The Tea Party may not be what you think

A review of Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party, by Lawrence Rosenthal and Christine Trost

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

If you know nothing about the Tea Party other than what you’ve picked up from the daily news and a magazine article here and there, chances are excellent that you’ll learn a great deal from reading Steep. Here are just a few of the insights I gained from this superb collection of scholarly articles that examine the Tea Party from the front, the back, upside down, and sideways:

• There is, really, no such thing as “The Tea Party.” The term encompasses thousands of organizations at the national, statewide, and local levels that at any given time may well be found squabbling with one another about ideology, tactics, or just plain personality differences. I knew about the proliferation of groups but not about the diversity of views among them.
• The Tea Party phenomenon first surfaced less than a month after Barack Obama’s inauguration as President in 2009 — yes, less than four years ago — as what one scholar calls a “test marketing” campaign backed by money from the Koch Brothers and mainstream Republican operatives such as former Congressman Dick Armey, which we all knew very well at the time. However, the movement spawned by this intentional investment in destabilizing the fledgling Obama Administration grew so quickly and with such spontaneity that its original backers soon lost control. Whatever else it might be, the Tea Party is a grassroots phenomenon.
• Unlike the Christian Right before it, the Tea Party brought few new voters into the Republican column. As several of the authors in Steep make clear from their studies of a wide variety of poll results, the Tea Party is populated largely by Right-Wing Republicans who usually vote, anyway. (They also tend to be white males at or nearing retirement age.) The Tea Party brought passion to the Republican grassroots base, providing the necessary motivation to draw more foot-soldiers to the conservative cause.
• The old John Birch Society, which we all thought had gone the way of the Cult of Isis in the 1960s after William F. Buckley, Jr. consigned it to purgatory, somehow managed to resuscitate itself and become engaged in Tea Party activities. So did former leaders of the White Citizens Councils, the militia movement, and other assorted cranks, kooks, and eccentrics and the delusions they brought with them. Since nearly one-half (44%) of Tea Party adherents professed to believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim and was not born in the United States, using the term delusional is not out of line.

The most intriguing chapter in Steep is University of Michigan political science and women’s studies professor Lisa Disch’s, in which she “advances a counterintuitive argument: The Tea Party movement is sparked, in part, by the threat its supporters perceive to their share in two key programs of the liberal welfare state [i.e., Social Security and Medicare]. Tea Party politics is conservative, but its supporters’ material commitments and even aspects of their rhetoric place them in a liberal genealogy.” Disch argues that, during its first two decades, Social Security was explicitly racialized — farmworkers and domestic workers were specifically excluded from benefits (and guess who they meant by that!) — and that for decades afterward Social Security was seen as largely a benefit to white people, even after the coverage was broadened. “This makes Tea Party mobilization a ‘white citizenship’ movement: action in defense of material benefits that confer ‘racial standing’ in a polity that purports to deny precisely that — special standing based on race . . .  [T]he Tea Party movement belongs to liberal America even as Tea Party rhetoric denounces liberalism and liberals denounce Tea Partiers.”

Since I’m not bound by the strictures of academic “objectivity” (whatever that is), I can sum up all this information with my own conclusion: The Tea Party is the latest and the most extreme expression of the Right-Wing Republican movement that has been growing since its inception in the 1940s and 1950s in McCarthyite anti-Communism, the John Birch Society, and Southern opposition to civil rights, and in the backlash to the New Left, feminism, and the anti-war movement. Though the Tea Party is heterogeneous in many ways, and its focus nationally has been on advancing the Republican agenda of small government and rolling back taxes, the overwhelming majority of its adherents also embrace the social politics of the Christian Right (anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-women’s rights) and the suppressed but all too real racial resentment that has been the centerpiece of the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy since the days of Richard Nixon.  

As I write this, however, I wonder whether anyone but historians and political scientists will care much about the Tea Party five years, or even a year, from now. It remains to be seen what impact the Republican losses of 2012 will have on the spirit and the cohesion of the Tea Party.

Steep is a product of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies at the University of California’s flagship campus, edited by Lawrence Rosenthal and Christine Trost, the Center’s director and associate director, respectively. More power to them!

Mass media, genocide, and the fate of the world

A review of Kill the Messenger: The Media’s Role in the Fate of the World, by Maria Armoudian

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

The emergence of mass society was one of the defining characteristics of the 20th Century. Enabled by population growth, industrialization, urbanization, rising rates of literacy, and advances in transportation and communications, mass society became a reality for growing numbers of people in more and more far-flung regions of the planet as the century unfolded. In turn, mass society facilitated the growth of Communism, Fascism, and other varieties of authoritarianism. Among the less extreme effects of this new phenomenon in human affairs were the advent of “public opinion,” the globalization of fashion, and the rapid development of important new industries such as advertising, public relations, and broadcast journalism. The “mass communications” we have taken for granted for so many years now were, properly speaking, an artifact of the 20th Century.

In Kill the Messenger, political scientist and radio broadcaster Maria Armoudian ably examines the central role of mass media in human affairs over the course of the century. Through brief case studies of events in Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and the former states of Yugoslavia, she explores the influential — and perhaps essential — function of the media as an enabler of genocide. Armoudian shows how authoritarian regimes in South Africa, Chile, Taiwan, and Burundi made similar efforts to harness the media to help promote the murder, torture, and imprisonment of their own citizens but with much more mixed results. In South Africa, for example, she reveals how new attitudes in the news media helped bring about a largely peaceful conclusion to the era of apartheid. However, Kill the Messenger is about mass media’s place in society, not just its relationship with governments. Armoudian’s examination of public opinion about climate change demonstrates the huge impact of relatively minor investments in media by Exxon Mobil, the Koch Brothers, and other naysayers.

Armoudian puts to work the linguistic concept of “framing” throughout the book, showing, for example, how climate change deniers managed to persuade the mass media to present the issue as open to debate. This frame (“debate”) has dominated coverage not just on Fox News but on most other television and radio networks as well.  Similarly, frames (“blaming” and “heroes-versus-villains”) dominated news coverage in countries where genocide became generally accepted.

Kill the Messenger is an important book because it squeezes between two covers a collection of observations and insights about many of the seminal events of the 20th Century, rendering the history of mass society understandable through the lens of mass media. However, it remains to be seen how much longer Armoudian’s analysis will help illuminate events in the future. The emergence of new communications technologies revolving about the Internet may have thrown a monkey wrench into the phenomenon of mass media. It’s far too early to tell.

This fascinating book would have benefitted from a better publisher than Prometheus Books. The text is rife with glaring typos that even a cursory proofreading would have caught. The cover art is uninviting, an unfortunate sign that Prometheus Books either doesn’t know or doesn’t care how to market a book of this significance.