Part 3 (1/2)

Overly Ent.i.tled Young People.

In addition to illegal immigrants, young people feature prominently in the stories Tea Partiers tell about undeserving freeloaders, and anecdotes about people in their own families sometimes stand in for larger generational tensions. The U.S. economy is changing in ways that make it harder for young adults to find jobs, form families, earn college degrees, and build careers and acc.u.mulate property according to the same formulas that once worked well for those in the older generations from which most Tea Partiers come. Younger cohorts of Americans are also more racially and ethnically diverse, and espouse different beliefs about families and s.e.xual conduct. Older people have always been likely to find fault with ”the kids.” In interviews, the faults Tea Party partic.i.p.ants ascribed to the younger generation included everything from foul language to poor penmans.h.i.+p. But the general tendency of older generations to nostalgia arguably takes on a harder edge when times are tough and economic, cultural, and demographic changes are happening very quickly.

After talking about her generation's commitment to hard work, Bonnie Sims concludes ”I don't think those values are being taught anymore.” John Patterson echoed the same theme, complaining that younger people have ”lost the value of work.” He told the story of a 29-year-old woman who expected to have a t.i.tle at work just because she has a Master's degree; she did not realize that you have to ”earn respect.” His wife, a teacher, laments that all the kids now ”expect to be praised” no matter how they perform.

Many Tea Partiers connected worries about the deteriorating behavior of young people directly to fears about wasteful ent.i.tlement spending. ”A lot of [young] people ... they just feel like they are ent.i.tled,” Betsy Stone declares, as she tells the story of a nephew who had ”been on welfare his whole life.” The nephew now has children of his own, yet by her account was not even reliably taking them for their medical check-ups, even though the children are eligible for free care, presumably through Medicaid. ”You give these people benefits,” Betsy says scornfully, ”and they don't even take advantage of it” in appropriate ways. Rather than learning to contribute to society, young people are being taught that they deserve support from the government, Michael says. ”My grandson, he's fourteen and he asked me: 'Why should I work, why can't I just get free money?'” Michael was very concerned that his grandson was typical of the younger generation.

Young adults in college are not exempt from Tea Party suspicion. Montana GOP Congressman Denny Rehberg, a Tea Party favorite, was no doubt speaking to the choir when he recently denounced aid to college students as ”the welfare of the 21st century.” Tellingly, Rehberg grouped federal Pell Grants that help low-income students cover part of their college tuition with every other public a.s.sistance program imaginable. And the Tea Party GOPer claimed that recipients are not really trying to complete college anyway. ”You can go to school, collect your Pell Grants, get food stamps, low-income energy a.s.sistance, section 8 housing, and all of a sudden we find ourselves subsidizing people that don't have to graduate from college,” explained Rehberg as he outlined plans to slash college aid.51 A similar point was made in an April 2010 blog posting on the Greater Boston Tea Party website, claiming that college kids are taking advantage of the Food Stamp program. ”Call me crazy,” the blogger opined, ”but when I needed money for college, I got a job.” Of course, getting a job may have occurred to some of the students ridiculed, but at the time the blog post was written there were five job seekers for every job opening available, and unemployment among those 20 to 24 stood at 17%.52 The limited economic opportunities available to young people were not something Tea Party members mentioned to us. Nor did they express any concern about declining college attendance and completion for lower-income and lower-middle-income young people-a decline that has caused the United States to fall behind in the global higher education sweepstakes. Instead, Tea Partiers condemned the behavior of the young in moral terms.

Societal Decline and Fear of the Future.

The Tea Party emphasis on the importance of work and earned benefits certainly meshes with widely held American values. Hard work is, after all, a cornerstone of the American Dream. Americans have long linked a person's deservingness to the effort he or she puts forth, and most tend to perceive poverty as a result of laziness rather than misfortune. But the current Tea Party distinction between freeloaders and hardworking taxpayers has ethnic, nativist, and generational undertones that distinguish it from a simple reiteration of the long-standing American creed. In Tea Party eyes, undeserving people are not simply defined by a tenuous attachment to the labor market or receipt of unearned government handouts. For Tea Partiers, deservingness is a cultural category, closely tied to certain racially and ethnically tinged a.s.sumptions about American society in the early twenty-first century. Tea Party resistance to giving more to categories of people deemed undeserving is more than just an argument about taxes and spending. It is a heartfelt cry about where they fear ”their country” may be headed.

