The Tea Party And The Remaking Of Republican Conservatism Part 3

Overly Ent.i.tled Young People.

In addition to illegal immigrants, young people feature prominently in the stories Tea Partiers tell about undeserving freeloaders, and anecdotes about people in their own families sometimes stand in for larger generational tensions. The U.S. economy is changing in ways that make it harder for young adults to find jobs, form families, earn college degrees, and build careers and acc.u.mulate property according to the same formulas that once worked well for those in the older generations from which most Tea Partiers come. Younger cohorts of Americans are also more racially and ethnically diverse, and espouse different beliefs about families and s.e.xual conduct. Older people have always been likely to find fault with "the kids." In interviews, the faults Tea Party partic.i.p.ants ascribed to the younger generation included everything from foul language to poor penmans.h.i.+p. But the general tendency of older generations to nostalgia arguably takes on a harder edge when times are tough and economic, cultural, and demographic changes are happening very quickly.

After talking about her generation's commitment to hard work, Bonnie Sims concludes "I don't think those values are being taught anymore." John Patterson echoed the same theme, complaining that younger people have "lost the value of work." He told the story of a 29-year-old woman who expected to have a t.i.tle at work just because she has a Master's degree; she did not realize that you have to "earn respect." His wife, a teacher, laments that all the kids now "expect to be praised" no matter how they perform.

Many Tea Partiers connected worries about the deteriorating behavior of young people directly to fears about wasteful ent.i.tlement spending. "A lot of [young] people ... they just feel like they are ent.i.tled," Betsy Stone declares, as she tells the story of a nephew who had "been on welfare his whole life." The nephew now has children of his own, yet by her account was not even reliably taking them for their medical check-ups, even though the children are eligible for free care, presumably through Medicaid. "You give these people benefits," Betsy says scornfully, "and they don't even take advantage of it" in appropriate ways. Rather than learning to contribute to society, young people are being taught that they deserve support from the government, Michael says. "My grandson, he's fourteen and he asked me: 'Why should I work, why can't I just get free money?'" Michael was very concerned that his grandson was typical of the younger generation.

Young adults in college are not exempt from Tea Party suspicion. Montana GOP Congressman Denny Rehberg, a Tea Party favorite, was no doubt speaking to the choir when he recently denounced aid to college students as "the welfare of the 21st century." Tellingly, Rehberg grouped federal Pell Grants that help low-income students cover part of their college tuition with every other public a.s.sistance program imaginable. And the Tea Party GOPer claimed that recipients are not really trying to complete college anyway. "You can go to school, collect your Pell Grants, get food stamps, low-income energy a.s.sistance, section 8 housing, and all of a sudden we find ourselves subsidizing people that don't have to graduate from college," explained Rehberg as he outlined plans to slash college aid.51 A similar point was made in an April 2010 blog posting on the Greater Boston Tea Party website, claiming that college kids are taking advantage of the Food Stamp program. "Call me crazy," the blogger opined, "but when I needed money for college, I got a job." Of course, getting a job may have occurred to some of the students ridiculed, but at the time the blog post was written there were five job seekers for every job opening available, and unemployment among those 20 to 24 stood at 17%.52 The limited economic opportunities available to young people were not something Tea Party members mentioned to us. Nor did they express any concern about declining college attendance and completion for lower-income and lower-middle-income young people-a decline that has caused the United States to fall behind in the global higher education sweepstakes. Instead, Tea Partiers condemned the behavior of the young in moral terms.

Societal Decline and Fear of the Future.

The Tea Party emphasis on the importance of work and earned benefits certainly meshes with widely held American values. Hard work is, after all, a cornerstone of the American Dream. Americans have long linked a person's deservingness to the effort he or she puts forth, and most tend to perceive poverty as a result of laziness rather than misfortune. But the current Tea Party distinction between freeloaders and hardworking taxpayers has ethnic, nativist, and generational undertones that distinguish it from a simple reiteration of the long-standing American creed. In Tea Party eyes, undeserving people are not simply defined by a tenuous attachment to the labor market or receipt of unearned government handouts. For Tea Partiers, deservingness is a cultural category, closely tied to certain racially and ethnically tinged a.s.sumptions about American society in the early twenty-first century. Tea Party resistance to giving more to categories of people deemed undeserving is more than just an argument about taxes and spending. It is a heartfelt cry about where they fear "their country" may be headed.

Tea Party worries about racial and ethnic minorities and overly ent.i.tled young people signal a larger fear about generational social change in America. To outside observers, Tea Partiers often seem disproportionately angry. Why are they insisting on taking back their country and defending their "rights" from tyranny when all that is happening is a p.u.s.s.yfooting health care reform, more conservative than the version supported by Richard Nixon in the 1970s? What is so "fascist" or "socialist" about an economic stimulus bill, one-third of which was tax cuts? One often hears such musings in liberal circles, but it is a mistake to a.s.sess emotional responses as if they were policy statements. When Tea Partiers talk about "their rights," they are a.s.serting a desire to live again in the country they think they recall from childhood or young adulthood. Their anger evinces a determination to restore that remembered America, and pa.s.s it on to their children and grandchildren (whether or not they are asking for this gift).

Many Tea Partiers talked about feeling as though they had been asleep, only to wake up recently in a new, strange country. Bonnie Sims was particularly p.r.o.ne to such comments. "It's so sad the way the country is now," she told us. "My children disagree with me, but they will never know the country I grew up in." Sandra repeats this concern nearly word for word: "My children will not see the life that I have lived." By understanding the societal threat Tea Partiers perceive, their sense that America is in decline and must be saved, we can better understand why they are so upset. As Stanley told us, "I've had such a good life, and I just want other Americans to have that life."

