Tea Party Activists Research Articles

Is subversion just another version of state aversion? Notes on Herzfeld’s Subversive archaism

Is subversion just another version of state aversion? Notes on Herzfeld’s <i>Subversive archaism</i>

Freedom over Fear: Fundamentalist Populism and the Challenge of COVID-19

Abstract Although public responses to national and international crises are never without contestations and conflicting truth claims, the COVID-19 pandemic draws attention to the stark political and cultural divisions presented by conservative populism in the age of the Tea Party Movement and Donald Trump. Beginning with research among Tea Party activists in 2010 and continuing through the Trump Administration and “reopen” protests, I have documented a shifting cultural world of right-wing populism. The vivid and symbolically elaborate performance of patriotism and indignation by the Tea Party Movement declined in 2012, being replaced by a more belligerent and less colorful form of populism with Donald Trump. As Trump-inspired protests opposing COVID-19 mitigation policies emerged in 2020, however, Tea Party themes and symbols reemerged as frames for resistance to government restrictions. Yet, despite the shifting styles, there was a constant theme of what I term “fundamentalist populism.” This style illustrates political identities characterized by vilification of opponents, distrust of existing political and social institutions, ideological rigidity, and a rededication to individualism and personal freedom. Ethnographic and documentary research shows how these themes animate a small yet vocal resistance to the science-based and cooperative guidelines prescribed by public health experts

Overcoming resistance to COVID-19 vaccine adoption: How affective dispositions shape views of science and medicine

Health experts worry that a COVID-19 vaccine boycott could inhibit reaching “herd immunity,” and their concerns have only grown as the pandemic has spread. Concern has largely focused on anti-vaccine protestors, who captured headlines as they stood side by side with Tea Party activists and armed militia groups demonstrating against the quarantine in April and May of this year. But anti-vax extremists make up only about a third of respondents in surveys who said they would not vac-cinate. Health officials must also take into account a swelling group who may understand the im-portance of a vaccine but are hesitant and confused because they feel the vaccine’s development is being rushed and may not be safe or effective. The challenge for the public health community is complex; it has to fashion messages to a set of disparate groups, each employing a unique set of biases when processing information about the efficacy of getting a vaccination

Research in a Minefield: Relating with Tea Party Activists

Based on a doctoral research project on Tea Party groups in Pennsylvania, this article deals both with the various pitfalls I had to learn to avoid and the significant impact that being a young, white French woman had on the way activists interacted with me. In addition, I reflect upon the general ramifications of studying a right-wing social movement while not aligning with it politically. The automatic distance—and presumed ensuing objectivity that this viewpoint initially seems to afford—is much more fragile and complicated than apparent at first glance.

Right-Wing Ideologies and Ideological Diversity in the Tea Party

ABSTRACTThis article extends prior research on right-wing ideology broadly and the ideology of the Tea Party specifically. Using data from 45 interviews with Tea Party activists and participant observation at Tea Party meetings, I map five distinct ideologies, used by subsets of the Tea Party Patriots membership: Christian Conservatism, Constitutionalism, Reformed Liberalism, Libertarianism, and Conspiracism.

Where’s the Tea Party? An Examination of the Tea Party’s Voting Behavior in the House of Representatives

Does the Tea Party affect how lawmakers vote? Given the possible spurious effect of a representative’s ideology, we leverage natural variation in the Tea Party’s existence and examine this question through the lens of party switching. Like when lawmakers change parties, representatives who (1) joined Tea Party Caucus and (2) had a large volume of Tea Party activists in their district underwent a significant shift to the right in the 112th Congress. We believe these findings support both legislative-centered and extended network theorists. An additional analysis reveals that, unlike Democrats and non-Tea Party aligned Republicans who also shifted to the extremes in the 112th Congress, Tea Party Republicans did not “bounce back” in the 113th Congress. Lastly, we find no equivalent rightward shift in comparable conservative caucuses or among Republicans with similar ideologies and districts. In the end, although the Tea Party is not a “party” in the classic sense of the word, we claim that it is having “party like” effects in Congress. In the conclusion section, we discuss the implications of these results for the stability of the current two-party system. Given our findings, a major realignment or split within the Republican Party would not be surprising.

Individual Responsibility, Culture, or State Organized Enslavement? How Tea Party Activists Frame Racial Inequality

This article explores how Tea (Taxed Enough Already) Party activists produce and circulate stories about racial inequality, presenting four distinct frames that reflect nonconformity in the Tea Party’s racial narrative. Activists engage with four racial frames: racism denial, individual responsibility, cultural responsibility, and structural responsibility. The Tea Party unites using frame amplification to emphasize the master frame of color blindness that allows activists, regardless of the frame with which they engage, to unite under the broader notion that they are all idyllically color blind.

Epilogue: What 2012 nomination contests tell us about the future of the Republican Party

Analysis of Tea Party activists within the Republican Party illustrates the “good-news, bad-news” aspects of intra-party factionalism. The good news is that nomination contests between Tea Party and establishment Republicans, divisive as they appear, do not necessarily undermine support for the party's nominees in the general election. Support for Tea Party candidates among its activists in the 2012 presidential nomination fight produced increased support for Romney–Ryan in the general election. At the same time, however, activism for Tea Party candidates contributed to increased negativity towards the Republican Party among Tea Party activists, suggesting that the factionalism within the party is unlikely to be soon resolved. Finally we find that negativity towards the Republican establishment is playing an even greater role than negativity towards President Obama in producing continuing or increased Tea Party movement activity. This suggests that the movement has the potential to survive beyond Obama's presidency.

