Part 1 (1/2)
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.
THEDA SKOCPOL AND.
VANESSA WILLIAMSON.
Preface and Acknowledgments.
Surprise and curiosity prompted us to do research on the Tea Party.
Most scholars.h.i.+p on U.S. politics addresses established academic questions, pulls concepts and hypotheses off the library shelf, and chews over computerized datasets. But when the Tea Party burst on the scene starting in 2009, it challenged a.s.sumptions about how U.S. politics would play out following the big Democratic victories in the 2008 elections. No canned datasets would be of much use to track an emergent set of protests; and the Tea Party as a whole could not be plopped into available conceptualizations about third parties, social movements, or popular protests during sharp economic downturns. Perfect! Many in academia turn away if something doesn't fit. But we were fascinated and intensely curious about this puzzling outburst. We wanted to get off our duffs, figure it out-and tell others what we found.
In 2009 and early 2010, Theda was doing research on the Obama presidency and the politics of health reform when the surprise victory of Republican Scott Brown in the Ma.s.sachusetts special election put a spotlight on Tea Party activists and funders. In fact, the Tea Partiers were out there on the Ma.s.sachusetts roadways, dressed in costumes and waving their signs. Clearly, the Tea Party was becoming a force in electoral politics, countering if not upending the policy agendas of the Obama administration. But who was involved in the Tea Party? How did it work, this combination of gra.s.sroots activism with sudden infusions of hundreds of thousands of dollars into campaigns such as Scott Brown's for the U.S. Senate? Would the Tea Party impact on electoral politics and public policy-making prove minimal and ephemeral-or was something bigger afoot? The answers were not obvious at all-so the questions kept nagging.
Around the same time, Vanessa was interested in gra.s.sroots activism about health reform, and decided to launch a research project for one of her graduate seminars comparing citizen mobilization around health reform on the left and right. She intended to look at both the Tea Party and Organizing for America (OFA), the organization founded to follow up on activism in the Obama presidential campaign of 2008. But very quickly she discovered that OFA was essentially dormant at the gra.s.s roots, with phone banking and email alerts proceeding in ways typical for routine party politics. Tea Party activists, by contrast, were holding meetings and plotting dramatic protests to oppose health reform legislation pending in Was.h.i.+ngton DC. Vanessa had originally presumed the Tea Party to be little more than a media phenomenon, pushed by conservative big-money funders. Her a.s.sumptions upended, she decided to look more closely at the Tea Party activists. Working with a fellow graduate student, John Coggin, she contacted Ma.s.sachusetts Tea Partiers and arranged observations and interviews during the spring of 2010.
In the summer of 2010, Vanessa and John teamed up with Theda to write an article, ”The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” that was accepted by Perspectives on Politics to appear in March 2011. Research for that article raised additional questions and suggested further lines of investigation. With encouragement from David McBride at Oxford University Press, Theda and Vanessa hatched the plan for this book.
We set out to learn more about the Tea Party's impact on the Republican Party, its role in the 2010 elections, and its impact on national political debates. We recruited two undergraduates to help us a.s.semble a nationwide database on local Tea Parties, and we reached out to Tea Party activists in states beyond Ma.s.sachusetts to arrange to observe meetings and talk with people at the gra.s.sroots in other states. A huge amount of new research needed to get done in a few short months so that this book could appear by the end of 2011.
Many people have helped us develop arguments, complete the research, and produce the book. Of course, people at Oxford University Press have been central, and we thank David McBride, Alexandra Dauler, Amy Whitmer, and others at the Press for their wise advice and efficient professional efforts.
We are grateful to John Coggin for his contributions to the field research in Ma.s.sachusetts. His incisive observations and tireless good cheer made this book's earliest field research a great deal of fun. We benefited from discussions with Emily Ekins, who is working on a UCLA PhD dissertation about the Tea Party. Adam Bonica, visiting at Princeton's Center for American Politics during 201011 and now on the faculty at Stanford University, contributed the data and developed the measures for Figure 5.1 on ideological polarization in the House of Representatives. His willingness to help us doc.u.ment a key political transition is much appreciated. We also thank Harvard graduate student Rich Nielsen for introducing us to the Jon McNaughton painting, ”One Nation Under G.o.d.” For their work on the nationwide database of local Tea Parties, we are deeply grateful to Andrew Crutchfield and Will Eger, two Harvard undergraduates who did hundreds of hours of skillful sleuthing on the Internet during the spring semester of 2011. They not only coded data; they also alerted us to fascinating features of specific groups around the country.