Tea Party worries about racial and ethnic minorities and overly ent.i.tled young people signal a larger fear about generational social change in America. To outside observers, Tea Partiers often seem disproportionately angry. Why are they insisting on taking back their country and defending their ”rights” from tyranny when all that is happening is a p.u.s.s.yfooting health care reform, more conservative than the version supported by Richard Nixon in the 1970s? What is so ”fascist” or ”socialist” about an economic stimulus bill, one-third of which was tax cuts? One often hears such musings in liberal circles, but it is a mistake to a.s.sess emotional responses as if they were policy statements. When Tea Partiers talk about ”their rights,” they are a.s.serting a desire to live again in the country they think they recall from childhood or young adulthood. Their anger evinces a determination to restore that remembered America, and pa.s.s it on to their children and grandchildren (whether or not they are asking for this gift).

Many Tea Partiers talked about feeling as though they had been asleep, only to wake up recently in a new, strange country. Bonnie Sims was particularly p.r.o.ne to such comments. ”It's so sad the way the country is now,” she told us. ”My children disagree with me, but they will never know the country I grew up in.” Sandra repeats this concern nearly word for word: ”My children will not see the life that I have lived.” By understanding the societal threat Tea Partiers perceive, their sense that America is in decline and must be saved, we can better understand why they are so upset. As Stanley told us, ”I've had such a good life, and I just want other Americans to have that life.”

One might imagine the changes that worry Tea Partiers to be primarily economic. In the last thirty years, economic opportunity has declined. Instead of economic prosperity benefiting all Americans, it increasingly benefits only the very few at the top.53 But Tea Party members rarely stressed economic concerns to us-and they never blamed business or the super-rich for America's troubles.54 The nightmare of societal decline is usually painted in cultural hues, and the villains in the picture are freeloading social groups, liberal politicians, bossy professionals, big government, and the mainstream media.

Virginians worried that their children do not grow up fis.h.i.+ng in local streams or know what it was like to feel safe walking home late at night. Arizona Tea Partiers talked about swings being taken out of playgrounds to meet persnickety safety standards, and schoolchildren suspended for carrying pocketknives. Forces conspire, Stella Fisher says, ”to the breaking down of conservative society.” Kids today believe ”it's not so important that you get married, even if you have a baby with somebody.... It's just not good for America.” Such generalized concerns about societal decline were the ones we heard most frequently-far more often than we heard any explicit comments about ethnic or racial minorities.

Such fears are, of course, wrapped up with anxieties about immigration and America's changing links to the larger world beyond the nation's borders. Telling us about her revelation that America had somehow changed, Bonnie plaintively asks, ”What's happening in this country? What's happening with immigration?” Tea Partiers see immigrants and young people as harbingers of cultural decline. Even Stanley, whose views on immigration were among the most moderate of any Tea Partier we interviewed, felt that immigration is a ”threat to our culture.” Though rates of immigration have been high in recent decades, sociologists looking at the typical measures of immigrant incorporation-educational attainment, language a.s.similation, and intermarriage-find that the most recent generations of immigrants from Asia and Latin America are ”being successfully incorporated into American society,” just as European immigrants were in the past.55 But this is not believable to many Tea Partiers, who perceive that today's immigrants are unwilling to integrate as previous generations did.

For many reasons, then, Tea Party people peer out at a fast-changing society, and they worry. The public image of the Tea Party is one of fierce anger, but in person and in local meetings fear was the more typical emotion. A meeting in Tempe featured a speaker who recounted the kind of stories that lead sensationalistic local TV news programs, emphasizing nightmarish scenarios of home invasion and rape. This is why, she said, all women should always carry concealed firearms. The speaker was herself carrying a concealed weapon during her talk, she informed us, patting a squarish bulge at her right hip. At a meeting in Virginia, a speaker discussed the near-term probability that the federal government would impose martial law and force citizens into camps that would be called ”five-minute zones.”56 In the minds of Tea Party activists, the American present-and especially the looming U.S. future-is often more than worrisome; it can be downright terrifying.

