Saturday, September 21, 2013

The Tea Party and Republican Conservatism

On February 19, 2009, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli stood on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and delivered a rant against government programs to shore up the housing market in the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression. Ridiculing "losers" who could not pay their mortgages, Santelli invited America's" Over the next two years, conservative activists took to the streets and airways, built hundreds of local Tea Party groups, and weighed in with votes and money to help right-wing Republicans win electoral victories in 2010. In this penetrating new study, Harvard University's Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson go beyond images of protesters in Colonial costumes to provide a nuanced portrait of the Tea Party. What they find is sometimes surprising. Drawing on grassroots interviews and visits to local meetings in several regions, they find that older, middle-class Tea Partiers mostly approve of Social Security, Medicare, and generous benefits for military veterans. Their opposition to "big government" springs from their reluctance to pay taxes to help people viewed as undeserving "freeloaders"--including immigrants, lower income earners, and the young. At the national level, Tea Party elites and funders leverage grassroots energy to further longstanding goals such as tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation of business, and privatization of the very same Social Security and Medicare programs on which many grassroots Tea Partiers depend. Elites and grassroots are nevertheless united in hatred of Barack Obama and determination to push the Republican Party sharply to the right. The book combines fine-grained portraits of Tea Party members and local chapters with an overarching analysis of the movement's rise, impact, and likely fate. The paperback edition has been updated to cover the 2012 presidential and congressional elections, showing how the Tea Party influenced not only the selection of Republican candidates all the way from Mitt Romney to aspiring congressmembers, but the policy positions they embraced. The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism

MORE GREAT CONSERVATIVE READING

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