Over on Facebook I got drawn
into a discussion/argument/throwdown between two folks I highly respect. The subject was, nominally, Tea Party racism,
and the essentials of the conversation is that one of the combatants called Tea
Party members racist based on an image of a Confederate Flag from a protest
last week at the White House. The other
combatant, who identifies with the Tea Party cause (though I don’t know if he’s
actually a member of any Tea Party group), took it personally and the “usual”
fireworks ensued.
I waded in with a well
reasoned mini-essay attempting to put the severe reaction of the first
combatant in perspective for the second, hoping since I know these men to
generally be men of integrity, that we might actually come to an understanding. Combatant number 2 challenged me to come up
with some facts – not blog posts, not retread photos, but facts – to buttress
my claims. So being a scientist for whom
the call to display facts in an emotional argument is like sweet nectar to a
bee, I jumped in.
But before I get to the
research – which I think is important – I have to acknowledge that this
argument, like so much in the current political sphere – is not about
demonstrable facts. Its about fears –
fear of economic loss, fear of loss of social standing or place, fear of
unknown or “other” cultures or socio-economic groups. And its about an America that is changing so
fast that in my life time we’ve gone from one or two rotary phones attached to
the wall in each house to handheld “phones” that have more computing power then the
Lunar Lander. That change, along with
demographic shifts in America that will render European Whites a minority in my
life time (2050) is something that society has not really equipped its members to
handle, nor have we acknowledged (particularly on the Left) the need for that
equipping. Instead we’ve leapt from
TRS-80’s to Mac’s to Thinkpads to iPads to Google Glass without so much as
turning to our fellow citizens and asking if they are still ok. And like it or not, those fears and that
change are now being exploited by those who want to resurrect and then fix in
place a social and economic order that rests on some people have economic and
social privilege built on the backs of economic serfs who are politically
powerless.
Back to the data:
First up is research
highlighted at rawstory.com. While they
don’t give actual percentages in their coverage, the story does summarize what
appears to be legitimate and recent social science research (sadly buried behind
one of those infernal paywalls; emphasis
in Italics mine):
New research published online in Race and Social
Problems suggests the racial politics surrounding the tea
party movement are highly nuanced. The researchers found no difference between
the racial attitudes of the general white population and self-identified tea
party members. Those who had a favorable view of the tea party {i.e. Tea Party Supports but not members},
on the other hand, were in fact more likely to admit to holding anti-black
sentiments.
“Clearly, an African-American,
mixed-race, liberal President may trigger symbolic racism and even racial
stereotypes among the population at large,” Angie Maxwell from the University
of Arkansas and Wayne Parent from Louisiana State University wrote in their
study. But the evidence suggests the tea
party wasn’t simply a racist reaction, though racists appear to be drawn to the
movement.
The link between racial animus and favorable opinions of the tea
party movement was clearer. Tea party
supporters were more likely than the general white population to agree with
statements like, “It is really a matter of some people not trying hard enough;
if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites” and
disagree with statements like, “Generations of slavery and discrimination have
created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of
the lower class.”
These results coincide with previous
research, which found tea party supporters held negative
attitudes about African Americans, Hispanic Americans and LGBT Americans.
Unlike past research, the present study found a difference between tea party
supporters and actual tea party members.
“These distinctions demonstrate
that the ‘subterranean agenda’ of the tea party may be different among members
and among those who admire the general movement from afar,” Maxwell and Parent
concluded. “What the tea party means to its members and what it represents to
the large public may, in fact, not be the same thing.”
Because its behind that paywall, its hard to know how many people were surveyed, or if the percentage of Tea Party respondents mimics what has been reported to be Tea Party representation in th egeneral population. These finding do suggest that
there are, in fact, racist elements and ideas/views in the Tea Party
universe. They also suggest that Tea
Party members (those actively participating in Tea Party groups as citizen
activists) are probably not the problem.
So both of my combatant friends are right at least to some degree.
