Angry white men
By Max J. Castro
The Tea Party movement, as it emerges from this survey, represents a radical right tinged with racism and resentment against what it believes to be the takeover of America and its government by an alien element: a Black president with a redistributionist agenda favoring the poor and minorities. This, despite Obama’s arguably excessive moderation, they call socialism.
Who are the Tea Partiers and what do they want? That question, which has been debated since the movement’s inception, is the subject of a CBS News-New York Times survey released last week.
Here are some conclusions that can be drawn from the poll:
The overwhelming majority of Americans do not support the Tea Party in theory or practice. Overall, 18 percent of Americans identified with the Tea Party, while only four percent had attended a rally or donated to the group. Thus the vast majority of Americans (82 percent) do not support the Tea Party even in theory and 96 percent have not done anything material to advance its cause.
Beyond this, the demographic that jumps out is racial. Only one percent of the people who identified themselves as supporters of the Tea Party are black! The Tea Party is not just about Obama, but it is about Obama and what he represents. In this light, it’s hardly surprising that the region with most Tea Party supporters is the South with 36 percent of the total. [The rest come from the West (25 percent), the Midwest (22 percent), and the northeast (18 percent).] This is a white rebellion against the changing composition of the country’s complexion at the highest level.
In addition, Tea Partiers are more likely to be men (59 percent) and older than average, with 75 percent 45 or older and 29 percent older than 65. In spite of some popular perceptions, those who identify with the Tea Party are more likely than the populations as a whole to have a college degree and have higher than average incomes.
Above all, Tea Party supporters say they are angry at Washington. But what does this mean? There is a racial and class component to this anger. More than 50 percent say Obama’s policies favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites. Only 11 percent of the general public thinks the administration practices racial favoritism.
President Obama is the preeminent target of Tea Party ire. Tea Partiers are more than twice as likely (88 percent) to disapprove of Obama’s performance on the job than the general public (40 percent). When asked what they dislike about Obama, the top answer was that “they just don’t like him” while the second most popular answer was that he was taking the country toward socialism.
Tea Partiers are extremely alienated from their president. According to the survey, “while most Americans (58 percent) say the president understands their needs and problems, just 24 percent of Tea Party supporters agree. Just one in five say the president shares the values of most Americans.” Seventy-seven percent of Tea Partiers describe the president as “very liberal.” Also according to the survey, “sixty-three percent say they get the majority of their political and current events news on television from the Fox News Channel, compared to 23 percent of Americans overall.”
This reliance on the Fox News Channel may be one reason why the Tea Party supporters delude themselves. Almost two-thirds believe Obama has raised taxes on most Americans when in reality most Americans have gotten a tax cut under the current administration. A whopping 84 percent of Tea Party supporters believe most Americans support their beliefs but only 25 percent of Americans agree.
Ideologically, at a time when the Republican Party has swung to the right, Tea Party supporters are more conservative than Republicans. They say their main goal is to reduce the role of the federal government. As many have pointed out, the Tea Party movement did not exist when the Bush administration was vastly expanding the role of government in the military and surveillance arenas.
The Tea Party movement, as it emerges from this survey, represents a radical right tinged with racism and resentment against what it believes to be the takeover of America and its government by an alien element: a Black president with a redistributionist agenda favoring the poor and minorities. This, despite Obama’s arguably excessive moderation, they call socialism. It was no surprise then that the health care debate was a flashpoint for this movement since one of its major items was the extension of health care to 38 million Americans who are for the most part in the lower half of the income distribution and many of whom are minorities.
Beyond the survey, it should be noted that the Tea Party movement, despite its pseudo populist pretensions, does not operate autonomously or outside the scope of U.S. partisan and ideological politics. There is a web of connections between the Tea Party and the Republican Party as well as between the former and “free-market” conservative consultants and political operatives who both provide funds to it and raise funds from the movement’s supporters.
Extreme reactionaries have always existed in the United States, but their coming together at this time under the umbrella of the Tea Party movement is not coincidental but quite useful to the very special interests that some of their members rail against.