Obviously, Tea Partiers speak constantly about an out-of-control federal budget deficit and the coming doom they think it portends for the United States. There is real-world basis for worrying about the U.S. fiscal situation, of course, though the United States is in reasonably good fiscal shape, as the steady health of the bond market attests.57 Tea Party worries about national debt therefore refer to real problems, but magnify them out of all proportion. Why? As we have learned, Tea Partiers are concerned that U.S. deficits might be addressed in part with tax hikes, which they imagine would require people like them to help pay for social spending that benefits undeserving freeloaders. But the fiscal question in the Tea Party imagination is more than just a redistributive matter, more than just a set of worries about taxes and social spending. In the highly emotional telling of many Tea Partiers, the ballooning federal deficit merges into a general sense of a coming collapse for America. A Virginia Tea Party partic.i.p.ant explained to us at length that, as the U.S. fiscal crisis unfolds, grocery stores will be shuttered and citizens who are not armed will risk falling prey to roving gangs. ”The United States has squandered its wealth created over the last 400 years and is now destroying wealth,” explains another Virginian, James Rand, who believes that politicians may decide to address the ”debt load overhanging us” by seizing the 401k savings accounts of all private citizens. It might be best for the country to go into default, he muses, to wake everyone up to the severity of our collapse.

Fears about imminent American collapse fuel fear-driven urges to make extreme preparations. Living in a pristine retirement community in exurban Phoenix, Stanley and Gloria Ames outlined their plans for the coming Armageddon. ”The forecast is we could have a crash, and the dollar could be worthless,” Stanley explains. ”So you barter in silver and gold, by weight. All of these things are scary out there. We didn't buy gold, we went into silver bullion.... We are concerned to the point that we are armed. We have a safe full of ammunition. We have food that has a date that will carry us out for almost a year and half. It's a frightening time.” For this charming and friendly older couple, Tea Party politics inextricably mixes relatively routine political engagement with extraordinary efforts to save America and themselves in a looming end-of-the-world scenario.

BARACK OBAMA AT THE VORTEX.

Nowhere are Tea Party fears more potently symbolized than in the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. The policies and person of the forty-fourth President were the subject of immense suspicion at every Tea Party event or interview we attended. It is no coincidence that Tea Party activism began within weeks of President Obama's inauguration. Several interviewees dated their concerns about the country and national politics to Obama's election or the 2008 campaign. Others told us, quite credibly, about long-simmering worries, and insisted that the Tea Party is not just or only about opposition to Obama. True enough, but these people had a hard time pinning down a different catalyst for their sudden political mobilization in early 2009.

The freewheeling anti-Obama paranoia expressed at Tea Party rallies has been widely reported. Various articles have quoted Tea Party members saying that Obama is a secret Muslim, a foreigner, a Socialist, a Communist, a n.a.z.i-or maybe all of the above! Obama the un-American is the overarching theme. Stoked by demagogues like Donald Trump, the claim about President Obama's otherness and illegitimacy reached its apogee in ”Birtherist” claims that Obama was not really born in the United States. In our interviews, the tone was of course more measured than in public rallies, but we heard variations of all the possible epithets for Obama. Even in face-to-face interviews, Tea Party rhetoric veers into the territory described by historian Richard Hofstadter as ”the paranoid style in American politics”-which should perhaps not come as a surprise, as Hofstadter was talking about John Birch Society members and Goldwater supporters, whose remnants have joined the Tea Party today.58 More typical in our encounters than the occasional reference to Communism or long-form birth certificates were frank admissions from Tea Party members that Obama is, to them, incomprehensible. ”I just can't relate to him,” said one man at a Tea Party meeting in Boston. Uncertainty veers into suspicion. ”I think that he's actually not what he seems to be,” said a Virginia Tea Partier. ”He's disingenuous. I have delved into it deeply,” claimed another. Several Tea Party members we spoke to described Obama simply as ”scary.” For Tea Partiers, President Obama is somehow outside or beyond comprehensible categories, and he has used confusion about who he is and what he stands for to his own nefarious political advantage.

A Perfectly Fearful Storm.

In recent decades, Democratic presidents who have come to office with Democratic Congressional majorities quickly become the objects of all-out attacks from conservatives. Race is not the main factor in drives to delegitimize Democrats, even when it offers fuel for fear and stereotypes. Attacks on Bill and Hillary Clinton from 1992 to 2000 invoked personal misbehavior, business shenanigans, and all sorts of alleged moral horrors-to the point of suggesting that the Clintons murdered their friend Vince Foster (who committed suicide). A decade and a half later, ultra-right-wing attacks on Barack Obama do not usually imply anything wrong with his family values or s.e.xual conduct. Instead, they use the material at hand: his race, his foreign father, and his background as a college professor and community organizer. Elites in the right-wing media and the netherworlds of ultra-conservative politics consciously play on whatever resentments or fears might be out there to undercut the Democratic president of the day.