Searching for more numbers
(!), I found this:
A striking difference over positive
attitudes towards black people showed up in a multi-state poll, conducted in
March 2010, by the University of Washington Institute for the Study of
Ethnicity, Race & Sexuality. Of those who strongly disapproved of the Tea
Party, 55% agreed with the statement that black people were “VERY hard
working.” Of those who strongly approved
of the Tea Party, only 18% agreed with the statement that black people were
“VERY hard working.” This 24-point difference pointed at Tea Party
supporters as more likely to have negative feelings about the work ethic of
black people. In fact, 68% of the Tea party “approvers” believed that if only
they would try harder, then black people would be as well off as white people.
That number fell by almost half, to 35%, when the “disapprovers” answered it.[245]
Further, almost
three-quarters of Tea Party supporters (73%), told pollsters that government
programs aimed at providing a social safety net for poor people actually
encourages them to remain poor.[246] In
fact, more than a bit of anecdotal evidence shows hostility and resentment
towards the poor and the programs designed to help them. Hence, the signs such
as one at an early St. Louis Tea Party that read: “Honk if I am paying your
mortgage.” Not every Tea party supporter exhibited such feelings, certainly,
but enough of it showed up in opinion polls to give credence to the description
of Tea Parties as mean-spirited.
Similarly, both anecdotal evidence
and poll data point to an irreconcilable gap between the president and Tea
Partiers. More is at issue here than a simple disagreement of social policy and
legislation. Indeed, a quarter of Tea
Party supporters polled on the question admit that they think that the Obama
“administration favors black people over whites.”[247] When
asked whether or not Barack Obama understood the “needs and problems of people
like you,” almost three-fourths of Tea Partiers (73%) said “no.” A similar
number (75%) said he did not “share the values most Americans try to live by.”
Is all that of that Racist? To an African American – definitely. To a liberal white guy trained in statistics
– more then likely. Obviously not to
some Tea Party folks. But the University
of Washington study cited above intrigued me.
Open access to data is a hallmark of quality science, so I followed the
interwebs. Sadly for my Tea Party
supporting combatant, the data don’t look good (again, emphasis and clarifying additions in Italics are mine):
For instance, the Tea Party, the grassroots
movement committed to reining in what they perceive as big government, and
fiscal irresponsibility, also appear predisposed to intolerance. Approximately
45% of Whites either strongly or somewhat approve of the {Tea Party} movement. Of
those, only 35% believe Blacks to be hardworking, only 45 % believe Blacks are
intelligent, and only 41% think that Blacks are trustworthy. Perceptions of
Latinos aren’t much different. While 54% of White Tea Party supporters believe
Latinos to be hardworking, only 44% think them intelligent, and even fewer, 42%
of Tea Party supporters believe Latinos to be trustworthy. When it comes to
gays and lesbians, White Tea Party supporters also hold negative attitudes.
Only 36% think gay and lesbian couples should be allowed to adopt children, and
just 17% are in favor of same-sex marriage.
As this figure shows, even as we
account for conservatism and partisanship, support for the Tea Party remains
a valid predictor of racial resentment. We're
not saying that ideology isn't important, because it is: as people become more
conservative, it increases by 23 percent the chance that they're racially
resentful. Also, Democrats are 15 percent less likely than Republicans to be
racially resentful. Even so, support for the Tea Party makes one 25 percent more likely to be racially resentful
than those who don't support the Tea Party.
Differences
in {Tea Party website} content emerge
when comparing the content from official tea party websites to the content from
the National Review online, a mainstream conservative commentary. Only 14 percent of the content from tea
party websites focuses on big government or states rights, issues that are
supposedly the ultimate concern of the tea party. This is compared to 39
percent of the content examined from the National Review online. 19 percent of the content from tea party
websites focuses on immigration, the gay community, race and personal attacks
on Obama, compared to only 10 percent of the National Review’s online
content. 10 percent of posts and articles on tea party websites focus
on patriotism and taking back the country while less than 1 percent of the
content from the National Review online have this focus. Similarly, 36
percent of the content from the National Review online examines national
security or foreign policy compared to only 2 percent of the content from tea
party websites. Content focusing on
socialism, communism, and the current government ruining the country make up 24
percent of the content on tea party websites. Again, this is in contrast
to the National Review online where only 5 percent of the content is of this
nature. These findings suggest that the opinions and concerns of the
tea party not only differ from mainstream America, but also from the
conservative mainstream as well.