Although this book was developed in a compressed time, we nevertheless took opportunities to make presentations to fellow scholars along the way, and picked the brains of colleagues willing to read papers and drafts. We are grateful for comments and insights offered by Dan Carpenter, Gregorz Ekiert, Claudine Gay, Peter Hall, Jennifer Hochschild, and Robert Putnam-all colleagues in the Harvard Department of Government. We also benefited greatly from lively discussions of our research at the seminar for the March 23, 2011 Alexis de Tocqueville Lecture sponsored by the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard, and at the April 28, 2011 meeting of the Boston Area Research Workshop on History, Inst.i.tutions, and Politics, where Mark Helbling and Alex Hertel-Fernandez provided very helpful comments. At the Tocqueville event, the official discussants Suzanne Mettler of Cornell, Larry Bartels of Princeton, and Mickey Edwards of the Aspen Inst.i.tute each offered sharp observations; and Jane Mans-bridge of the Harvard Kennedy School asked a thought-provoking question about democratic partic.i.p.ation. And in both group discussions, colleagues posed telling questions about data and interpretations. We have not answered all of their points, but their arguments made an impression and allowed us to improve our ma.n.u.script up until the last minute.
Perhaps our greatest debt is to the Tea Party partic.i.p.ants in Ma.s.sachusetts, Virginia, and Arizona who hosted our visits and were willing to meet with us for personal interviews and allow us to attend and observe local meetings. Conservatives all, with political views very different from our views in our personal lives as citizens, they nevertheless treated us with courtesy and kindness. The people we met answered our questions with obvious sincerity and willingness to let us better understand their points of view, their values, and their activities. No other source of information we tapped for this project was anywhere nearly as important-and it was a great pleasure to get out of Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, and visit actual Tea Party meetings and events in other very different parts of our marvelous country. It has been fascinating for us, and very important, to hear directly from Tea Party people about why they got involved, how, and to what ends. We got beyond stereotypes and preconceptions, to learn in person about people's hopes and fears for American democracy.
Christen Varley of the Greater Boston Tea Party was graciously accommodating in the early stages of this research, encouraging our attendance at meetings and sending out our email questionnaire to Ma.s.sachusetts activists. We are equally grateful to Peter Courtney Stephens of Gloucester, Virginia, and to others in his local group, the Peninsula Patriots, for sharing so much with us. We thank Carole Thorpe of Charlottesville, Virginia, for inviting Theda to one of her group's meetings and following up by phone and email to answer further questions about their approach to citizen organizing. In Arizona, Jim and Julie Wise and Sandi Bartlett are tireless organizers who found time to welcome Vanessa to their meetings.
We realize that our Tea Party hosts and contacts will not agree with everything we argue in this book. Still, we hope they will feel that we have treated them and others at the gra.s.s roots with the respect they deserve as active and committed fellow American citizens. We found each person we met admirable and likeable in many ways, and the warm hospitality they extended to us was encouraging beyond our expectations. The picture of the Tea Party we develop in this book is richer, more accurate, and more insightful because of the time they gave to us.
Finally, we thank our husbands, Bill Skocpol and Brad Johnson, and Vanessa's parents, Liz and Arthur Williamson. They all put up with our preoccupation with this project over many crucial months, and Vanessa's parents did some sharp-eyed editing, too.
Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson.
Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, August 2011.
The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.
Introduction.
”I Want My Country Back!”
On the evening of March 23, 2010, more than forty Tea Partiers filled to overflowing the back room of the Cape Cod Cafe, a diner on Main Street in the gritty town of Brockton, Ma.s.sachusetts. Their regularly scheduled monthly meeting fell only hours after President Barack Obama had signed into law the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act. The pa.s.sage of ”ObamaCare,” as Tea Partiers derisively call it, was an especially bitter pill in Ma.s.sachusetts. Just two months earlier, conservatives had mobilized for a surprise GOP victory in the special election to replace the late Senator Ted Kennedy. Republican victor Scott Brown had promised to provide the forty-first vote needed to block health reform in the U.S. Senate.
By all rights, Bay State Tea Partiers should have been demoralized that rainy evening. But their enthusiasm seemed undampened. A trickle of early arrivals quickly became a flood, and waitresses struggled to navigate the standing-room crowd.1 ObamaCare needed to be repealed, everyone agreed; yet the group also maintained a determined focus on local endeavors. Amidst talk of an upcoming Tax Day rally planned for the Boston Common, Tea Partiers displayed sophisticated political awareness, sharing tips on how to build a contact list for registered Republicans in each district and brainstorming about how to persuade Tea Party members to run for the legislature. President Obama may have scored a victory, but the faithful still felt energized and on the offensive for the rest of 2010.