The son of an African father and a white American mother, Obama is perceived by many Tea Partiers as a foreigner, an invader pretending to be an American, a fifth columnist. Obama's past as a community organizer is taken as evidence that he works on behalf of the undeserving poor and wishes to mobilize government resources on their behalf. His academic achievements and social ties put him in league with the country's intellectual elite, whose disdain feels very real to many Americans, and whose cosmopolitan leanings seem unpatriotic. For so many reasons, therefore, Obama's social ambiguities as well as his political stands make him easy to portray as a threat-especially in the eyes of very conservative Americans.

Asked about the President, Tea Party members connect Obama and his administration and political allies directly with those deemed undeserving-not just with African-Americans but also with illegal immigrants and criminals. Michael, the retired police officer, worries that ”the people I was looking for back when I was a cop are now running the government.” James Rand angrily a.s.serts that ”criminals” are in charge of the U.S. government.59 It is widely believed, moreover, that President Obama intends to grant amnesty to all illegal immigrants in order to develop a new bloc of electoral support. An extra 10 million votes from newly legalized citizens would give the Obama Administration the electoral cus.h.i.+on needed to continue to ignore the interests of real Americans, several Tea Party members told us. Similar sentiments are invoked in group discussions, too. At the April 2011 meeting of the York Const.i.tutionalists a.s.sembled in North Berwick, Maine, both the outside speaker and members of the group repeatedly characterized the current Democratic Party as an alliance of unionized public officials and people on welfare, and they speculated that the Obama Administration would soon use immigration reform to add current undoc.u.mented immigrants to the Democratic voter rolls.

With his Ivy League degrees, President Obama is also perceived as a member of a haughty, overbearing, and dubiously patriotic higher-educated elite. While the business community gets a free pa.s.s, Tea Party activists are very concerned about liberal cultural elites, who they believe scorn most Americans. As Sandra put it, ”there is an elite cla.s.s that loathes the middle cla.s.s” and looks down on ”stupid rednecks.” Tea Partiers often use higher education as shorthand for the difference between the cultural elite and average Americans. In Boston, one activist dismissed people ”with a bunch of letters after their name,” while a Virginia activist commented that she had ”lost all respect” for higher education. Discussing who might run for public offices, Charlottesville Tea Partiers stressed that expert qualifications were not only unnecessary, but might be harmful. Firm convictions and a determination not to compromise were all people needed to serve in local, state, or national government, these Tea Partiers agreed.

Although Tea Partiers dismiss intellectuals with harsh rhetoric, they are themselves usually well educated. Most of those we spoke to had a college education, and many had advanced degrees. One Tea Partier objected to a brief written survey we had provided, saying it did not allow her to list her full academic credentials. As with those deemed undeserving, the category of the ”intellectual elite” is more politically symbolic than based on clear-cut empirical facts. In Tea Partyland, ideology and politics separate objectionable educated elites from other highly educated people.

Because of their supposed disdain for average Americans, liberal elites are imagined to be plotting new forms of regulation and control. They think ”they know what's best for us,” one Virginia Tea Partier explained. Regulations supported by liberals are perceived as a foreign moral code, an imposition of un-American ideals, although the exact impositions may range from ”political correctness,” as Timothy Manor put it, to health and safety rules. For some Tea Partiers, Mich.e.l.le Obama's anti-obesity campaign is yet another elite judgment on the lifestyles of average Americans. Another source of acute concern is environmentalism. Tea Party members routinely dismiss climate change as nothing more than a hoax perpetrated by scientists and bureaucrats, as a prelude to extending the reach of their power.

To the extent the policy prescriptions advanced by educated elites appear to benefit the undeserving, those elites are seen by Tea Partiers as allied with freeloading groups to steal taxpayer money and subvert the proper role of U.S. government. The housing bubble, for instance, was explained in these terms. Through his purported ties to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and to the now-defunct community organizing group ACORN, Obama is charged with joining other Democrats to promote an unsustainable boom in homeowners.h.i.+p among the undeserving. James Morrow, for instance, a.s.sured us that Obama had received ”the most money from Fannie and Freddie” of any senator except Senator Chris Dodd. For Tea Partiers, Obama is the epitome of the liberal elitist working in the interest of the undeserving.

Old Themes for a New Time.