One might imagine the changes that worry Tea Partiers to be primarily economic. In the last thirty years, economic opportunity has declined. Instead of economic prosperity benefiting all Americans, it increasingly benefits only the very few at the top.53 But Tea Party members rarely stressed economic concerns to us-and they never blamed business or the super-rich for America's troubles.54 The nightmare of societal decline is usually painted in cultural hues, and the villains in the picture are freeloading social groups, liberal politicians, bossy professionals, big government, and the mainstream media.

Virginians worried that their children do not grow up fis.h.i.+ng in local streams or know what it was like to feel safe walking home late at night. Arizona Tea Partiers talked about swings being taken out of playgrounds to meet persnickety safety standards, and schoolchildren suspended for carrying pocketknives. Forces conspire, Stella Fisher says, "to the breaking down of conservative society." Kids today believe "it's not so important that you get married, even if you have a baby with somebody.... It's just not good for America." Such generalized concerns about societal decline were the ones we heard most frequently-far more often than we heard any explicit comments about ethnic or racial minorities.

Such fears are, of course, wrapped up with anxieties about immigration and America's changing links to the larger world beyond the nation's borders. Telling us about her revelation that America had somehow changed, Bonnie plaintively asks, "What's happening in this country? What's happening with immigration?" Tea Partiers see immigrants and young people as harbingers of cultural decline. Even Stanley, whose views on immigration were among the most moderate of any Tea Partier we interviewed, felt that immigration is a "threat to our culture." Though rates of immigration have been high in recent decades, sociologists looking at the typical measures of immigrant incorporation-educational attainment, language a.s.similation, and intermarriage-find that the most recent generations of immigrants from Asia and Latin America are "being successfully incorporated into American society," just as European immigrants were in the past.55 But this is not believable to many Tea Partiers, who perceive that today's immigrants are unwilling to integrate as previous generations did.

For many reasons, then, Tea Party people peer out at a fast-changing society, and they worry. The public image of the Tea Party is one of fierce anger, but in person and in local meetings fear was the more typical emotion. A meeting in Tempe featured a speaker who recounted the kind of stories that lead sensationalistic local TV news programs, emphasizing nightmarish scenarios of home invasion and rape. This is why, she said, all women should always carry concealed firearms. The speaker was herself carrying a concealed weapon during her talk, she informed us, patting a squarish bulge at her right hip. At a meeting in Virginia, a speaker discussed the near-term probability that the federal government would impose martial law and force citizens into camps that would be called "five-minute zones."56 In the minds of Tea Party activists, the American present-and especially the looming U.S. future-is often more than worrisome; it can be downright terrifying.

Obviously, Tea Partiers speak constantly about an out-of-control federal budget deficit and the coming doom they think it portends for the United States. There is real-world basis for worrying about the U.S. fiscal situation, of course, though the United States is in reasonably good fiscal shape, as the steady health of the bond market attests.57 Tea Party worries about national debt therefore refer to real problems, but magnify them out of all proportion. Why? As we have learned, Tea Partiers are concerned that U.S. deficits might be addressed in part with tax hikes, which they imagine would require people like them to help pay for social spending that benefits undeserving freeloaders. But the fiscal question in the Tea Party imagination is more than just a redistributive matter, more than just a set of worries about taxes and social spending. In the highly emotional telling of many Tea Partiers, the ballooning federal deficit merges into a general sense of a coming collapse for America. A Virginia Tea Party partic.i.p.ant explained to us at length that, as the U.S. fiscal crisis unfolds, grocery stores will be shuttered and citizens who are not armed will risk falling prey to roving gangs. "The United States has squandered its wealth created over the last 400 years and is now destroying wealth," explains another Virginian, James Rand, who believes that politicians may decide to address the "debt load overhanging us" by seizing the 401k savings accounts of all private citizens. It might be best for the country to go into default, he muses, to wake everyone up to the severity of our collapse.

Fears about imminent American collapse fuel fear-driven urges to make extreme preparations. Living in a pristine retirement community in exurban Phoenix, Stanley and Gloria Ames outlined their plans for the coming Armageddon. "The forecast is we could have a crash, and the dollar could be worthless," Stanley explains. "So you barter in silver and gold, by weight. All of these things are scary out there. We didn't buy gold, we went into silver bullion.... We are concerned to the point that we are armed. We have a safe full of ammunition. We have food that has a date that will carry us out for almost a year and half. It's a frightening time." For this charming and friendly older couple, Tea Party politics inextricably mixes relatively routine political engagement with extraordinary efforts to save America and themselves in a looming end-of-the-world scenario.

BARACK OBAMA AT THE VORTEX.

Nowhere are Tea Party fears more potently symbolized than in the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. The policies and person of the forty-fourth President were the subject of immense suspicion at every Tea Party event or interview we attended. It is no coincidence that Tea Party activism began within weeks of President Obama's inauguration. Several interviewees dated their concerns about the country and national politics to Obama's election or the 2008 campaign. Others told us, quite credibly, about long-simmering worries, and insisted that the Tea Party is not just or only about opposition to Obama. True enough, but these people had a hard time pinning down a different catalyst for their sudden political mobilization in early 2009.

The freewheeling anti-Obama paranoia expressed at Tea Party rallies has been widely reported. Various articles have quoted Tea Party members saying that Obama is a secret Muslim, a foreigner, a Socialist, a Communist, a n.a.z.i-or maybe all of the above! Obama the un-American is the overarching theme. Stoked by demagogues like Donald Trump, the claim about President Obama's otherness and illegitimacy reached its apogee in "Birtherist" claims that Obama was not really born in the United States. In our interviews, the tone was of course more measured than in public rallies, but we heard variations of all the possible epithets for Obama. Even in face-to-face interviews, Tea Party rhetoric veers into the territory described by historian Richard Hofstadter as "the paranoid style in American politics"-which should perhaps not come as a surprise, as Hofstadter was talking about John Birch Society members and Goldwater supporters, whose remnants have joined the Tea Party today.58 More typical in our encounters than the occasional reference to Communism or long-form birth certificates were frank admissions from Tea Party members that Obama is, to them, incomprehensible. "I just can't relate to him," said one man at a Tea Party meeting in Boston. Uncertainty veers into suspicion. "I think that he's actually not what he seems to be," said a Virginia Tea Partier. "He's disingenuous. I have delved into it deeply," claimed another. Several Tea Party members we spoke to described Obama simply as "scary." For Tea Partiers, President Obama is somehow outside or beyond comprehensible categories, and he has used confusion about who he is and what he stands for to his own nefarious political advantage.