As it turned out, Ma.s.sachusetts Tea Partiers had few additional electoral successes. But it was a different story across much of the rest of the country. In the November 2010 midterm elections, the dreams of many Tea Party activists were realized, as Republicans gained sixty-three seats in the U.S. House of Representatives-sending former Speaker Nancy Pelosi back to the minority leader's office and putting Republicans in charge. Republicans also gained six seats in the Senate and claimed six new governors.h.i.+ps and about 700 more seats in state legislatures. Brash Tea Party-aligned governors took charge in places such as Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Indeed, a great many of the victorious GOP candidates of 2010 openly identified with the Tea Party and enjoyed the support of activists and plutocratic funders a.s.sociated with the cause.
Tea Partiers did not bask for long in the 2010 afterglow. It was no time to relax and let Republicans in office fall into go-along-to-get-along routines of meeting Democrats halfway. Tea Partiers set their sights on stillgreater gains at the polls in 2011 and 2012, but would not stand down until then. They would not hear of compromises, and pushed GOP officials to act quickly and unremittingly: to reduce taxes, slash public spending, curb public sector unions, and clear away regulations on business. Policing immigrants, safeguarding Second Amendment gun rights, and promoting pro-life and traditional family values were also important goals for many at the gra.s.s roots.
Across America, gra.s.sroots Tea Partiers geared up in early 2011 to monitor and push local, state, and national officials. Characteristic of their determination was the discussion among about fifty members of the Jefferson Area Tea Party Patriots who, supper trays in hand, crowded into the back room of the Wood Grill Buffet on the north side of Charlottesville, Virginia, on February 24, 2011, to discuss future priorities.2 A lively give and take was skillfully orchestrated by Carole Thorpe, the energetic woman in her late forties elected to head the group. Did people want to endorse candidates for office? Most were wary. Endors.e.m.e.nts might divide their ranks and encourage candidates to sweet-talk Tea Partiers. Perhaps we can endorse when ”a great candidate comes along,” one man suggested, but we should be ”90% watchdogs.” His position got general a.s.sent, and Jefferson Area Patriots hatched plans to attend meetings of local government boards, track dozens of specific bills in the Virginia legislature and Congress, take over local GOP committees-and, last but not least, keep a close watch on Robert Hurt, the Virginia fifth district Republican recently elected to the House of Representatives. Even GOPers supported by Tea Partiers could ”disappoint,” explained Carole, who cited Scott Brown of Ma.s.sachusetts as a ”textbook case.” To avoid such betrayals, Tea Partiers must ”organize for the long-term to carry the movement into the halls of government.”
A similar effort was under way a few weeks later in a group near Phoenix, Arizona. On the evening of Wednesday, March 16, 2011, the Pink Slip Patriots of Tempe gathered in a meeting room at a local hotel.3 Pink Slip members are mostly women, though many have husbands in tow. Most are dressed in pink or sport pink accessories-and, in a clever double entendre, they proclaim themselves ever-ready to ”deliver pink slips” to politicians. That night, featured speakers came from the Second Amendment Sisters, a pro-gun group, and from the Arizona branch of Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a national free-market advocacy organization originally funded by the petrochemical billionaire Koch brothers.4 AFP speaker Tom Jenney told the a.s.sembled Tea Partiers about a new ”scorecard” for state legislators and gave folks a rundown on what each Phoenix-area legislator had been doing. Pink Slip members took copious notes, and readied themselves to continue the conservative fight at every level of government.
TEA PARTIERS ERUPT AND GET THEIR ACT TOGETHER.
The Tea Party's rise to prominence has been stunning. Celebrated by Fox News and urged on by national free-market advocacy groups, Tea Partiers like the ones we have just glimpsed in Ma.s.sachusetts, Virginia, and Arizona burst onto the national scene, starting in early 2009, just weeks into the Obama presidency. They mounted colorful protests, established local groups and regional networks, and delivered powerful electoral punches in the GOP primaries and the November 2010 general election. Subsequently, Tea Partiers have mobilized to keep Republican officeholders on the conservative straight and narrow.
