The Tea Party versus the ‘freeloaders’

What does the Tea Party want? As the debt ceiling debate rages in Washington, that should be the central question in U.S. political discourse. After all, it is the rise of the Tea Party that revitalized the Republican Party in 2009 and gave it the muscle to deliver a shellacking to the Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections. And it is the radicalism of the Tea Party and the freshman legislators it elected that is often blamed for the uncompromising stance of the Republicans in the current budget negotiations.

That’s why “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” a recent study of the Tea Party by Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, and graduate students Vanessa Williamson and John Coggin, is so important. An expanded version of the paper, which appeared this spring in the journal Perspectives on Politics, will be published as a book by the Oxford University Press later this year.

Prof. Skocpol is an unashamed progressive, but what is striking about her team’s work is its respect for the Tea Party and its members. “Commentators have sometimes noted the irony that these same Tea Partiers who oppose ‘government spending’ are themselves recipients of Social Security,” the paper notes. “Don’t they know these are ‘big government’ programs?”

The usual assumption of the news media elites is that the Tea Party’s worldview is inchoate or just plain uninformed. “I think the pundit class tends to treat popular ideologies as products of ignorance,” Prof. Skocpol told me. But when she and her colleagues delved deeper, including distributing questionnaires to Tea Party activists and interviewing many of them, the scholars found that “what appear to be contradictory or uninformed views of federal government programs make better sense once we understand how Tea Party activists view themselves in relation to other groups in society.”

When it comes to the size of government and its proper role, Prof. Skocpol and her colleagues found the Tea Partiers had a clear and coherent point of view, but one that does not fully jibe with the orthodoxies of libertarian ideologues or of elite, ultraconservative, Republican Party doctrine.

The central tension for the Tea Party grassroots isn’t between the Big Brother state and the freedom-loving individual, or between inefficient government spending and effective free markets. Instead, the researchers found that the fundamental distinction for Tea Partiers is not state versus individual, it is the division of their country into “workers” versus “people who don’t work.”

Some of those “people who don’t work” are the young. And the Tea Party rank and file, 70 to 75 per cent of whom are over 45, are worried that the feckless youth are taking over the country and emptying the state’s coffers. These young “freeloaders” include the Tea Partiers’ own relatives. One man told the researchers: “My grandson [is] 14 and he asked, ‘Why should I work, why can’t I just get free money?’ ”

“The conditions for young adults to establish themselves have changed radically,” Prof. Skocpol told me. “It is harder for young adults. They may live at home longer. And that manifests itself in ways that are easy to condemn morally. The older generation is having a little trouble understanding what is happening to their children and especially grandchildren.”

The other group of government-supported non-workers the Tea Party is worried about is illegal immigrants, which is often equated with racism. But the researchers take great pains to point out that for Tea Partiers, the immigration issue isn’t race-based; it is about deserving, income-earning citizen and unauthorized, foreign freeloader.

Important political implications can be drawn from this research. First, there is a latent but potentially vast divide between the grassroots and the conservative elite on the most important U.S. fiscal issue – the twin entitlements of Social Security and Medicare. Cutting these programs is a core tenet of faith for the Tea Party’s funders and its intellectuals, but its members view them as earned benefits that belong to hard-working Americans as surely as do their homes and private savings.

The second take-away is for the Democrats. It has become conventional wisdom that the way to make social welfare programs affordable is to direct them at the people who really need them. But this study of the Tea Party suggests that the government programs that earn long-term public support, including among conservatives, are those that are perceived to be both universal and deserved.

Helping the poor is well and good, but when times get tough, the institutions we are willing to pay for are those that assist virtuous, hard-working people – in other words, ourselves.

Origin
Source: Globe & Mail