A Perfectly Fearful Storm.

In recent decades, Democratic presidents who have come to office with Democratic Congressional majorities quickly become the objects of all-out attacks from conservatives. Race is not the main factor in drives to delegitimize Democrats, even when it offers fuel for fear and stereotypes. Attacks on Bill and Hillary Clinton from 1992 to 2000 invoked personal misbehavior, business shenanigans, and all sorts of alleged moral horrors-to the point of suggesting that the Clintons murdered their friend Vince Foster (who committed suicide). A decade and a half later, ultra-right-wing attacks on Barack Obama do not usually imply anything wrong with his family values or s.e.xual conduct. Instead, they use the material at hand: his race, his foreign father, and his background as a college professor and community organizer. Elites in the right-wing media and the netherworlds of ultra-conservative politics consciously play on whatever resentments or fears might be out there to undercut the Democratic president of the day.

The son of an African father and a white American mother, Obama is perceived by many Tea Partiers as a foreigner, an invader pretending to be an American, a fifth columnist. Obama's past as a community organizer is taken as evidence that he works on behalf of the undeserving poor and wishes to mobilize government resources on their behalf. His academic achievements and social ties put him in league with the country's intellectual elite, whose disdain feels very real to many Americans, and whose cosmopolitan leanings seem unpatriotic. For so many reasons, therefore, Obama's social ambiguities as well as his political stands make him easy to portray as a threat-especially in the eyes of very conservative Americans.

Asked about the President, Tea Party members connect Obama and his administration and political allies directly with those deemed undeserving-not just with African-Americans but also with illegal immigrants and criminals. Michael, the retired police officer, worries that "the people I was looking for back when I was a cop are now running the government." James Rand angrily a.s.serts that "criminals" are in charge of the U.S. government.59 It is widely believed, moreover, that President Obama intends to grant amnesty to all illegal immigrants in order to develop a new bloc of electoral support. An extra 10 million votes from newly legalized citizens would give the Obama Administration the electoral cus.h.i.+on needed to continue to ignore the interests of real Americans, several Tea Party members told us. Similar sentiments are invoked in group discussions, too. At the April 2011 meeting of the York Const.i.tutionalists a.s.sembled in North Berwick, Maine, both the outside speaker and members of the group repeatedly characterized the current Democratic Party as an alliance of unionized public officials and people on welfare, and they speculated that the Obama Administration would soon use immigration reform to add current undoc.u.mented immigrants to the Democratic voter rolls.

With his Ivy League degrees, President Obama is also perceived as a member of a haughty, overbearing, and dubiously patriotic higher-educated elite. While the business community gets a free pa.s.s, Tea Party activists are very concerned about liberal cultural elites, who they believe scorn most Americans. As Sandra put it, "there is an elite cla.s.s that loathes the middle cla.s.s" and looks down on "stupid rednecks." Tea Partiers often use higher education as shorthand for the difference between the cultural elite and average Americans. In Boston, one activist dismissed people "with a bunch of letters after their name," while a Virginia activist commented that she had "lost all respect" for higher education. Discussing who might run for public offices, Charlottesville Tea Partiers stressed that expert qualifications were not only unnecessary, but might be harmful. Firm convictions and a determination not to compromise were all people needed to serve in local, state, or national government, these Tea Partiers agreed.

Although Tea Partiers dismiss intellectuals with harsh rhetoric, they are themselves usually well educated. Most of those we spoke to had a college education, and many had advanced degrees. One Tea Partier objected to a brief written survey we had provided, saying it did not allow her to list her full academic credentials. As with those deemed undeserving, the category of the "intellectual elite" is more politically symbolic than based on clear-cut empirical facts. In Tea Partyland, ideology and politics separate objectionable educated elites from other highly educated people.

Because of their supposed disdain for average Americans, liberal elites are imagined to be plotting new forms of regulation and control. They think "they know what's best for us," one Virginia Tea Partier explained. Regulations supported by liberals are perceived as a foreign moral code, an imposition of un-American ideals, although the exact impositions may range from "political correctness," as Timothy Manor put it, to health and safety rules. For some Tea Partiers, Mich.e.l.le Obama's anti-obesity campaign is yet another elite judgment on the lifestyles of average Americans. Another source of acute concern is environmentalism. Tea Party members routinely dismiss climate change as nothing more than a hoax perpetrated by scientists and bureaucrats, as a prelude to extending the reach of their power.

To the extent the policy prescriptions advanced by educated elites appear to benefit the undeserving, those elites are seen by Tea Partiers as allied with freeloading groups to steal taxpayer money and subvert the proper role of U.S. government. The housing bubble, for instance, was explained in these terms. Through his purported ties to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and to the now-defunct community organizing group ACORN, Obama is charged with joining other Democrats to promote an unsustainable boom in homeowners.h.i.+p among the undeserving. James Morrow, for instance, a.s.sured us that Obama had received "the most money from Fannie and Freddie" of any senator except Senator Chris Dodd. For Tea Partiers, Obama is the epitome of the liberal elitist working in the interest of the undeserving.

Old Themes for a New Time.