The turnaround for U.S. conservatives has been remarkable because not so long ago the national tide seemed to be running against them. The elections of 2008 were widely said to portend doom for forces on the right. Not only did the November 2008 election mark the triumph of an African-American Democratic presidential candidate proposing an ambitious reform agenda; voters also sent formidable Democratic majorities to the House and Senate, and handed many statehouses to Democratic governors and legislators. Outgoing Republican President George W. Bush was extremely unpopular, and the failed presidential campaign of John McCain left the GOP without a clear leader.5 Before long, feuds broke out between the former campaign advisors to McCain and his rambunctious running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
Scrambling to regroup in late 2008 and early 2009, high-ranking Republicans were far from united behind their new party chair, Michael Steele.6 His tenure at the Republican National Committee would leave official party organs mired in controversy and debt. Masterminds like Karl Rove stepped to the fore to raise funds outside of the Republican National Committee. Yet who could be the public face of the GOP after Bush? Congressional minority leaders Mitch McConnell and John Boehner appeared regularly on television, of course, but no one would call either of them charismatic. Flamboyant media provocateurs like Rush Limbaugh seemed to be pointing the way for ultra-conservatives, but many moderate Republicans and independents recoiled from the vitriol of Limbaugh and his ilk. No wonder that in the months after the 2008 elections, pundits debated whether the Republican Party might be doomed to long-term decline. With rising cohorts of younger and minority voters energized on behalf of Barack Obama and the Democrats, the crestfallen GOP looked like a relic of the past, fast fading into irrelevance.7 For the opening months of his term, President Obama enjoyed wide public approval.8 Not everyone was on board, of course. Rank-and-file Republicans remained sullen and strongly opposed to Democratic initiatives; conservatives at the rightward edge of the Republican Party were angrier than ever, not just about Democrats in office, but also about what they took to be Bush-era betrayals of small-government principles. With Was.h.i.+ngton now dominated by Democrats, right-wingers despaired that things would just get worse. Not only had Obama promised to pursue long-standing liberal priorities such as health care reform; he came to office as the United States was careening into a deepening recession in the aftermath of the 2008 Wall Street meltdown. Many Americans resented the costly bailouts of banks and auto companies initiated by outgoing President Bush and carried forward by the incoming Obama Administration. And then came the hugely expensive economic stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act pa.s.sed by President Obama and Congressional Democrats in their bid to revive the fast-contracting U.S. economy. Republican hostility hardened, and in some circles ”Porkulus” became the mocking shorthand for Obama's recovery efforts.9 But Porkulus was hardly a catchy rallying cry. And how could any effective resistance crystallize with the Republican brand so besmirched and party organs in such disarray?
On February 19, 2009, an opportunity presented itself. From the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CNBC television reporter Rick Santelli burst into a tirade against the Obama Administration's nascent foreclosure relief plan: ”The government is rewarding bad behavior!” Santelli shouted. He invited America's ”capitalists” to a ”Chicago Tea Party” to protest measures to ”subsidize the losers' mortgages.”10 Video of the Santelli rant quickly scaled the media pyramid. The rant headlined the Drudge Report and was widely re-televised. Within twenty-four hours, it even provoked a public rebuke from White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, whose pushback only fueled the media fire. Anyone who hadn't caught Santelli's original outburst could hardly miss the constant replays and escalating responses.
Across the country, disgruntled conservatives perked up. The ”Tea Party” symbolism was a perfect rallying point since it brings to mind the original American colonial rebels opposing tyranny by tossing chests of tea into Boston Harbor.11 It signifies authentic patriotism, and has visceral meaning to people who feel that the United States as they have known it is slipping away. ”I want my country back!” one Ma.s.sachusetts man told us in 2010. ”We need to take our country back,” echoed a Virginia woman the following year. This plaintive call is perhaps the most characteristic and persistent theme in gra.s.sroots Tea Party activism. As Mark Lloyd of the Virginia Tea Party Patriots explains, people gravitate to the Tea Party when they anguish about ”losing the nation they love, the country they planned to leave to their children and grandchildren.”12 As a new president of diverse heritage promised to ”transform America,” perceived threats to the very nature of ”our country” spurred many people, and particularly older people, to get involved with the Tea Party.13 When Santelli issued the call for ”Tea Party” protests, web-savvy activists recognized this rhetorical gold. Operating at first through the online social-networking site Twitter, conservative bloggers and Republican campaign veterans took the opportunity offered by the Santelli rant to plan protests under the newly minted ”Tea Party” name.14 Right-wing radio jocks and bloggers started circulating information on how would-be Tea Partiers could hook up with local and regional organizers to ”take back” the country.
Initial Tea Party protests on February 27th drew small crowds in dozens of cities across the country. But after cable giant Fox News took up the rallying cry in March and early April, hundreds of thousands rallied on Tax Day 2009 to reiterate the anti-government message.15 This was the moment when many people we interviewed got involved for the first time. In the months that followed, rallies and demonstrations continued, featuring mostly ordinary-looking older people waving incendiary signs and dressed up like Revolutionary-era patriots. Conservative news outlets amplified the public attention gra.s.sroots Tea Partiers were receiving, and mainstream media outlets became transfixed by the spectacle.