These data are striking for two important
conclusions. First, that Tea Party
supporters (as opposed to members) are more likely the other conservatives to harbor
racial resentment (which many conflate with racism); in turn conservatives are
more likely then liberals to hold similar racial resentments. Second, Tea Party groups focus nearly the
same amount of their web content on
immigration, gays, race(including attacks on President Obama), socialism,
communism, and the ruination of the country by the current government (43%b
total) as the “mainstream” conservative press focuses on big government and
states rights – which the Tea Party has claimed are its central issues. It might be true that Tea Party web managers
don’t seek content on these issues because National Review already does it;
more likely the Tea Party needs to get straight what its issues really are.
Finally in the data department, the Southern Poverty Law
Center has published data (under the hilariously dark euphemism unsweet tea)
that suggests the Tea Party’s almost all white membership may be a factor in
its apparent racial resentment:
Just
1% of Tea Party supporters are black, the recent poll found, compared to more
than 12% of the general population. Nine out of 10 disapproved of
President Obama's job performance. Asked why they didn't like the president,
19% said they just don't like him, 11% suggested he is moving the country
toward "socialism," and 9% said he is dishonest. Fifty-two percent
thought too much has been made of black people's problems, about twice the
proportion of all Americans.
Does all this make the ENTIRE
Tea Party Racist? No, it does not. But these data do point out that the Tea
Party has race relations problems and blindspots, some of which appear to be
even bigger then the race relations blindspots that have been part of the
conservative movement since it’s inception.
Sadly, that racial blindspot trace back to the pre-civil war South, an
economy built on the owning (and abusing) of people of color:
The battle against the Constitution and later against an
energetic federal government — the sort of nation-building especially
envisioned by Washington and Hamilton – emanated, in part, from the fears of
many Southern plantation owners that eventually the national political system
would move to outlaw slavery and thus negate their massive investment in human
bondage.
Their thinking was that the stronger
the federal government became the more likely it would act to impose a national
judgment against the South’s slavery. So,
while the Southern argument was often couched in the rhetoric of “liberty,”
i.e. the rights of states to set their own rules, the underlying point was the
maintenance of slavery, the “liberty” to own black people.
{After the Civil War}
However, the defeated South still balked at equal rights for blacks and invoked
“states’ rights” to defend segregation during the Jim Crow era. White
Southerners amassed enough political clout, especially within the Democratic
Party – the successor to Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party – to fend off civil
rights for blacks.
The battle over states’ rights was
joined again in the 1950s when the federal government finally committed itself
to enforcing the principle of “equal protection under the law” as prescribed by
the Fourteenth Amendment. Many white Southerners were furious that their system
of segregation was being dismantled by federal authority.
Southern rightists and many
libertarians insisted that federal laws prohibiting denial of voting rights for
blacks and outlawing segregation in public places were unconstitutional. But
federal courts ruled that Congress was within its rights in banning such
discrimination within the states.
Southern white anger was also
reflected in the prevalence of the Confederate battle flag on pickup trucks and
in store windows. Gradually, however, the American Right retreated from
outright support of racial segregation. The growing public revulsion over the
“Stars and Bars” as a symbol of racism also forced the Right to make a
stylistic adjustment as well.
To
this day, much of the American Right has refused to come to grips with the idea
of non-whites holding U.S. citizenship. And, there is now a palpable fear that
the demographics of democracy might finally eradicate white supremacy in the
United States. It is that last-ditch fight for white dominance – as much as
anything else – that is driving today’s Tea Party.