As we have seen throughout this chapter, most aspects of Tea Party thinking are not new; they add up to the most recent incarnation of American conservative populism. In talking to Tea Party activists, you hear echoes of Reagan-era stories of "welfare queens" and Nixonian rhetoric about the "silent majority," the true Americans for whom Tea Partiers think they speak. Like earlier rounds of right-wing activism, the activism of Tea Partiers is driven by societal oppositions more than by detailed policy logic. Tea Partiers at the gra.s.s roots are content with the parts of U.S. social provision they see as benefiting worthy people, even as they are determined to slash government a.s.sistance for those they see as freeloaders "mooching" at taxpayer expense. Tea Partiers want no government regulation of their own businesses, homes, and property, even as they are eager for government to crack down hard on immigrants and others they see as political or cultural opponents.

To say that Tea Partiers are part of a long-standing conservative tradition is to agree with many of our interviewees, who celebrate previous generations of conservatives as their political forebears. One Virginia Tea Partier told us that the "problems" the United States is now facing "go back to Roosevelt" and the New Deal. Looking back even further, many who watched Fox News anchor Glenn Beck echoed his criticisms of Woodrow Wilson.60 Indeed, the Minnesota Tea Partiers affiliated with the large and vibrant Southwest Metro Tea Party see themselves as part of a long tradition battling American liberalism. As their "Principles" explain, the Tea Party's goal is to reverse the work of "Woodrow Wilson's Progressivism, FDR's New Deal, LBJ's Great Society, and President Obama's 'fundamentally transforming America."61 The war is a long one and today's Tea Partiers are the latest soldiers.

Nor are connections across time merely intellectual and political. One of the few college-age Tea Partiers we met, a young man in Boston, wore a T-s.h.i.+rt emblazoned with Goldwater's b.u.mper sticker slogan "AuH2O." It was history for him, but of course many of his fellow Tea Partiers remember that campaign firsthand. An extraordinary number dated their first political experiences to the 1964 Goldwater campaign. Mandy had served as a page at the Republican convention that nominated Goldwater; Ben described himself as an "old Barry Goldwater guy"; and a protestor in Boston said he had not felt this "excited" about politics "since Goldwater." Despite endless commentary comparing it to a.s.sorted movements ranging from Civil Rights to the Ross Perot campaign, the Tea Party is fundamentally the latest iteration of long-standing, hard-core conservatism in American politics.

Yet the ideas and pa.s.sions of today's Tea Partiers are also born of this time and place; they are very much responses to the startling social changes and roiling politics that mark the United States in the early twenty-first century. Obama's election to the nation's highest office galvanized conservatives desperate to express their opposition to everything they believe he stands for-a country changing too quickly in directions they dread. The coincidence of Obama's election and broader Democratic gains with a scary financial meltdown heightened the threat for conservatives who turned to the Tea Party. But we cannot understand the ferocity of their reaction or the obsessive focus on Obama as an alien force without situating the politics of the economic crisis in the context of the larger societal s.h.i.+fts.

Just as liberals and many younger people perceive President Obama as a symbol of the breaking of boundaries, a harbinger of new possibilities in U.S. society and politics, so, too, do Tea Party partic.i.p.ants perceive that new things are afoot-changing societal norms, greater ethnic diversity, international cosmopolitanism, and new redistributions aimed at younger citizens. What signifies hope for some Americans, triggers anger and fear in others. As James Morrow put it, "Barack Obama came right out and said he wanted to transform America." For the conservative-minded, mostly older people who have joined the Tea Party, this promise was-and is-a frightful threat.

Mobilized Gra.s.sroots and Roving Billionaires.

The Panoply of Tea Party Organizations.

When CNBC commentator Rick Santelli vented his anger on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in February 2009, he launched a spectacular political brand for the next election cycle and beyond. The soon-boiling Tea Party commingled all-out opposition to the Obama presidency, cover for business at a time when Wall Street seemed culpable, and old-fas.h.i.+oned patriotic fervor in a populace reeling amidst an economic tailspin. From coast to coast, from local to national arenas, activists wasted no time turning a colorful tirade into widespread mobilizations.

Local activism in the Tea Party depends on the energy and commitment of conservative citizens willing to organize projects, attend meetings, travel to lobby days and rallies, study and discuss legislation, and learn government procedures and GOP rules. But local efforts are not all that is going on because generously funded political action committees and advocacy groups also take part in Tea Party efforts. A few of these national organizations were newly founded with the Tea Party label, but most simply added the moniker on top of long-standing organized efforts, or linked their offerings to Tea Party websites.

Some national organizations, most notably Tea Party Patriots, encourage and coordinate gra.s.sroots activists, while others, such as Tea Party Express, stage media events and give money to GOP candidates. In addition, advocacy groups such as Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity push long-standing ultra-free-market agendas. They are ideological organizations first and foremost and draw a lot of their specific legislative proposals from a.s.sorted right-wing policy inst.i.tutes, including the Cato Inst.i.tute and the Heritage Foundation in Was.h.i.+ngton DC. A vast network of policy-oriented right-wing intellectuals, generously funded, has been strategizing and writing for many years, awaiting the moment when political and electoral winds might s.h.i.+ft just enough to allow their ideas to find a larger place on the mainstream agenda.

There is not, therefore, a single Tea Party organization, nor even a well-coordinated network. Instead, a gaggle of jostling and sometimes competing local and national organizations, none of them directly controlled by the inst.i.tutional Republican Party, are pus.h.i.+ng to influence GOP officeholders, candidates, and voters. Mapping the Tea Party as a set of organizations is no easy undertaking. Picking up the phone to call a few DC organizers does not suffice. Attending a few big conventions or rallies also falls short.1 In this chapter, we combine publicly available evidence with in-depth personal interviews and local observations to provide an overview of the organizations and networks that make up the Tea Party. We start with the efforts of the gra.s.sroots organizers who moved during 2009 and 2010 from sparking rallies to creating regularly meeting Tea Party groups across the country. Then we look in greater detail at the Tea Partylinked national organizations that operate with backing from right-wing billionaires and other wealthy interests. These top-down organizations, most of them established years ago, deserve a close look, not because they simply created or directly control the Tea Party, but because they are effectively leveraging gra.s.sroots activism to gain new advantages in durable crusades to remake the Republican Party and s.h.i.+ft legislative agendas at all levels of U.S. government.

