Where Did They Come From? The Rise of the Tea Party [View all]

[PETRUS]

(a book review)

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One of the most pressing questions regarding the Tea Party phenomenon is why many working-class people have expressed support for it. During 2010 the group grew in popularity among most sectors of the population, not just among the affluent. By August 2010 over half the US public expressed “sympathy” with the Tea Party. DiMaggio is careful to distinguish between the motives of the Tea Party’s elite leadership and those of the ordinary working people who have been attracted to it. The Tea Party may be “a false populist force,” but “the group would be nowhere near as successful if it were not for the legitimate grievances and anger of a general public” (p. 31). Falling real wages, rising inequality, and unresponsive government have all fueled the Tea Party’s popularity, even if its false solutions would intentionally exacerbate such problems. Moreover, many of the people who have expressed support for the Tea Party in fact hold progressive values. One explanation DiMaggio offers for this paradox is that factual ignorance (largely created by media coverage) results in disjunctions between people’s values and attitudes toward specific policies, on one hand, and their opinions of politicians, institutions, and abstract ideas like “healthcare reform,” on the other. For example, individuals may strongly support welfare programs like Medicare or Social Security—as most of the public does—but oppose “welfare” due to the racist and classist propaganda offensive mounted against the idea since the 1970s.

A similar pattern seems to apply to public opinion on a wide range of issues. Most of the public thinks workers should have more income and power, but is more ambivalent toward the idea of unions. The public supports a binding treaty to combat climate change, but over half of Bush voters in 2004 were under the erroneous impression that Bush supported the Kyoto Protocol. To take a recent example, the public overwhelmingly agrees with the Occupy Wall Street movement’s goals of reducing inequality, taxing the rich to fund social programs, and ending corporate domination of government, but stated support for the Occupy movement itself is lower (though still substantial). DiMaggio’s argument about how elites and media coverage “manufacture dissent” against policies that might otherwise enjoy widespread support helps to explain such paradoxes, although further research—particularly at the ethnographic level—will be necessary to more fully understand the reasons for working-class support for the Tea Party and other right-wing forces (working-class racism, sexism, and nationalism are surely important here).

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/29/the-rise-of-the-tea-party-2/

More at the link.