Rebel flags at the White House - An (on edit) Sociologist weighs in [View all]

[Scuba]

Last edited Tue Oct 15, 2013, 06:44 PM - Edit history (1)

This is posted on facebook. I'm not a member, so cannot link to it. It was forwarded to me by my sister, a friend of the psychologist who wrote it. It sounds on the money to me.

When push comes to shove, this is metaphorically what the tea party is all about, based on statistical generalities of meta-research. It is the latest incarnation of far-right nativist social movements in the U.S. such as the Know-Nothings (1850's), the Ku Klux Klan (1920's), and the John Birch Society (1950's).

The father of David and Charles Koch, primary funders of the tea party, was one of the original Birchers. The primary correlate is anxiety about social change. All have been irrational, intolerant, ethnocentric and paranoid, believing THEIR America was being taken from THEM, the REAL Americans: white, middle-class, English-speaking, native-born, mostly male, middle-age and older, mostly Calvinist Christian. It is composed of reactionary rather than moderate (or evolutionary) conservatives.

Conservatives don't like change. Moderate conservatives realize they must adapt to change, but choose to do so in an incremental, evolutionary manner - in part, to stave off the revolutionary change that might otherwise occur. Reactionary conservatives act on behalf of relatively advantaged groups and want to reverse progress, to return to a period they perceived themselves as dominant and unchallenged. They perceive change as subversive and themselves as victims. Such reactionary groups emerge during periods of significant social change, when their sense of prestige, deference, and cultural superiority appear undermined and threatened.

Less than 30% of tea party rhetoric is "conservative" according to the primary tenets of post WWII conservatives. More than 70% is what social scientists often consider "pseudo-conservative," utilizing conservative rhetoric for non-conservative ends, to attack the enemy (Parker and Barreto, among others). Most tea partiers themselves are pseudo-conservatives.

The election of Barack Obama, the first black president, is too absurd to absorb for many tea partiers. It cannot possibly have happened legitimately. Therefore, he and his election must be delegitimized. This has occurred simultaneously with significant Hispanic immigration, the first Hispanic woman on the Supreme Court, the first female Speaker of the House, the legalization of gay marriage in +20% of our states, the passage of affordable health insurance, and the attempt to recover from a major economic recession. The very identity of tea partiers is threatened by such changes, most specifically by having a black man in the presidency, serving as the primary "face of America." It should not be surprising that the majority of tea partiers reside in our southern states.

On edit, the author is a sociologist, not a psychologist. My bad.