Did the tea party come about because a bunch of old white conservatives suddenly got it into their heads that their taxes were too high, or was it a more simplistic—read, racist—reaction to the election of America's first black president? Let's find out,
using science!
At least to some degree, the Tea Party movement is an outlet for mobilizing and expressing racialized grievances which have been symbolically magnified by the election of the nation’s first black president,” writes a research team led by Florida State University sociologist Daniel Tope.
The study, just published in the journal Social Science Research, finds this acrimony appears to be aimed specifically at blacks rather than also targeting Latinos. While that’s somewhat surprising, “The findings suggest that, among conservatives, racial resentment may be a more important determinate of membership in the Tea Party movement than hard-right political values.”
Your membership in the tea party may have stronger ties to anti-black racial resentments than any declared political values? How shocking! How unexpected! And so on, and so forth!
[T]he researchers found racial resentment was a “distinct factor” driving membership, one which was “largely independent” from ideological concerns. “Conservatives who were more racially resentful were substantially more likely to claim Tea Party movement membership,” they write.
The caveat to all of this is that it is dastardly science, and the people who are out there wearing triangular hats complaining that Barack Obama is clearly the most
tyrannical and
out of control president ever insist that they have not suddenly discovered how oppressed they are and how mistrustful of presidential authority they should be because their president is now A Black Guy. That they just happen to also answer a series of questions about race in a manner that clearly demonstrates their hostility to black Americans is, they will insist, purely a coincidence.
We could extend this further and theorize that the tea party movement as embraced by the wider Republican party, and I don't think you can make any serious argument that it hasn't been embraced, is itself just an extension of the well-worn Southern Strategy. The election time concern over Obama's suspicious black preacher; the deep suspicions as to whether Obama was even an "American" or whether his citizenship itself was a fraud; his supposed secret Muslimness; the sudden alarm over government czars; the ongoing and ever-fruitless investigations into take-your-pick. The dominant theme of Republicanism over the last six years has been first and foremost that Obama must not be allowed to be successful, and that his mere existence in the office has brought about all sorts of intolerable "government tyrannies" that were not "government tyrannies" when the last president did them.
It's not just the theme of the tea partiers, but of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and the rest of party leadership, and Fox News, and the usual conservative publications that promise they've finally gotten over that whole business with segregation now so it would be wrong to hold that against them. Don't trust that guy, they say. He may be doing the same thing that all the other presidents have done, what with appointing people to positions and signing executive orders and giving speeches and the like, but when that guy does it he can't be trusted. He's not American "in his heart." He doesn't have America's best interests in mind. His "affinities" are more with Africa than with us, say the "conservative" pundits.
Where was I? Ah, yes. It turns out the movement that started as an old southern conservative white guy revolt immediately after the election of America's first non-white president sports racial resentment as a more important determinate of membership than any specific conservative issue or policy. Yes, yes, we're all shocked.