As we introduce the key players in the Tea Party field of organizations, we probe the many ways in which local and national actors influence one another. How do local Tea Party people tap regional and national resources to facilitate gra.s.sroots efforts? And how do national organizations use ties to popular undertakings to enhance their own clout? The advantages go both ways, yet tensions remain that raise provocative questions. What happens when wary, independent-minded gra.s.sroots organizers deal with national or regional orchestrators trying to coordinate popular activism, or when local Tea Partiers look out and see well-funded organizations and ambitious operators advocating in the name of the Tea Party as a whole? In the final a.n.a.lysis, do rank-and-file Tea Partiers have any real control over the impresarios and politicians who speak so loudly in their name-and do they care?

GRa.s.sROOTS GROUPS GALORE.

After a full and varied career in business and civic endeavors, Tom Robinson, in his early sixties, was in a "semi-retirement phase" in early 2009, moving back and forth between domiciles in the Richmond area and a cottage in the village of Moon, in Mathews County on the Middle Peninsula of Virginia. After hearing about the Tea Party as a way for citizens to "rise up," Tom decided to found a group, partly as a way to connect to others in an area that attracts many newly resident retirees.2 He tracked down Jean Casanave, who had published a stirring letter to the editor of the Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal, lamenting that Americans were "losing our way" and urging people to "fight" for "our Const.i.tution" as well as "small government, low taxes, [and] religious freedom."3 On a pretty day in June 2009, about two dozen early recruits gathered on picnic benches in front of Tom's seaside cottage to found the Peninsula Patriots.4 A news piece in the local paper indicated that people could get more information at the group's new Meetup site. Because he had previously used the social networking site to a.s.semble a voluntary group to fight attention deficit disorder, Tom knew that Meetup can "help you get organized in a hurry." Before long, dozens of Peninsula Patriots were gathering monthly to hear speakers and plan for rallies, lobbying, and local advocacy.

In Lynchburg, Virginia, several "local ladies" got things going in spring 2009 with email and leaflets stuffed under winds.h.i.+eld wipers in the Walmart parking lot. Lynchburg Tea Partiers partic.i.p.ated in several more city and regional protests, and about fifty carpooled to the huge 9/12 Rally in Was.h.i.+ngton DC. Meanwhile, about an hour away in Charlottesville, two friends a.s.sembled twenty people, including sympathetic talk radio hosts, to mount stirring rallies and stage protests at the office of Representative Tom Perriello, Democrat of Virginia, fifth district.5 In both towns, new leaders stepped up to found regularly meeting groups. Following the big DC rally in September 2009, more of the same seemed "anticlimactic," explains Lynchburg Tea Partier John Patterson. He took the reins from the early rally organizers to influence local GOP committees and gear up for the next year's primary and general elections. In Charlottesville, the baton was pa.s.sed in early 2010 to Carole Thorpe, a stay-at-home mother with lots of volunteer experience in community theatrical events. During 2009, Carole went from being "always in the front row" at rallies, to serving as one of four bus leaders for travel to the 9/12 DC rally. Carole had the know-how to lead the Jefferson Area Tea Party in a transition from "street organization" to a members.h.i.+p group that convenes at least monthly and uses subcommittees to pursue multiple projects at once.

The Southwest Metro Tea Party in Chanha.s.san, near the Twin Cities of Minnesota, was launched by Cindy Pugh and Mara Souvannasoth, two women who did not know each other before the effervescence of 2009. Mara calls herself a "stay-at-home homeschooling mom" and Cindy has worked in retail management and now devotes much of her time to civic activism.6 Each was attracted to the Tea Party and active in rallies from the start, but they did not meet until a trip to Was.h.i.+ngton DC in November 2009, when three busloads traveled from Minnesota in response to Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's call to protest the imminent pa.s.sage of health reform legislation by the U.S. House of Representatives.7 Feeling a "strong desire to fully wake up and wake others up," they decided to work together, to "jump off the sidelines" and start a Tea Party. In June 2010, they convened an organizational meeting at the Chanha.s.san Library, and before long the Southwest Metro Tea Party became something of a powerhouse and model.8 One of the largest groups in the state, it has moved to the more capacious American Legion hall, where it meets, not merely monthly, but every Monday night from 7:00 to 8:30 P.M. Three sessions per month are devoted to speakers and discussion; the fourth Monday is "Movie Night," where people bring family and friends to the likes of "Atlas Shrugged" or doc.u.mentaries dramatizing the evils of liberalism.

The Tea Party could have been a flash in the pan, at least at the gra.s.s roots. After the Santelli rant, the first "Tea Party" rallies were mounted to colorful effect on February 27, 2009, and more extensively on Tax Day, April 15, 2009. Synchronization depended on ma.s.s media and national advocacy groups. Along with right-wing blogs and talk radio, Fox News, including colorful host Glenn Beck, created the sense that a ma.s.sive "movement" was afoot. Online interactive maps let organizers combine efforts and guided would-be protestors to events. And the DC-based advocacy organization FreedomWorks posted tips on "How to Organize Your Own 'Tea Party' Protest."9 Rally organizers were urged to prepare homemade signs with "BIG LETTERS" and pick a visible location such as a "main street at an intersection with lots of traffic." Carpools, press releases, and contacts with local talk radio, were additional parts of the recommended menu-as were sign-in sheets to generate "a big list of people that can plan the next, much bigger and louder, event." This formula certainly worked to build protests in the early weeks and months.

