The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism: on Civil Rights
Paul LePage:
Publicly insulted the NAACP
Governor Paul LePage made a point of publicly insulting the NAACP and ordering the removal of murals at the Maine Department of Labor that depicted scenes of working people in the state's past and honored figures such as Francis Perkins, the 1st female
Secretary of Labor in America. Maine Governor LePage projects an in-your-face image that thrills his Tea Party backers. Similar pugnaciousness has been on display from many GOP Representatives and Senators in Washington DC.
Source: The Remaking of Republican Conservatism, p.168
Jan 2, 2012
Tea Party:
Majority oppose gay marriage or civil unions
Tea Party support for regulation of marriage is certainly not limited to [the few groups that raise the issue]. Although the Tea Party includes a significant portion of libertarians who think differently, Tea Partiers are more likely than Americans in
general to oppose legal recognition of gay marriage or civil unions. About 2/3 of all Americans favor one or another of those forms of recognition, but less than half of Tea Party supporters do--and 40% of them advocate "no legal recognition" of any kind
Source: The Remaking of Republican Conservatism, by T.Skocpol, p. 58
Jan 2, 2012
Tea Party:
More male Tea Party members, but more female leadership
We were urged to talk about "sexism" in the Tea Party. [But] in our field observations, we saw many energetic women taking the lead in grassroots Tea Party activities. Both men & women serve as local and state Tea Party leaders, of course. But it appears
that, although men may be more likely to support the Tea Party, women are dominating the organizing efforts.Many of the men who tell pollsters that they sympathize with or generally support the Tea Party may be doing so from their armchairs. In the
local Tea Party meetings we visited, women provided active leadership. Even when a man chaired the meeting, women were invariably in charge of the sign-up sheets & email lists.
It certainly appears that some women have a great deal of influence at the
local level, and some have used grassroots Tea Party activism as a stepping-stone to state and national influence. That would be nothing new in the annals of American civic democracy. Women's leadership has been well documented for the Christian Right.
Source: The Remaking of Republican Conservatism, p. 42-43
Jan 2, 2012
Tea Party:
Racial minorities seen as undeserving, but so are whites
As we listened to our Tea Party interlocutors talk about underserving people collecting welfare benefits, racially-laden group stereotypes certainly did float in and out of the interviews, even when people never mentioned African-Americans directly.
A sense of "us versus them" along racial and ethnic fault lines clearly marks the worldview of many people active in the Tea Party.At least one scholarly study suggests that problematic racial assumptions are widely held by Tea Party supporters. Tea
Party supporters tended to rate blacks and Latinos as less hardworking than did other respondents. Tea Partiers' views of minorities were even more extreme than other avowed conservatives and Republicans. It is important to note that, compared to other
Americans, Tea Partiers rate WHITES relatively poorly on these characteristics, too. Tea Partiers have negative views about all their fellow citizens; it is just that they make extra-jaundiced assessments of the work ethic of racial and ethnic minorities
Source: The Remaking of Republican Conservatism, p. 68-69
Jan 2, 2012
Page last updated: Feb 21, 2019