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Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

Is the Tea Party Movement Racist?

By: Inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/

In the short period after President Barack Obama’s election, a new force has emerged in American politics. The so-called Tea Party movement nowadays provides strong opposition to Mr. Obama’s policies.

In light of its growing influence, the Tea Party has come under attack as a movement motivated by racial animus. Some – such as New York Times columnist Charles Blow – have criticized Tea Party rallies for lacking diversity. The NAACP is planning to draft a statement calling on the Tea Party to repudiate extremists within its ranks.

All this leads to the question: is the Tea Party movement really a racist organization in disguise?

More below.

The answer depends on examining what Tea Party movement really is. Most Americans would probably agree that the Tea Party holds a lot in common with the Republican Party. The conservative Fox News channel, for instance, especially TV-host Glenn Beck, was fundamentally instrumental in the Tea Party’s rise.

Polls of Tea Party members also provide useful context. Take this NYT poll, which went out in the field this April. A grand 5% of Tea Party members usually or always vote Democratic (pg. 35); 6% have a positive view of the Democratic Party (pg. 18). With regards to personal ideology, 4% of Tea Partiers consider themselves “somewhat liberal” – while 73% consider themselves “somewhat” or “very conservative” (pg. 41). In the general population, 34% of those polled put themselves into the “somewhat” or “very conservative” column.

Indeed, on almost every issue in which Democrats and Republicans disagree, Tea Party supporters support the side of the Republican Party. To take just one example, a solid 57% of them hold a positive opinion of former President George W. Bush, compared to 27% with a negative opinion (pg. 21).

The Tea Party movement then, looks much like a group of passionate Republicans calling themselves by the name “Tea Partiers.” Unlike presidential candidate Ross Perot, who drew support equally from both parties, the Tea Party draws overwhelmingly from conservatives and Republicans. In 1992, Mr. Perot’s three best states were Maine, Alaska, and Utah. Maine would probably not be in that list were a Tea Party candidate to run.

If the Tea Party is really just a group of politically excited Republicans, it follows that what is true for the Republican Party is true for the Tea Party. How racist is the Tea Party, if at all? Well, just as racist as the Republican Party.

This analysis explains the homogeneity of Tea Party rallies. The Times poll found that 89% of Tea Parties considered themselves white (pg. 41). This is, quite coincidentally, the same exact percentage of John McCain voters who are white. Thus, Tea Party rallies are mainly white because most Tea Partiers are Republicans, and Republican voters are mainly white.

Of course, this analysis begs a second question: Is the Republican Party racist? That is a complicated and controversial line of inquiry. How one answers it probably depends on a number of factors, such as whether one is a Republican or a Democrat.


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 16 Comments

16 comments

  2. Rashaverak

    Two Chairmen of the RNC have admitted this.

    It was called “the southern strategy,” started under Richard M. Nixon in 1968, and described Republican efforts to use race as a wedge issue — on matters such as desegregation and busing — to appeal to white southern voters.

    Ken Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman, this morning will tell the NAACP national convention in Milwaukee that it was “wrong.”

    “By the ’70s and into the ’80s and ’90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out,” Mehlman says in his prepared text. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/…

    “We have lost sight of the historic, integral link between the party and African-Americans,” Steele said. “This party was co-founded by blacks, among them Frederick Douglass. The Republican Party had a hand in forming the NAACP, and yet we have mistreated that relationship. People don’t walk away from parties. Their parties walk away from them.

    “For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South. Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, ‘Bubba’ went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton.”

    http://theplumline.whorunsgov….

    They will say that that is all in the past, but a leopard does not change his spots overnight.

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    Teabaggers….

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  3. Rashaverak

    As a member of the Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis. Part of this interview was printed in Lamis’ book The Two-Party South, then reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater’s name revealed. Bob Herbert reported on the interview in the 6 October 2005 edition of the New York Times. Atwater talked about the GOP’s Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan’s version of it:

       Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964 and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

       Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

       Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L…

  4. Rashaverak

    Space doesn’t permit a complete list of the Gipper’s signals to angry white folks that Republicans prefer to ignore, so two incidents in which Lott was deeply involved will have to suffice. As a young congressman, Lott was among those who urged Reagan to deliver his first major campaign speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in one of the 1960s’ ugliest cases of racist violence. It was a ringing declaration of his support for “states’ rights” – a code word for resistance to black advances clearly understood by white Southern voters.

    Then there was Reagan’s attempt, once he reached the White House in 1981, to reverse a long-standing policy of denying tax-exempt status to private schools that practice racial discrimination and grant an exemption to Bob Jones University. Lott’s conservative critics, quite rightly, made a big fuss about his filing of a brief arguing that BJU should get the exemption despite its racist ban on interracial dating. But true to their pattern of white-washing Reagan’s record on race, not one of Lott’s conservative critics said a mumblin’ word about the Gipper’s deep personal involvement. They don’t care to recall that when Lott suggested that Reagan’s regime take BJU’s side in a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, Reagan responded, “We ought to do it.” Two years later the U.S. Supreme Court in a resounding 8-to-1 decision ruled that Reagan was dead wrong and reinstated the IRS’s power to deny BJU’s exemption.

    http://www.time.com/time/natio…

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