But then what? At the time, many observers across the political spectrum expected periodic rallies to be the sum total of Tea Party activity, with after-effects in the form of expanded email lists managed by professionally run advocacy organizations. When Chris Good of The Atlantic got in touch with "national-level conservative groups" to get their sense of the lay of the land in April 2009, a spokesman for FreedomWorks, Adam Brandon, told him that the right was trying to imitate the model of online networking and occasional public protests developed so effectively on the left by MoveOn.org. "Activists in general have learned a lot from the last election," observed Brandon. "You'd see 50 MoveOn.org people standing outside a gas station. We feel just as strongly about our issues."10 FreedomWorks also planned to send people with sign-up sheets to public rallies, hoping (as the Atlantic reporter explained) to use protests against the Obama agenda to "fill conservative e-mail lists and coffers with new support."11 At that juncture, no one antic.i.p.ated that hundreds of regularly meeting local Tea Parties would pop up across America during 2009 and 2010.

Tea Party Organization in Perspective.

Had the Tea Party turned into a glorified email list, no social scientist who studies U.S. voluntary a.s.sociations and interest groups would have been surprised. Professionally run operations that involve gra.s.sroots citizens mainly via sporadic, emotional appeals to send money or take an online "action" are the norm these days.

Historically, from the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, politically and civically active Americans relied on voluntary a.s.sociations rooted in local chapters where people met face to face, once every week or two, or perhaps monthly. Members.h.i.+p dues and people's time were the prime resources. The most effective and powerful U.S. voluntary a.s.sociations were federations, paralleling the U.S. government, where thousands of local members.h.i.+p groups sent elected leaders or representatives to attend conventions and run state and national organizations. But this cla.s.sic model of U.S. voluntary organization fell into disuse after the 1960s.12 There after, professionally run lobbying groups took center stage. If so-called members are involved at all, they are usually just scattered adherents who receive messages online or in the mail and make monetary contributions. Professional staffers run advocacy group offices, and they spend most of their time doing media appearances, lobbying officials, and raising funds at c.o.c.ktail parties or via databases of potential supporters. Their unorganized followings do not pay regular dues, do not elect leaders, and have few mechanisms by which to hold the professionals accountable.

A few recently active a.s.sociations on the right and left have found ways to link themselves to groups at the gra.s.s roots, usually through preexisting organizations or networks, or in close relations.h.i.+p to one of the two major political parties. The then more than century-old National Rifle a.s.sociation was converted during the 1970s into a right-wing advocacy juggernaut, combining well-funded lobbying with links to people in localities and states who still belonged to gun clubs. Long-standing teachers' a.s.sociations turned into unions and became active in Democratic Party politics. Around the edges of the GOP in the 1980s and 1990s, evangelical religious conservatives created a.s.sociations rooted in church-based networks (much as the Civil Rights movement did in relation to black churches in the 1950s and 1960s). But, mostly, recent U.S. political organizations operate as what Marshall Ganz has aptly called "bodyless heads," that is, they are professionally run operations headquartered in Was.h.i.+ngton DC with no "ground game" to speak of, and certainly with no accountability to independently organized local members.h.i.+p groups.13 Hard-fought presidential contests bring temporary exceptions to this "bodyless heads" scenario because voters have to be mobilized in every state and local district. Starting in the 1980s, national and state Republican parties learned to work with Christian-right activists and tap into church networks to engage socially conservative voters. In the early 2000s, Democrats followed suit to some degree, as the presidential campaigns of Howard Dean in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008 a.s.sembled impressive national networks grounded, at least in part, in face-to-face local meetings. The spread of Internet access made it easier both for people to join national lists and organize local house meetings. But presidentially focused undertakings always seem to lose steam after the candidate loses or wins.

Notably, the Obama for America organizing juggernaut that helped win the presidency lost energy and clout as it was relabeled "Organizing for America" and incorporated as a division of the Democratic National Committee.14 Ironically, following the landmark 2008 elections, Democrats fused volunteer activism into official party organs at the very same time that the Tea Party rubric inspired conservative gra.s.sroots activists to organize separately from official GOP organizations. For conservative activists in and around the edges of the GOP, early 2009 was a scary time, in that they suddenly faced a new "Democratic establishment" in Was.h.i.+ngton DC. But it was also a juncture of openness and opportunity because, in the wake of the discredited Bush presidency and failed McCain campaign, official GOP organizations were not going to be able to control what happened next-the exact opposite of what was happening on the left side of the political spectrum.

Certainly, early Tea Party protests were not launched or controlled by the inst.i.tutional Republican Party, and local Tea Parties were not deferential to establishment GOP ideas about candidates or policy priorities. A scattering of Republican House members managed to speak at some of the early Tea Party rallies. But then-Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, was turned away when he tried to get involved in April 2009, and national-level GOP operatives were not engaged.15 Some activists were previously involved with local Republican Party organs, and other Tea Partiers soon moved to take over their GOP committees. Yet from the start, Tea Party instigators expressed disdain for most existing GOP organizations and "establishment Republicans," especially at state and national levels. Even Karl Rove, operating as a GOP mastermind outside of official party organizations themselves, was not paid deference. Tea Party instigators, from local activists to professional right-wing national ideologues, were determined to act independently, and put pressure on the GOP at the same time that they attacked Obama and the Democrats.

So the very first gra.s.sroots Tea Party eruptions were not an inst.i.tutional GOP creation, and national advocates were channeling energy towards protests and list-building in early 2009. A mystery remains: Why and how did Tea Party activists at the local level quickly move beyond mounting rallies and compiling email lists to organizing locally run Tea Party groups that met regularly and set their own agendas? This was a crucial step, one that set the Tea Party apart from the "bodyless" types of organizations that dominate contemporary U.S. political life (even though it remained to be seen whether local Tea Parties, once established, would be able to control what national organizations do in their name).