Interestingly, however, this fight is not just focused on racial
dominance – it seems to be focused on modern Democrats (and perhaps their
predecessors) who, as always, favor government solutions to intractable social
and economic problems (or they used to anyway):
And that's a problem. It's a problem because too
many observers mistakenly react to the tea party as if it's brand new, an
organic and spontaneous response to something unique in the current political
climate. But it's not. It's not a response to the recession or to health care
reform or to some kind of spectacular new liberal overreach. It's what happens
whenever a Democrat takes over the White House. When FDR was in office in the
1930s, conservative zealotry coalesced in the Liberty
League. When JFK won the presidency in the '60s, the John Birch Society flourished. When Bill
Clinton ended the Reagan Revolution in the '90s, talk radio erupted with the
conspiracy theories of the Arkansas
Project. And today, with Barack Obama in the Oval Office, it's the tea
party's turn.
Above all, though, is the recurring theme of
creeping socialism and a federal government that's destroying our freedoms. In
the '30s this took the form of rabid opposition to FDR's alphabet soup of new
regulatory agencies. In the '60s it was John Birch Society founder Robert
Welch's insistence
that the threat of communism actually took second place to the "cancer of
collectivism." Welch believed that overweening government had destroyed
civilizations from Babylonia to 19th-century Europe, and he said his fight could be
expressed in just five words: "Less government and more responsibility."
All of this points in one direction. The growth
of the tea party movement isn't really due to the recession (in fact, polling
evidence shows
that tea partiers are generally better off and less affected by the recession
than the population at large). It's not because Obama is black (white
Democratic presidents got largely the same treatment). And it's not because
Obama bailed out General Motors (so did
George W. Bush). It's simpler. Ever since
the 1930s, something very much like the tea party movement has fluoresced every
time a Democrat wins the presidency, and the nature of the fluorescence always
follows many of the same broad contours: a reverence for the Constitution, a
supposedly spontaneous uprising of formerly nonpolitical middle-class
activists, a preoccupation with socialism and the expanding tyranny of big
government, a bitterness toward an underclass viewed as unwilling to work, and
a weakness for outlandish conspiracy theories.
How did this happen? Partly it's a reflection of the long-term rightward shift of the
Republican Party. Partly it's a product of the modern media environment:
The Birchers were limited to mimeograph machines and PTA meetings to get the
word out, while the tea partiers can rely on Fox News and Facebook. Beyond that, though, it's also a reflection
of the mainstreaming of extremism. In 1961, Time exposed
the John Birch Society to a national audience and condemned it as a
"tiresome, comic-opera joke"; in 2009, it splashed Glenn Beck on the cover
and called him "tireless, funny, self-deprecating...a gifted
storyteller." And it's the same story in the political community: The
Birchers were eventually drummed out of the conservative movement, but the tea
partiers are almost universally welcomed today. "In the '60s," says Rick
Perlstein, a historian of the American right, "you had someone
like William F.
Buckley pushing back against the Birchers. Today, when David Frum
tries to play the same role, he's completely ostracized.
There are just no countervailing forces in the Republican Party anymore."
Unlike the Birchers, or even the Clinton conspiracy theorists, the tea partiers
aren't a fringe part of the conservative movement. They are the
conservative movement.
So where does
that leave my combatants? Clearly there
is a racist element to support of the Tea Party even if individual Tea Party
members are not, themselves racist. That
racist element is part of a play to use the Tea Party to drive the Republican
Party to answer legitimate fears about change, about loss, about economic
vitality with firm convictions and easy targets of blame, rather then answering
with real nuance and substance. It’s
also clear this is both the culmination of four or five (or even six) decades
of Republicans telling people government is the problem– with its power to redistribute
income and create equality of opportunity that mocks private market places –
have been the latest contribution in a long line of attempts in post-Civil War
America to beat back opportunities for the poor, who are often historically and
still people of color. Tea Party members
need to come to grips with this reality if they really want to have a place in
future America.
Liberals too
have to come to grips with something – Tea Party Members are sincere Americans
who don’t like what they see happening to a country they love. Tea Party tactics are many times likely to
use or harken to racist tactics – the evidence does exist – and Tea Party
supporters do appear to harbor racial resentments if not outright racism. If we are to build the America we want, we
have to confront that racism where and when we see it – regardless of which
side of the aisle we sit on.
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