Part 8 (1/2)

Fox News makes viewers both more conservative and less informed. The introduction of Fox News into the cable roster has been shown to have coincided with an uptick in voting for Republican presidential candidates.8 The capacity to s.h.i.+ft U.S. voting patterns suggests that Fox News has a very real persuasive power, although obviously people predisposed to be conservatives choose the network they watch. But Fox weighs more heavily-and in a way more worrisome for U.S. democracy-by spreading misinformation and evoking racial and ethnic stereotypes. Watch a day of Fox, and you will have the impression that illegal immigrants, criminals, and badly behaving people of color are overrunning America. You will also get the impression that federal officials and liberals are constantly plotting to take away the rights and ruin the family finances of regular Americans-all to aggrandize themselves and take care of ”freeloading” supporters. You will hear dire warnings about the supposedly imminent collapse of the national economy and U.S. currency (and commercials will urge you to buy gold to ward off disaster in the looming economic collapse).

Fox News viewers are more likely than other news consumers to be misinformed on political issues. In 2010, Fox News watchers were fourteen points more likely to believe-mistakenly in most instances-that their own taxes had gone up, and thirty-one points more likely to believe that the health care reform law pa.s.sed under Obama would increase the deficit (when in fact it is projected to significantly reduce the long-term federal deficit).9 As mentioned above, we saw evidence of such policy misinformation in our interviews-in all cases speaking with Tea Partiers who reported regularly getting all or almost all of their news from Fox and other overtly conservative sources. In more than one instance, moreover, we tracked the falsehoods directly to Fox.10 At a Tea Party meeting in Ma.s.sachusetts, people discussed the possibility that the ”SmartGrid” (an infrastructure improvement to the electricity grid, a plan approximately as controversial as road repair) was in fact a plan that would give the government control over the thermostats in people's homes. We wondered how such an outlandish conspiracy theory could have been accepted by the intelligent and well-educated people at this meeting-until we checked the Fox News transcripts. Glenn Beck had indeed raised this weird possibility on his show.11 Tea Partiers' factually inaccurate beliefs about many policy matters are particularly striking given their relatively high levels of education and overall savvy about the political process. It is hard to escape the conclusion that deliberate propagation of falsehoods by Fox and other powerful media outlets is responsible for mis-arming otherwise adept Tea Partiers, feeding them inaccurate facts and falsely hyped fears. If so, the elite media impresarios who have encouraged and helped to shape Tea Party activism are more responsible than the gra.s.sroots members themselves for marrying activism to falsehoods and stoking destructive social stereotypes that pit older white Americans-the Fox viewers.h.i.+p-against younger, less privileged, often minority fellow citizens.

So far, we have disagreed with Harry Reid's declaration in January 2011 that the Tea Party will soon disappear. Whatever happens with the economy, we expect Tea Party forces to remain in the field for quite some time, even if the Tea Party label loses its charm. Many gra.s.sroots Tea Partiers will continue to attend meetings, and those who rarely attend will still respond to emails urging them to attend rallies or turn out at the polls to vote for conservative candidates. The right-wing media, too, will keep doing its thing- put out whatever Roger Ailes of Fox News and other key decision-makers think will favor the electoral fortunes of the GOP and advance conservative policy causes.

Even more certain to stay active are the national advocacy organizations, whose followings in email lists and on the Web have greatly swelled in the Tea Party period. Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks now have many more gra.s.sroots ties, and much greater reach into many states and localities, than they did before 2009. They will continue to stoke free-market preferences and engage gra.s.sroots citizens to push favored legislation-at the state level as well as nationally-and will do so with greater clout in and around the GOP than they had before the Tea Party emerged. The roving billionaires who fund these advocacy organizations are not going to let up either. They remain alarmed at Obama's presidency. In an era of steadily rising wealth and incomes at the very top, they have nearly unlimited wherewithal to influence public debates and elections-even as the Supreme Court has cleared away legal obstacles to the sway of fat cat money in politics.

Nevertheless, even if organization, resources, and strong networks keep its various parts active for some time to come, it is hard to see the Tea Party as such hanging together for many more years. The ”Tea Party” label has become more ho-hum. Elites that find the label less than helpful for electoral or policy struggles will downplay it during the general presidential contest in 2012. The greater limitation for the Tea Party is the age of its partic.i.p.ants. Gra.s.sroots Tea Partiers are mostly older people whose activism will of necessity wane in coming years. GOP supporters and Fox viewers, too, are disproportionately from the ranks of older white Americans. Both the Tea Party gra.s.s roots, and key inst.i.tutions surrounding it, must find ways to appeal to younger cohorts of Americans, who are more racially diverse, or their decline is a.s.sured.

