The NYT Analyzes the Roots of the Tea Party

We have seen the paralytic effect the Tea Party has had on national and local politics. This radical antigovernment movement can claim credit for the debt-limit train wreck and subsequent stock market crash, and teabag-friendly candidates and themes are dominating the Republican campaign, at least at this early date.

In our suburban Maryland county we saw how a tiny group of noise-makers could grab media attention and run a school district into a panic. Of course they lost everything in the long run but in the meantime they put intense pressure on the school board to dumb down its sex ed curriculum, even without widespread public support for their anti-gay conservative attitudes.

I attended a Montgomery County Tea Party school-board candidate forum last year, put on by Americans for Prosperity, mainly just to see who would show up to speak to them. There was a small crowd, maybe fifty people (out of a county of nearly a million people) in a school building, and one of those people was Ruth Jacobs, president of the Citizens for Responsible Whatever that has opposed the school sex-ed curriculum and the county's gender identity nondiscrimination bill as well. Even though the Tea Party's big message has to do with cutting taxes and government spending, they are integrally bound up in the hate politics of the religious right.

The New York Times reports today on some interesting research.

… in fact the Tea Party is increasingly swimming against the tide of public opinion: among most Americans, even before the furor over the debt limit, its brand was becoming toxic. To embrace the Tea Party carries great political risk for Republicans, but perhaps not for the reason you might think.

Polls show that disapproval of the Tea Party is climbing. In April 2010, a New York Times/CBS News survey found that 18 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of it, 21 percent had a favorable opinion and 46 percent had not heard enough. Now, 14 months later, Tea Party supporters have slipped to 20 percent, while their opponents have more than doubled, to 40 percent. Crashing the Tea Party

In one sense it is not surprising, given the economic crisis they have exacerbated with their willingness to take the country over the edge into defaulting on our debts, and in the other sense you wonder why the Republican candidates and the party itself are trying so hard to appease them. At this early point in time it seems they will dominate the rhetoric of the GOP primaries, but then the winning candidate will have to run for office in a world that mostly does not like teabaggers.

Hee hee...

Of course, politicians of all stripes are not faring well among the public these days. But in data we have recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about — lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like “atheists” and “Muslims.” Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.

I'm just telling you what they say in the papers, ok? Tea Party less liked than Muslims, atheists.

This is fascinating. The NY Times can tell you what kind of people were most likely to join up with the Tea Party:

Beginning in 2006 we interviewed a representative sample of 3,000 Americans as part of our continuing research into national political attitudes, and we returned to interview many of the same people again this summer. As a result, we can look at what people told us, long before there was a Tea Party, to predict who would become a Tea Party supporter five years later. We can also account for multiple influences simultaneously — isolating the impact of one factor while holding others constant.

Our analysis casts doubt on the Tea Party’s “origin story.” Early on, Tea Partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes. Actually, the Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born, and were more likely than others to have contacted government officials. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of Tea Party support today.

What’s more, contrary to some accounts, the Tea Party is not a creature of the Great Recession. Many Americans have suffered in the last four years, but they are no more likely than anyone else to support the Tea Party. And while the public image of the Tea Party focuses on a desire to shrink government, concern over big government is hardly the only or even the most important predictor of Tea Party support among voters.

So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.

You hear people say that the Tea Party is inherently racist, and you see the teabaggers being very careful not to use explicitly racist language -- there are even a couple of black ones, proving they cannot be racist. But it is undeniably a group of conservative white people who are not fond of minorities.

More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

Do you see how breaking down the wall between religion and government ties into a constant spewing of rhetoric about taxes and spending? Maybe one way to look at it is to consider the churches' role in organizing communities. Tax-exempt institutions preach politics from the pulpit. I have never seen any sermon reported in the papers, but conservative clergy reach millions of people every Sunday. Many churches provide safety nets for their parishioners, the Mormons for instance are required to tithe a certain amount to the church to take care of the less fortunate of their members. They take care of their own, and so they have less need for secular safety nets, if poor people need food and shelter they should just join a church that will provide it! People who tithe and pay taxes are being charged twice for the same protection.

This inclination among the Tea Party faithful to mix religion and politics explains their support for Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. Their appeal to Tea Partiers lies less in what they say about the budget or taxes, and more in their overt use of religious language and imagery, including Mrs. Bachmann’s lengthy prayers at campaign stops and Mr. Perry’s prayer rally in Houston.

Yet it is precisely this infusion of religion into politics that most Americans increasingly oppose. While over the last five years Americans have become slightly more conservative economically, they have swung even further in opposition to mingling religion and politics. It thus makes sense that the Tea Party ranks alongside the Christian Right in unpopularity.

That's right, most Americans want religion to stay completely out of government. It is never good, whether it is the Taliban or the Baptist Church, religious governments do not have the interest of fairness and equality in mind. Even in theocratic states I'll bet you'd find most people would prefer democracy - whether they are so bold as to say it is another question, freedom not exactly being a hallmark of religion-dominated governing.

The unsurprising picture you get is that the Tea Part is another incarnation of the religious right. The interesting thing is that they keep their rhetoric secular, they talk about taxes and spending and "entitlements" in public speaking, but their followers know what's going on.

Here's an interesting analogy:

On everything but the size of government, Tea Party supporters are increasingly out of step with most Americans, even many Republicans. Indeed, at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, today’s Tea Party parallels the anti-Vietnam War movement which rallied behind George S. McGovern in 1972. The McGovernite activists brought energy, but also stridency, to the Democratic Party — repelling moderate voters and damaging the Democratic brand for a generation. By embracing the Tea Party, Republicans risk repeating history.