The Spread of Local Tea Parties.

Local Tea Parties emerged in the spring of 2009, and spread through the summer and fall of 2009 and on into 2010. In the fall of 2010, a team of Was.h.i.+ngton Post reporters succeeded in contacting the organizers of about 650 Tea Party groups, from a list of over 1400 "possible groups."16 We developed an even more comprehensive tally of local groups in the winter and spring of 2011, by using multiple online searches to find 804 currently active Tea Parties with some presence on the web, plus 164 more groups that appear to have held regular meetings at some point since February 2009. A few states, like Vermont, Delaware, and the Dakotas, have fewer than three Tea Party groups that we could trace. Fifteen states have more than thirty Tea Party groups; a few states (California, Florida, and Texas) have more than fifty local groups apiece.17 Of course, bigger states have more people who could partic.i.p.ate, so in Figure 3.1, we show where Tea Parties are most prevalent compared to the state population. The northern Rocky Mountain States have an unusually heavy Tea Party density, as do states in the Ozarks and lower Appalachian range and states along the southwestern border.

Just counting Tea Parties is not a perfect measure of Tea Party prevalence because it does not take into account how many people partic.i.p.ate in each individual group. So we also mark on the map the Tea Parties that claim an online members.h.i.+p of at least 500 people.18 Online members.h.i.+p is certainly not the same as the number of people who actually attend meetings, but it does give us a sense of where Tea Party groups have a deeper reach in their communities. Large Tea Party groups are found in state capitols and big cities, and beyond that, they are especially common in the South.

We believe our study caught local Tea Parties at close to the peak of their spread. There may be scattered Tea Parties that have no web indications whatsoever, but by 2011 local websites were the rule. Although local groups have continued to emerge during 2011-often because people who attend Tea Parties in a metropolitan area decide to spin off satellite groups closer to home-preexisting Tea Parties also fade away. The net result may be a wash. Even if our tally is merely in the ballpark, it underlines the scope of local Tea Party organizing. Tea Parties are far from being as widespread as local chapters of cla.s.sic U.S. voluntary federations such as the Boy Scouts, the American Legion, or even the American Bowling Congress, each of which once had millions of members organized in an elaborate network of active local chapters.19 But a stock of more than 800 regularly meeting local groups is unusual for any U.S. political organization or network since the 1960s.

FIGURE 3.1. Local Tea Party Groups in the United States. Number of Tea Party groups per million people in each state, and location of largest Tea Party groups. Data from nationwide survey of local Tea Party websites, spring 2011.

The spread of local Tea Parties was hardly antic.i.p.ated in advance, not even by the right-wing media stars or national advocacy organizations trying to spur and exploit Tea Party activism in early 2009. As we have seen, FreedomWorks and other professionally run advocacy organizations were thinking in terms of rallies with television cameras and sign-up sheets to capture new adherents and donors. As we will discuss in more detail in Chapter 4, Fox News star Glenn Beck did make active efforts to build locally meeting groups through his 9/12 Project, launched in March of 2009. Though this campaign certainly got several hundred local groups mobilized, less than half of the Tea Parties we found make any reference to the 9/12 Project.20 Whatever local organizing the national honchos expected, gra.s.sroots Tea Partiers soon accomplished more.

We can tell ourselves that local Tea Party organizing "had to happen." Rank-and-file conservatives moved toward holding regular meetings in an effort to get a handle on the many opportunities suddenly coming their way-opportunities to mount rallies and help people get to them; to debate core values like "Const.i.tutionalism"; to develop capacities to capture publicity, pressure government officials, and take over formerly moribund GOP committees. But let's not kid ourselves: the mere presence of opportunities does not automatically mean that anyone will seize the day. People have to do the hard work and keep at it. Most local Tea Parties were not just preexisting groups of other kinds that draped themselves in a new label after February 2009. Remarkably, local instigators created and sustained brand-new members.h.i.+p groups, ongoing local parts of a nationally shared ident.i.ty. This sort of thing used to happen all of the time in American civic and political life. But it is much rarer nowadays, so we have more to learn about why and how it happened.

Who Were the Local Founders-and How Did They Do It?

No national surveys pinpoint local Tea Party founders, let alone provide a window into the ideas and skills they brought to the job. Sadly, surveys today are obsessed with att.i.tudes and individual characteristics, and pay virtually no attention to organizations or inst.i.tutions. They treat individuals as isolates floating around in asocial s.p.a.ces-which is not the way real people live their lives. But we can still gain some insights into what happened. From interviews and tracking local Tea Parties in public sources, we have learned that these groups were often launched by sets of organizers who did not know one another personally before they met in rallies or other protest settings. The founders of Tea Party groups acted out of like-mindedness and the desire to do ever-more-challenging things in an exciting mobilization, and they brought recognizable resources, experiences, and skills to the task.

Local organizers have important resources. Leaders who launched local Tea Parties and keep them going are usually men or women of at least modest economic means who find themselves in life circ.u.mstances where they have some flexibility in the use of their time. Retirees or semi-retired leaders often crop up-such as Tom Robinson, founder of the Peninsula Patriots whose story we briefly glimpsed in the vignette at the start of this section, or the Arizona couple profiled in an earlier chapter. Ironically, many organizers and leaders of local Tea Parties are supported in part by Social Security or veterans' pensions, and also enjoy health benefits from Medicare or veterans' health care programs. U.S. taxpayers subsidize their incomes and well-being, and hence give them the time and capacity to organize protests and Tea Party groups.