Mama Grizzlies and Guardians of the Republic: The Democratic and Intersectional Politics of Anger in the Tea Party Movement

Tea Party activists have proudly embraced anger and outrage as a distinguishing mark of patriotic dissidence, and have successfully exploited the contemporary politics of anger in the United States. Although much democratic theory casts anger as a hazardous impediment to democratic politics, these theories and the progressive critiques based on them participate in troubling efforts to discipline or even expel anger from the public sphere. Instead this article theorizes public anger as an agonistic, performative, and intersectional practice. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, it also demonstrates how intersectional formations of gender, sexuality, and race have played a central role in making Tea Party performances of anger politically intelligible and powerful. The analysis highlights not just how white men and white women are able to enact public anger, but also how some Tea Party activists of color have surprisingly circumvented contemporary affective norms that usually render racial minorities' public anger politically suspect. The article concludes with a discussion of the democratic implications of an agonistic approach to anger for democratic theory and practice.

You Can Help Stop America’s March to the Right

You Can Help Stop America’s March to the Right

The Tea Party's Constitution

The Tea Party is a populist constituency for constitutional amendments designed to advance federalism and to limit the size of the federal government. Randy Barnett, who considers the Tea Party a “market” for constitutional reform, has recently collaborated with Tea Party activists to call for a constitutional convention to consider proposing Barnett’s “Repeal Amendment” for ratification.The Repeal Amendment would allow any federal law or regulation to be repealed by a vote of the legislatures of two-thirds of the states. This amendment has been criticized by Sanford Levinson for giving too much power to “the extortionate demands” of “small parochial rural states.” However, this paper concludes that the Repeal Amendment would be one small means of advancing the constitutional values of federalism, especially the value of individual liberty and the often overlooked sanctuary function of federalism.

Postmortems On The Affordable Care ActInside National Health Reform by McDonough John E. Berkeley (CA) : University of California Press , 2011 330 pp.; $34.95Why ObamaCare Is Wrong For America: How The New Health Care Law Drives Up Costs, Puts Government In Charge Of Your Decisions, And Threatens Your Constitutional Rights by Turner Grace-Marie Capretta James C. Miller Thomas P.

Postmortems On The Affordable Care ActInside National Health Reform by McDonough John E. Berkeley (CA) : University of California Press , 2011 330 pp.; $34.95Why ObamaCare Is Wrong For America: How The New Health Care Law Drives Up Costs, Puts Government In Charge Of Your Decisions, And Threatens Your Constitutional Rights by Turner Grace-Marie Capretta James C. Miller Thomas P.

El Grito and the Tea Party

This article uses California’s long history of migration to question efforts by local Tea Party activists to push for an anti-immigration law modeled after Arizona’s notorious S.B. 1070. Focusing on Mary Hunter Austin’s description of a multilingual, transborder celebration of el Grito de la Independencia (Mexican Independence Day) in the Owens Valley in 1903, the article argues that the Tea Party’s anti-immigrant ideology relies on a flattening of history to cast migrant workers as outsiders and naturalize Anglo dominance of the region.

Mama Grizzlies and the Midterms: Women and the Tea Party

This paper offers a first look at women who support the Tea Party and considers both how they compare with other women politically and with Tea Party men using a national PEW survey. Compared with Republican women more generally, Tea Party women are the most theologically orthodox and religiously observant. In this respect, the Tea Party appears to be capturing support among women for whom mixing their conservative religious values and conservative politics is a good thing — women who may otherwise feel right at home in the Christian Right. Tea Party women are also more religiously devout and theologically conservative than Tea Party men. And while Tea Party women and Tea Party men are more similar than not when it comes to public policy attitudes (and certainly more conservative than the nation at large), the preliminary findings here suggest that Tea Party women hold less conservative views on social welfare concerns than do Tea Party men, which echoes other studies that consistently show that men are less supportive of government assistance to the poor. That women nationally are more likely to be more supportive of government assistance to the poor than men indicates that women are also more supportive of a larger role for government to play in society, which is exactly what the Tea Party is rallying against. So attempts to rally more women to be supportive of the Tea Party may need to be gendered in tone and may need to speak to women’s place as caregivers and mothers, aka the “mama grizzlies” that Sarah Palin talks about in her stump speeches. More empirical research needs to be conducted that determines whether Tea Party activists and conservative Tea Party candidates — especially Tea Party women — routinely employ such rhetoric in their appeals, and if so, whether such appeals are effective in terms of gaining electoral support from women.

Popular Originalism? The Tea Party Movement and Constitutional Theory

The United States Constitution is currently the subject of a heated political debate. Tea Party activists have invoked the constitution as the foundation of their conservative political philosophy. These activists are engaged in “popular originalism,” using popular constitutionalism, constitutional interpretation outside of the courts, to invoke originalism as constitutional method. The Tea Party movement thus highlights the relationship between originalism and popular constitutionalism, two prominent trends in constitutional theory. Both fields study legal history to illuminate constitutional meaning, but originalists and popular constitutionalists draw diverging lessons from that history. Originalists look to history to determine fixed original meaning, which they hold to be binding on contemporary interpreters regardless of subsequent historical or political developments. Popular constitutionalists study how constitutional interpretation has been influenced by historical developments, and explore the use of constitutional theory to bolster constitutional arguments. This essay explores the convergence and divergence between originalism and popular constitutionalism, and questions whether popular originalism is feasible given originalists’ fidelity to the original text. The essay concludes by asking what popular originalism can teach about us constitutional interpretation and democracy. While modern originalism began as a critique of judicial over-reaching into the political process, it has evolved into a justification for courts to overturn democratic measures. Paradoxically, then, the popular originalism of the Tea Party may achieve its only success, not through the democratic process, but in the federal courts.

A Good Coalition

A Good Coalition