As we have seen throughout this chapter, most aspects of Tea Party thinking are not new; they add up to the most recent incarnation of American conservative populism. In talking to Tea Party activists, you hear echoes of Reagan-era stories of ”welfare queens” and Nixonian rhetoric about the ”silent majority,” the true Americans for whom Tea Partiers think they speak. Like earlier rounds of right-wing activism, the activism of Tea Partiers is driven by societal oppositions more than by detailed policy logic. Tea Partiers at the gra.s.s roots are content with the parts of U.S. social provision they see as benefiting worthy people, even as they are determined to slash government a.s.sistance for those they see as freeloaders ”mooching” at taxpayer expense. Tea Partiers want no government regulation of their own businesses, homes, and property, even as they are eager for government to crack down hard on immigrants and others they see as political or cultural opponents.

To say that Tea Partiers are part of a long-standing conservative tradition is to agree with many of our interviewees, who celebrate previous generations of conservatives as their political forebears. One Virginia Tea Partier told us that the ”problems” the United States is now facing ”go back to Roosevelt” and the New Deal. Looking back even further, many who watched Fox News anchor Glenn Beck echoed his criticisms of Woodrow Wilson.60 Indeed, the Minnesota Tea Partiers affiliated with the large and vibrant Southwest Metro Tea Party see themselves as part of a long tradition battling American liberalism. As their ”Principles” explain, the Tea Party's goal is to reverse the work of ”Woodrow Wilson's Progressivism, FDR's New Deal, LBJ's Great Society, and President Obama's 'fundamentally transforming America.”61 The war is a long one and today's Tea Partiers are the latest soldiers.

Nor are connections across time merely intellectual and political. One of the few college-age Tea Partiers we met, a young man in Boston, wore a T-s.h.i.+rt emblazoned with Goldwater's b.u.mper sticker slogan ”AuH2O.” It was history for him, but of course many of his fellow Tea Partiers remember that campaign firsthand. An extraordinary number dated their first political experiences to the 1964 Goldwater campaign. Mandy had served as a page at the Republican convention that nominated Goldwater; Ben described himself as an ”old Barry Goldwater guy”; and a protestor in Boston said he had not felt this ”excited” about politics ”since Goldwater.” Despite endless commentary comparing it to a.s.sorted movements ranging from Civil Rights to the Ross Perot campaign, the Tea Party is fundamentally the latest iteration of long-standing, hard-core conservatism in American politics.

Yet the ideas and pa.s.sions of today's Tea Partiers are also born of this time and place; they are very much responses to the startling social changes and roiling politics that mark the United States in the early twenty-first century. Obama's election to the nation's highest office galvanized conservatives desperate to express their opposition to everything they believe he stands for-a country changing too quickly in directions they dread. The coincidence of Obama's election and broader Democratic gains with a scary financial meltdown heightened the threat for conservatives who turned to the Tea Party. But we cannot understand the ferocity of their reaction or the obsessive focus on Obama as an alien force without situating the politics of the economic crisis in the context of the larger societal s.h.i.+fts.

Just as liberals and many younger people perceive President Obama as a symbol of the breaking of boundaries, a harbinger of new possibilities in U.S. society and politics, so, too, do Tea Party partic.i.p.ants perceive that new things are afoot-changing societal norms, greater ethnic diversity, international cosmopolitanism, and new redistributions aimed at younger citizens. What signifies hope for some Americans, triggers anger and fear in others. As James Morrow put it, ”Barack Obama came right out and said he wanted to transform America.” For the conservative-minded, mostly older people who have joined the Tea Party, this promise was-and is-a frightful threat.

Mobilized Gra.s.sroots and Roving Billionaires.

The Panoply of Tea Party Organizations.

When CNBC commentator Rick Santelli vented his anger on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in February 2009, he launched a spectacular political brand for the next election cycle and beyond. The soon-boiling Tea Party commingled all-out opposition to the Obama presidency, cover for business at a time when Wall Street seemed culpable, and old-fas.h.i.+oned patriotic fervor in a populace reeling amidst an economic tailspin. From coast to coast, from local to national arenas, activists wasted no time turning a colorful tirade into widespread mobilizations.

Local activism in the Tea Party depends on the energy and commitment of conservative citizens willing to organize projects, attend meetings, travel to lobby days and rallies, study and discuss legislation, and learn government procedures and GOP rules. But local efforts are not all that is going on because generously funded political action committees and advocacy groups also take part in Tea Party efforts. A few of these national organizations were newly founded with the Tea Party label, but most simply added the moniker on top of long-standing organized efforts, or linked their offerings to Tea Party websites.