Hofstadter’s Day Is Done

The emergence of the Tea Party in the summer of 2009, only months after the election of Barack Obama, caught many experts in American politics by surprise. At a moment when Democrats were celebrating their newfound dominance in the halls of Washington, angry Americans took to the streets, denouncing the policies of the new administration and warning darkly of an unprecedented threat to the American way of life. Pundits, bloggers, and scholars of American politics all turned to the task of explaining the emergence of this new populist movement. The most oft-cited explanations portrayed the Tea Party as either a populist conservative backlash against the Obama administration or a racial backlash triggered by the election of the nation’s first African-American president. Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto argue that neither of these explanations is adequate. They harness together Richard Hofstadter’s seminal critique of “pseudo-conservatism” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (2008) and the results of their 2011 Multi-State Survey of Race and Politics (MSSRP) to offer a more sophisticated analysis of the sources and consequences of Tea Party adherence.

Relying largely on Hofstadter; Theodore Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality (1950); Daniel Bell, The Radical Right (2008); and Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason (1970), the authors advance their hypothesis: that the Tea Party represents the anxiety of white, Christian, middle-class, heterosexual men to the loss of their social and cultural dominance as “real Americans.” The movement thus represents the latest in a series of “reactionary conservative” movements seeking to ward off demographic and economic change and take the country back to an earlier era of white patriarchal supremacy. The authors argue that the Tea Party is animated not simply by racial resentment but by a broader displacement anxiety filtered through the obsessions with conspiracy and subversion that have long characterized far right movements.

Chapter one lays the theoretical foundation of this hybrid hypothesis. Parker and Barreto begin by setting the Tea Party in the context of two earlier reactionary conservative movements: the second Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society. They argue that, like the Tea Party, both organizations dedicated themselves to policing Americanism; both appealed to the same white, middle-class, male, Christian audience; and both harnessed a “militant nationalism” to conservative political ends. They then turn to the theoretical literature of “right wing movements” to argue that the traits of such movements include a Manichean worldview, religious and secular fundamentalism, the idealization of tradition, an apocalyptic perception of events, an anxious response to social change that festers into paranoia, and a tendency to explain perceived powerlessness with elaborate conspiracy theories.

The authors hypothesize that, for Americans, the office of the presidency is of enormous symbolic importance, that “indeed, the President is America Personified” (p. 36). Given this symbolic importance, they argue that

it is not hard to imagine that people who embrace both normative and phenotypical stereotypes of American identity may believe their way of life is under threat of displacement, and that they are no longer in receipt of the deference to which they have become accustomed. . . . With this in mind, we think it fitting to extend the paranoid social cognition paradigm to Tea Party sympathizers. This mirrors Hofstadter’s impression that perceived persecution extends beyond the individual and attaches to a wider, like-minded community. Under these circumstances it is possible that Tea Party supporters think themselves the victims of a conspiracy.

[pp. 37–38]

The authors devote the rest of the chapter to drawing a contrast between the views of mainstream conservatives and Tea Party conservatives. First they engage in a content analysis that compares articles drawn from the National Review Online with articles and postings on a group of forty-two Tea Party–affiliated websites. Second, they use responses to questions in the 2011 MSSRP that indirectly measure response to the assertion “Barack...