For the coming months and years, however, Tea Party activism and its elite supporters will sharpen social tensions in U.S. politics. As Brookings demographer William Frey and journalist Ronald Brownstein have pointed out, U.S. politics finds itself in a period of cultural mismatch between generational groups.12 Older Americans are disproportionately white and often wary about paying taxes for programs to help younger cohorts, who are increasingly racially and ethnically diverse. The oldsters value Social Security and Medicare, to be sure, but feel they have already paid for them through lifetimes of work and tax contributions. When the federal budget is strained, older Tea Partiers want to make sure that cuts. .h.i.t programs other than theirs.

The ”grey” versus ”brown” divide-a tension that superimposes divisions by age and experience, income, and ethnicity-is increasingly apparent for the United States as a whole. The mismatch is especially acute in certain states, including major Republican strongholds in the West and South, where recent immigrants coexist with older whites who were reared and began their working lives in an era of restricted immigration.13 Budget battles can be more naked in the states, too, because potential tax increases to pay for public education and Medicaid would ask older, disproportionately white Americans to contribute more to sustain programs benefiting younger, more racially diverse residents. As we have seen, the Tea Party is very much a reaction by older white conservative Americans who resent and fear what they think might be the political accompaniments of a nation transformed by rising younger cohorts with different experiences, values, and social characteristics. Barack Obama's presidency, coming at a moment of national economic crisis that strained public budgets, only crystallized and heightened Tea Party fears on both the social and fiscal fronts.

If Obama is reelected in 2012, the generationally grounded fears will remain, and Republicans supported by Tea Partiers will continue to push against Democratic priorities. If Obama is defeated, the Republican president who replaces him will come under strong pressure to accept radical cuts in public programs that benefit younger Americans, as well as tax cuts for the wealthy that will necessitate restructurings of Medicare and Social Security for future cohorts of retirees. Elderly Tea Partiers themselves may be held whole by Republicans fearful of angering their most aroused followers, but the children and grandchildren of Tea Partiers will suffer from drastic GOP cutbacks along with all other younger Americans. The big winners will be the super-rich fat cats who have manipulated Tea Party activism with such glee.

”Tea Party” as a fas.h.i.+onable label is losing its l.u.s.ter, as the media and many conservative elites move on. But the outlooks, values, and heightened engagement of many older American citizens who gravitated toward this protest effort starting in 2009 will remain. Tea Party fears and outlooks are central to American politics in a period of culturally polarized generational change. For better and worse, Tea Partystyle politics is likely to remain, for some time to come, a pivotal part of ongoing, fierce disputes about what U.S. government should do and not do. Tea Party activism is a generationally bounded variant of long-standing forms of conservative populism in America.

The Tea Party in all of its manifestations has pulled the Republican Party sharply toward the right, and s.h.i.+fted U.S. public debates at a critical juncture, blunting the reformist force of Barack Obama's historic presidency. The Tea Party's place in history, side by side with Obama, is a.s.sured. Even so, the longer-term results and after-effects of Tea Party mobilizations remain to be seen. Will elite and gra.s.sroots Tea Party efforts prove to have permanently s.h.i.+fted the center of gravity of U.S. politics? Will they have a long-term effect on the capacity of American government to respond to a changing society and ensure opportunity and security for citizens of all ages and backgrounds? These crucial questions remain as yet unanswered. Only time and future politics will tell.

Notes.

INTRODUCTION.

1. Vanessa Williamson attended this meeting and took notes.

2. Theda Skocpol attended this meeting and took notes.

3. Vanessa Williamson attended this meeting and took notes.

4. More details and references appear in Chapter 3.

5. Johanna Neuman, ”As Voters Go to the Polls to Pick His Successor, George W. Bush Hits New Low in Approval Rating,” Los Angeles Times, November 4, 2008.

6. Allen Barr and Mike Allen, ”Steele Trap? GOP Fears Grow,” Politico, March 4, 2009.

7. See, for examples, the stories about a possible Democratic-led ”New New Deal” in the November 24, 2010 issue of Time, which featured a memorable cover showing Barack Obama in an FDR pose, riding in an open convertible with a cigarette dangling from his grinning mouth.

