A timely study of a contemporary movement and its far-reaching effects on politics and policy.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Many questions and much misinformation surround the recent Tea Party movement. Skocpol (government, Harvard Univ.; Reaching for the New Deal) and Williamson (PhD candidate, Harvard Univ.) conducted interviews with Tea Party members to explain the forces giving rise to the movement and its impact on the GOP and the U.S. political system. The book examines the development and motives of the movement at both the grassroots level and through the self-appointed Tea Party advocates who are largely members of the media and financial elite. Aptly demonstrated are the Tea Party's overriding desires to remove President Obama from office and, as important, move the GOP, seen by the Tea Party as too moderate, to the extreme right. The authors also offer possible implications of Tea Party influence on the American political scene in 2012 and beyond. VERDICT Readers interested in grassroots political organizations, the influence of outside interests on political parties, or the Tea Party itself, as well as those whose leanings fall elsewhere on the political spectrum will find this an eye-opening book.-Beth M. Johns, Saginaw Valley State Univ., Haslett, MI (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Preface and Acknowledgments |
| Introduction: "I Want My Country Back!" |
| 1 Behind the Costumes and Signs: Who are the Tea Partiers? |
| 2 What They Believe: The Ideas and Passions of Tea Partiers |
| 3 Mobilized Grassroots and Roving Billionaires: The Panoply of Tea Party Organizations |
| 4 Getting the Word Out: The Media as Cheerleader and Megaphone |
| 5 How the Tea Party Boosts the GOP and Prods It Rightward |
| 6 The Tea Party and American Democracy |