Soon Tea Partiers across the country moved into local organizing. From spring to fall of 2009 and on into 2010, local activists operating without central direction created legions of local Tea Parties meeting regularly, usually once a month, but in some cases weekly. In this book, we pay careful attention to the creation and spread of what grew to be approximately 1000 local Tea Party groups. Their emergence was important, taking gra.s.sroots activism from the realm of occasional outbursts connected by Internet communications into sustained, face-to-face community organizing. Typical was the genesis of the local Tea Party in Gloucester and Mathews counties in Virginia. On May 10, 2009, the local newspaper published a letter from Jean Casanave, who lamented that Americans are ”losing our way” and declared that we must ”fight” for ”our Const.i.tution,” for ”small government, low taxes, [and] religious freedom ...”16 Tom Robinson, an area man with considerable organizing experience, tracked Jean down to express interest in joint action. Within weeks, Tom and Jean plus a couple of dozen others launched the Peninsula Patriots, whose members meet monthly to hear lectures and plan lobbying and protest activities.17 As local Tea Party cl.u.s.ters formed during 2009 and early 2010, national conservative advocacy organizations and right-wing media stars stepped in to mobilize Tea Party people for contentious August town hall events with their local Congressional representatives, and also planned a national rally in the fall. On September 12, 2009, between 60,000 and 70,000 Tea Party protesters marched on Was.h.i.+ngton DC. 18 Periodic rallies continued through 2010, and during that pivotal year both gra.s.sroots citizens and national advocacy organizations claiming the Tea Party banner exercised significant clout in dozens of electoral races-first in Republican primaries, and then in the dramatic general election contests of November 2010.
After the GOP scored major victories in the 2010 midterms, the Tea Party's national momentum s.h.i.+fted even further to the elites at the top. Several of the well-heeled free-market advocacy groups that had pushed the 2009 Tea Party rallies convened newly elected Republicans in January 2011 to tutor them on how to hold firm, without compromise, for lower taxes, huge spending cuts, and evisceration of government regulations. Dozens of GOP Representatives and Senators joined Tea Party caucuses to exert leverage in the 112th Congress, in which the ideological center of gravity jumped sharply rightward. National media outlets accelerated their recruitment of self-appointed Tea Party spokespersons because producers and columnists were more desperate than ever to have honchos on speed-dial, easy to reach on short notice. And of course the unelected leaders of ultra-free-market advocacy groups based in Was.h.i.+ngton DC were all too happy to speak in the name of gra.s.sroots Tea Partiers, even though most of the DC talking heads rarely attend local meetings or interact with actual gra.s.sroots partic.i.p.ants.
Indeed, one of the most important consequences of the widespread Tea Party agitations unleashed from the start of Obama's presidency was the populist boost given to professionally run and opulently funded right-wing advocacy organizations devoted to pus.h.i.+ng ultra-free-market policies. Along with Republican Party operatives, who had long relied for popular outreach on independent-minded and separately organized Christian conservatives, national free-market advocacy operations would, via the Tea Party, enjoy new ties to gra.s.sroots activists willing to prioritize fiscal anti-government themes. One political action committee poured the old wine of GOP consultants and big-money funders into a new bottle labeled Tea Party Express (TPE), which allowed them to seem closely aligned with gra.s.sroots citizens. 19 Other existing national organizations, such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, suddenly saw fresh opportunities to push long-standing ideas about reducing taxes on business and the rich, gutting government regulations, and privatizing Social Security and Medicare. 20 There is a certain irony in these newly formed ties. FreedomWorks, for example, is not any sort of insurgent force. As a multimillion-dollar ideological organization advocating ”Lower Taxes, Less Government, More Freedom,” FreedomWorks operates out of Was.h.i.+ngton DC and traces its roots back to Citizens for a Sound Economy (an organization founded in 1984 with major funding from arch-conservative petrochemical billionaires, the Koch brothers). FreedomWorks is currently led by d.i.c.k Armey, now in his seventies, who was the Republican Majority Leader from Texas in the 1990s, and has also worked as a lobbyist for many big-business interests. Hard to find more establishment Republican credentials than these. Yet suddenly, in 2009 and 2010, FreedomWorks helped to launch the Tea Party Patriots, an umbrella group that endeavors to orchestrate local and regional gra.s.s-roots Tea Partiers into a bigger-than-life force in the media and electoral contests. And the unelected d.i.c.k Armey, along with his billionaire-backed organization, emerged as a national Tea Party spokesperson and advisor to GOP officials-operating in the name of a gra.s.sroots populist movement. In a twinkling, long-standing and top-down became, supposedly, new and bottom-up.
MAKING SENSE OF THE TEA PARTY.