Academics dub tea partyers devout, racist

[What Democracy Means To Liberals]

Two years after it burst onto the political scene, the tea party
is getting a critical eye from political science academics who
say the movement’s adherents are knowledgeable and religiously
devout - but hypocritical and more likely to be motivated by
“racial resentment.”

Gathering this weekend in Seattle for the annual American
Political Science Association convention, several professors
argued that tea party Republicans are more likely than other
voters and more likely than most others in the GOP to harbor
racial hostility, as judged by their answers in a broad pre-
election survey administered in October.

“Tea Party activists have denied accusations that their movement
is racist, and there is nothing intrinsically racist about
opposing ‘big government’ or clean-energy legislation or health
care reform. But it is clear that the movement is more appealing
to people who are unsympathetic to blacks and who prefer a
harder line on illegal immigration than it is to other
Americans,” Gary C. Jacobson, a professor at the University of
California at San Diego, wrote in his paper, “The President, the
Tea Party, and Voting Behavior in 2010.”

In another paper, Alan I. Abramowitz, a professor at Emory
University, crunched the numbers from the American National
Election Studies’ October 2010 pre-election survey and drew up a
portrait of tea party voters that found they are more likely
than other Republicans to be registered to vote, to have
contacted a public official or to have donated to a campaign.
They also are generally older, wealthier and more likely to be
evangelical.

Like Mr. Jacobson, Mr. Abramowitz also said they were more
likely to harbor racial resentment, which he judged based on
their answers to questions such as whether blacks could succeed
as well as whites if they “would only try harder,” and whether
they agreed with the statement that Irish, Italians and Jews
overcame prejudice and “blacks should do the same without any
special favors.”

Mr. Abramowitz said tea party supporters were substantially more
likely than other voters to question how much effort black
Americans are making to advance themselves, versus being held
back by social factors.

“Tea Party supporters displayed high levels of racial resentment
and held very negative opinions about President Obama, compared
with the rest of the public and even other Republicans,” Mr.
Abramowitz wrote. “In a multivariate analysis, racial resentment
and dislike of Barack Obama, along with conservatism, emerged as
the most important factors contributing to support for the Tea
Party movement.”

More than a dozen papers at the conference peered into the tea
party, the movement’s philosophical underpinnings and its role
in the 2010 elections. Titles included “Civil Rights and LGBTQ
Scapegoats in the Tea Party Movement,” “Passionate Patriotism:
Gender and the Discourse of Anger in the Tea Party Movement” and
Mr. Abramowitz’s “Partisan Polarization and the Rise of the Tea
Party Movement.”

Tea party leaders laughed off the scrutiny and chuckled when
they heard the names of the papers.

“This is good. You’re making my day,” said Mark Meckler, co-
founder of Tea Party Patriots.

“Statistics show that the vast number of folks that are in the
world of academia are liberals,” he said after collecting
himself. “Liberals don’t like the tea party movement. I don’t
think that’s news.”

“From my perspective, they’ve literally become a caricature of
themselves,” he said of the academy, adding that there are a
“few exceptions.”

The academics posed a wide breadth of questions, but a number of
them delved into what makes tea party voters tick. Others
explored the movement’s philosophy and questioned its internal
consistency.

Christopher S. Parker, a political science professor at the
University of Washington, put the tea party’s proclaimed beliefs
in limited government to the test on three questions: whether
they supported limits on free speech, whether they believed in
indefinite detention and whether they wanted broader police
powers for racial profiling.

Using his own survey data, he concluded that tea party
supporters were more likely than the general public to believe
speech should be free of restrictions and were just as likely to
support indefinite detention of suspected terrorists, but were
more willing for police to use racial profiling to stop crimes.

“The hypothesis would be if they were really just about freedom,
they would be unabashedly, relative to other groups, in favor of
freedom or supporting civil liberties. One would think that
would be the case across the board, but that’s not the case,”
Mr. Parker said in an interview.

In his research, Mr. Parker controlled for other factors and
said the defining characteristic isn’t education level or class
or racism, but rather that tea party supporters are more likely
to be “reactionary” conservatives who strongly oppose change.

“It’s not about law and order, it’s not about education, it’s
not even about racism as racism, per se. And it’s not completely
tied into race. It’s this diffuse idea that our country is
slipping away from us,” he said.

Mr. Parker said his research found that tea party supporters
were significantly more likely to be involved in the political
process and, as such, will be a force within the GOP.

Other academics saw other mechanisms at work. Emily McClintock
Ekins, a graduate student at the University of California at Los
Angeles, said tea partyers have more faith in the fairness of
capitalism, which she said could explain their attitudes on race.

“This makes it less surprising that nearly all Tea Partiers
believe that hard work, rather than luck, drives success. This
might also explain their lower levels of racial empathy, as they
are less aware for how opportunity may be different for
particular groups of people,” she wrote in a working draft paper.

In his paper, Nicol C. Rae, a professor at Florida International
University, said the tea party movement rose as a reaction to
the failures of Republicans when they controlled most of the
levers of the executive and legislative branches from 2001
through 2006, yet oversaw massive government expansion.

“George W. Bush had campaigned as the heir of Ronald Reagan, but
his presidency yielded a huge new government bureaucracy in the
form of the new Department of Homeland Security, and a massive
new federal entitlement - the Medicare Prescription Drug
program,” he wrote, saying it wasn’t surprising that
conservative Republicans rebelled against that trajectory.

Yet another paper questions the conventional wisdom that tea
party power propelled the GOP to its 2010 electoral victories.

“We failed to find any systematic evidence that the Tea Party
was responsible for the Republican success in 2010,” professor
Jon R. Bond and several colleagues wrote in their analysis.
“Instead, we find that variables long cited by scholars of
congressional elections [-] in particular, the incumbent’s
previous electoral performance, the normal party vote in the
district, candidate spending, and challenger experience - best
explain the district-level outcomes of the 2010 elections.”

The authors of that analysis said the tea party did help
nationalize the election by highlighting spending and the growth
of government.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/sep/4/academics-tea-
partyers-devout-more-likely-racist/