8. Jeffrey M. Jones, ”In First 100 Days, Obama Seen as Making a Bipartisan Effort,” Gallup, April 24, 2009.

9. The first national media figure to bring significant attention to the Porkulus protests was Mich.e.l.le Malkin. See her blog post from February 16, 2009: mich.e.l.lemalkin.com/2009/02/16/from-the-boston-tea-party-to-your-neighborhood-pork-protest/. In April, Malkin offered a snarky ”cheat sheet” for reporters struggling to catch up with the Tea Party story: mich.e.l.lemalkin.com/2009/04/15/a-tax-day-tea-party-cheat-sheet-how-it-all-started/. (Both blog posts are available as of May 26, 2011.) In explaining the Tea Party's origins, Malkin featured the story of Keli Carender, who held an anti-Porkulus protest in Seattle in early February 2009. Malkin's framing of the Tea Party's origins was apparently quite successful; Carender later appeared prominently in New York Times reporter Kate Zernike's book. Kate Zernike, Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America (New York: Times Books, Henry Holt, 2010), pp. 1319. Like Malkin, Zernike credits Carender with organizing the original Tea Party protest. This is in tune with Zernike's overall emphasis on young libertarians as central to Tea Party activities. We find the origins story unconvincing, however, because there is no reason to believe that ”Tea Party” activities would have spread like wildfire without persistent promotion from conservative media-and without a catchy name. ”Anti-Porkulus” was not an electrifying rallying cry.

10. Video of the Santelli ”rant” can be found at CNBC's website, available at video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=1039849853 as of May 21, 2011.

11. The historical facts of the Boston Tea Party are not actually entirely in keeping with the common perception of the Tea Party as an anti-tax protest. For more information, see Joseph J. Thorndike, ”A Tax Revolt or Revolting Taxes?” Tax History Project, December 14, 2005. Available at ments-which allowed activists from a variety of different conservative networks to connect and combine forces.

15. Estimating the total crowd size of many protests held across the country is a difficult task. Data a.n.a.lyst and New York Times contributor Nate Silver came up with an estimate of ”300,000+” on April 16th, 2009. You can see his calculations and data sources at /2009/04/tea-party-nonpartisan-attendance.html as of May 26, 2011.

16. Jean Casanave, ”Losing Our Way,” letter to the editor, Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal, May 10, 2009.

17. See ”Government Restraint Group Forms in Mathews,” Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal, June 19, 2009. The article has a picture of the founding members of the local Tea Party meeting around picnic tables, and ends with information on how others could get more information at the Peninsula Patriots website on Meetup.com. Another picture of larger numbers of Peninsula Patriots and others from the area preparing, signs in hand, to board two buses to travel to the national Tea Party protest march on September 12, 2009, in Was.h.i.+ngton DC, appears in the Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal, Thursday, September 17, 2009, p. 22A.

18. The figure comes from ABC News, citing the Was.h.i.+ngton DC fire department. Russell Goldman, ”Tea Party Protesters March on Was.h.i.+ngton,” ABC News, September 12, 2009. Some conservative activists, including Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks, dramatically inflated this number. For an a.n.a.lysis, see Nate Silver, ”Size Matters; So Do Lies,” available at /2009/09/size-matters-so-do-lies.html as of May 26, 2011.

19. More details and references on Tea Party Express are included in Chapter 3.

20. More details and references appear in Chapter 3. Journalist Kate Zernike does a good job of telling about the efforts of FreedomWorks to stoke the Tea Party. See her Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America (New York: Times Books, Henry Holt, 2010), chapter 2.

21. Lloyd, ”Why the Left Will Never Understand the Tea Party,” p. 7.

22. Taki Oldham, ”The Billionaires' Tea Party: How Corporate America is Faking a Gra.s.sroots Revolution,” DVD doc.u.mentary distributed by the Media Education Foundation, Northhampton, Ma.s.sachusetts, starting in March 2011.

23. This disconnection is doc.u.mented and a.n.a.lyzed in Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Members.h.i.+p to Management in American Civic Life (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004).

24. Andrew Crutchfield and Will Eger worked for many hours to visit and catalogue the websites of every Tea Party group in the country.

25. The results are reported in Amy Gardner, ”Gauging the Scope of the Tea Party Movement in America,” Was.h.i.+ngton Post, October 24, 2010. We have had the chance to compare our findings to the dataset compiled by the Post team.

CHAPTER 1.

1. As we explained in the Introduction, pseudonyms will be italicized the first time we use them in each chapter.

2. A more detailed discussion of survey research appears in Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin, ”The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” Perspectives on Politics 9 (1) (March 2011). We also look at polling in relation to media storylines in Chapter 4 of this book.

3. Nate Silver includes a figure with trends in favorable and unfavorable views in ”Poll Shows More Americans Have Unfavorable Views of Tea Party,” FiveThirtyEight, New York Times, March 30, 2011.