the Tea Party and Remaking of Republican Conservatism

Bol Partner

Shortly after the Democrats' resounding victory in 2008, many prognosticators envisioned an enduring Democratic majority. As conventional wisdom had it, the Republican Party would be hamstrung by its far right wing, particularly in the wake of the financial crisis and the failures of the Bush presidency. Republicans, so the thinking went, would need to rediscover the center and cater to it. However, this is not what happened. Shortly after Obama took office and proposed bold new legislation that expanded the scope of federal power, a grassroots conservative movement spread like wildfire through the prairies: the Tea Party Movement. In this sharp analysis of the Tea Party, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson combine finely grained portraits of local Tea Party chapters with a big-picture analysis of the larger movement's rise and likely fate. After explaining the movement's demographic makeup as well as the organization and operation of local chapters, Skocpol and Williamson explore their belief system. Drawing from extensive interviews with Massachusetts and Virginia chapters, they found that while Tea Partiers profess to hate government, they are generally supportive of programs that working people pay into like Social Security and Medicare. They reserve their hostility for programs that fund the 'undeserving,' which puts the movement squarely in line with the long tradition of postwar American conservatism. Perhaps most interestingly, they have found that the movement resents illegal immigration more than any other social or economic phenomenon-even in places like Massachusetts, which is not a gateway for undocumented aliens. The authors take their story through the 2010 Congressional elections and assess what the Tea Party's strength means for both the Republican Party and the Conservative movement in the future. Much of what the Tea Party supports cuts against other Republican commitments, like the elites' commitment to cutting social security and expanding free trade, so the movement's successes will generate new fissures. Also, the ongoing attempt by the national Republican Party to co-opt the movement will probably lead to contradictions and conflict. That said, they are a powerful new social movement in American politics-more powerful than most foresaw when they initially burst on the scene-and they will play an important role in conservatism for the foreseeable future.

Bol

This revised edition features a new afterword, updated through the 2016 election. On February 19, 2009, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli delivered a dramatic rant against Obama administration programs to shore up the plunging housing market. Invoking the Founding Fathers and ridiculing "losers" who could not pay their mortgages, Santelli called for "Tea Party" protests. Over the next two years, conservative activists took to the streets and airways, built hundreds of local Tea Party groups, and weighed in with votes and money to help right-wing Republicans win electoral victories in 2010. In this penetrating new study, Harvard University's Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson go beyond images of protesters in Colonial costumes to provide a nuanced portrait of the Tea Party. What they find is sometimes surprising. Drawing on grassroots interviews and visits to local meetings in several regions, they find that older, middle-class Tea Partiers mostly approve of Social Security, Medicare, and generous benefits for military veterans. Their opposition to "big government" entails reluctance to pay taxes to help people viewed as undeserving "freeloaders" - including immigrants, lower income earners, and the young. At the national level, Tea Party elites and funders leverage grassroots energy to further longstanding goals such as tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation of business, and privatization of the very same Social Security and Medicare programs on which many grassroots Tea Partiers depend. Elites and grassroots are nevertheless united in hatred of Barack Obama and determination to push the Republican Party sharply to the right. 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.