Below retirement age, Tea Party orchestrators may be small business owners free to engage in volunteer efforts while still meeting the demands of earning a living. Or they may be people who can step back from salaried employment and still get by on a spouse's salary. For example, John Patterson, the organizer from Lynchburg, Virginia, lost his salaried position and now works as an occasional consultant while doing Tea Party work. Another instance is Gena Bell, the founder of the Eastern Hills Community Tea Party in Cincinnati, Ohio, whose story is told by Was.h.i.+ngton Post reporter Amy Gardner.21 Gena's husband earns a salary, and encouraged her to drop her part-time job to do more Tea Party activities.

Many local organizers are stay-at-home moms, who rely on financial support from spouses or family resources. Both Carole Thorpe in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Mara Souvannasoth in Chanha.s.san, Minnesota, exemplify this archetypical sort of American civic activist. Mothers who are either not wage-earning employees or who work part-time are mainstays of every kind of civic and political activism in the United States. In the Charlottesville and Chanha.s.san Tea Parties, the highly effective leaders are very busy women, who enjoy sufficient economic support and flexibility in daily routines to alternate motherly work with Tea Party activities.

Tea Party group founders and leaders thus seem to be reasonably economically comfortable and not tied down by demands of nine-to-five paid employment or overwhelming family obligations. But these are merely enabling factors. They alert us to the sort of folks who could organize Tea Parties but don't go deep enough to tell us why and how actual people took the plunge to create genuinely new organizations. A few tiny Tea Parties amount to little more than relabeled kin groups, and some are the progeny of different right-wing organizations, including the 2008 Ron Paul campaign, and the 9/12 Project, a network founded around the same time as the Tea Parties by Fox News host Glenn Beck.22 But most local Tea Parties were freshly created organizations launched by self-appointed organizers who started out as occasional protestors.

Friends sometimes worked together as Tea Party instigators. In the central Virginia vignettes above, we note the "local ladies" who organized early rallies in Lynchburg, and the male friends who did the same in Charlottesville. In both cases, rally organizers seemed to have known each other before Santelli's rant. But as happened in Chanha.s.san, Minnesota, many of the leaders who stepped up to organize ongoing local Tea Parties were drawn in for the first time through public events. They were conservative-minded people who attended Tea Party rallies and only later made the transition from simple partic.i.p.ation to organizing. People got going out of a conviction that it was time for conservatives to "get off the couch" and act, and from the sense that it would be fun to work with others who felt just as angry and threatened as you did about Obama and goings-on in Was.h.i.+ngton DC. When people told us how they got inspired, or met others with whom they could work to found a Tea Party, they echoed the same theme: how great it was to discover they were not alone in "shouting at the TV."

Prior experiences in organizing political or civic endeavors were very helpful for the men and women who took the first steps to establish ongoing local Tea Parties. We do not know how often inexperienced people tried to start Tea Parties, either with or without success, let alone how often experienced organizers tried and failed. But existing scholars.h.i.+p suggests, and our fieldwork confirms, that people who take it upon themselves to mount a rally or found a regularly meeting group need to have some confidence and know-how. Tea Partiers are usually well-educated, which gives them general skills to speak and write and gather information. Many have surely learned relevant skills in the workplace, or from organizing community activities for kids and parents. "'It's like being a Girl Scout mom,'" Gena Bell told the Was.h.i.+ngton Post's Amy Gardner as she recounted drumming up volunteers for rallies and fielding phone calls from fellow Tea Partiers and politicians. And many had previous political or civic experiences they could draw upon.

Previous involvement in conservative politics could be very helpful in launching a new Tea Party. When she set out to launch the Greater Boston Tea Party in early 2009, Christen Varley had social contacts as well as relevant skills from previous involvement in conservative causes. She could start emailing potential recruits at once. Yet experience in nonpolitical civic activities could also help. Tom Robinson knew how to use MeetUp to rev up the Peninsula Patriots in Virginia because he had already used that organizing website to a.s.semble a group dealing with attention deficit disorder. Similarly, Carole Thorpe in Charlottesville, Virginia, had loads of transferable skills from her volunteer work in community theater productions, where she had not only acted dramatic parts but also pitched in to organize productions.

Because of her experience in theater projects, Carole is a whirlwind at orchestrating while delegating. She knows how to inspire and direct, yet also get other people to take responsibility as part of teams, in which each person, as she explained to us, does not feel that it "all falls on" him or her alone. When one of us (Theda) visited a meeting of the Jefferson Area Tea Party in Charlottesville, Carole's organizing skills were on full display-even if, as she later explained, she had not been active in politics prior to the Tea Party. Carole was getting her flock of about 100 Tea Partiers organized into multiple subcommittees, each with shared leaders.h.i.+p and responsibility. Through the multiple ongoing subcommittees, the Jefferson Area Tea Party would be able to draw up a new const.i.tution and bylaws; communicate regularly with members; do education and outreach in the community; monitor elected representatives in local, state, and national government; and mount regular rallies at the recurrent ritual peak-points in the Tea Party calendar-Tax Day in April, Independence Day in July, and Const.i.tution Day in September.

Indeed, as local Tea Parties emerged across America, it was everywhere important for an organizing nucleus to take shape, so duties like finding appropriate meeting places, arranging refreshments, and scheduling speakers could be divvied up. A clear marker of organizational development is the formal division of labor, and we saw this happening in a number of the local groups we visited. Local Tea Party leaders told us of their efforts to recruit and encourage committee chairs and multiple partic.i.p.ants in leaders.h.i.+p teams, people who might or might not be elected by other members. Websites for local Tea Parties often identify multiple people as joint leaders and sometimes name different people to contact about various aspects of ongoing Tea Party activities. Sometimes the founders found themselves unhappy with the way things evolved after they formed a leaders.h.i.+p team-that happened in one local Tea Party when more socially conservative leaders took over from a more secularly minded libertarian who started the group. But in other instances, the original kingpin(s) or queenpin(s) stayed very involved, and simply inspired others to join the leaders.h.i.+p team.