[Essay] Tea Party: a social movement analysis

The 2008 financial crisis proved to be a pivotal moment of modern political history. Some of the adverse effect of the crash have been slow burners, such as the rise of Corbyn and Trump. On the other hand, some effects developed as soon as states began to react to the crash like the Icelandic protests. The Tea Party (TPM) lies in the latter category, with the movement developing pretty much as soon as government bailouts of the banking system began to be rolled out. The movement was mainly organised around opposition to President Obama’s policies for addressing the fiscal crisis with protests being centred on demands for limited government and lower taxes (Arceneaux and Nicholson, 2012). This social movement analysis will look to the American perspective to try and understand, through ideas of the political process model (PPM) and resource mobilisation theory (RMT), how the Tea Party movement (TPM) developed. Through the use of the European, or identity processes, including ideas around culture and framing, the essay will try to explain why the TPM mobilised.

The TPM of today, in harmony with their historical counterparts of the 1700s, hold an unease over increased taxation and were adamantly opposed to government imposed regulation. The Tea Party developed as a conservative, anti-government spending, anti-‘Obamacare’ and anti-Obama force on the right of the American political spectrum (Fetner, 2012). The starting pistol for the mobilisation of a TPM can be traced back to a on air rant by CNBC’s Rick Santelli who, in reaction to the government’s proposed response to the foreclosure crisis, raised the possibility of a ‘Chicago Tea Party’ (Cox, 2014). Across America local Tea Party groups shot up, with the support of right wing media outlets such as Fox News, as well as some newly formed, or reformatted, Political Action Committees (Fetner, 2012). Various Tea Party forces organised a coordinated set of Tax Day protests in cities across America. Pullum (2014: 1378) argues that the ‘Tea Party can be conceptualised as a reactive movement, forming in response to specific threats.’ The Tea Party fits into Hofstadter’s (1969) description of ‘pseudo-conservative’ social movements as a fringe group on the political right that displayed a deep distrust of mainstream politics and despised the New Deal.

A social movement theory that can be applied to the TPM is resource mobilisation theory (RMT), as it stresses the ‘dependence of movements upon external support for success’ (McCarthy & Zald, 1977: 1213). RMT is concerned with why social movements come into being and is interested in how movements ‘effectively mobilise resources to successfully achieve their organisational goals’ (Martin, 2015: 36). Resources are taken to mean anything from material resources — jobs, incomes, savings, and the right to material goods and services — to nonmaterial resources — authority, moral commitment, trust friendship, skills’ (Oberschal,1973: 28).

One of the reasons for the TPM’s success in mobilising supporters is their huge financial and logistical backing from big business and other conservative groups. Despite its claim to be a decentralised movement with a lack of a leadership structure, the Tea Party has the backing of two established organisations, FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity (Meyer & Pullum, 2014). These organisations were already in existence so were able to allocate resources to the new movement. FreedomWorks provided intellectual and logistical support, whilst Americans for Prosperity sponsored numerous Tea Party activities (Schons, 2011). For example, considerable funding and labour were needed to put on events like the Tax Day Tea Party rallies, the largest of which drew at least 7,000 protestors (Galloway, 2009). Skocpol and Williamson (2012) point to the fact many Tea Partiers already had deep ties to local conservative groups and Republican organisations. This argument confirms the view of resource mobilisation theorists such as Doug McAdam (1982) and Anthony Oberchall (1973), who stress the importance of extant networks for movement mobilisation.

As well as the backing of established organisations, the TPM also enjoyed positive coverage by right wing media outlets. Fox News, for example, played a huge role in nurturing grievances and encouraging Tea Party mobilisation. The likes of Fox News added fuel to the Tea Party fire with their extensive covering of the movement, as well as encouraging their viewers to participate in the protests and covering said protests live (Delaney, 2009). Skocpol and Williamson (2012) point out the influence of popular media hosts who openly supported the Tea Party as a major aid to the movement’s mobilisation capacity. They (Skocpol & Williamson, 2012: 13) also argue the ‘steady diet of information and misinformation these media personalities propound’ are core components of Tea Party activism. Conservative media outlets continued to keep up the hype of the TPM through the use of different techniques. Fetner (2012: 764) explains how the news media sponsor polls and then produce a story to cover the polls: ‘This keeps the Tea Party in the news cycle, and it also is a sideways path for news media to deal with topics of misinformation.’ In Pullum’s (2014) opinion, few other social movements have had this sort of national media support from such an early stage.

In combination with its wealthy backers and high profile media supporters, the TPM has also benefitted from online resources. The introduction of online communications has meant a fundamental transformation has taken place in the American media and in the abilities of conservative movements to mobilise their activists and coordinate activities (Harris, 2010). The ‘Tea Party Patriots’, a social movement organisation connected to the TPM, have provided significant technological support to the movement. The organisation originated as a hub for local activists and developed into a nationwide coalition linking hundreds of websites and compiled an extensive database of email addresses (Rasmussen and Scheon, 2010). Schons (2011: 26) explains that it’s these online connections that ‘allowed interested groups and persons to tap into the sentiment and successes of demonstrators from throughout the country’.

Another element to resource mobilisation theory is the argument around entrepreneurs. For McCarthy and Zald (1977), social and political problems are comparable to economic problems, which are resolved by entrepreneurs willing to exploit a gap in the market, and which they are able to profit from. They (McCarthy & Zald, 1977: 1215) argue that ‘grievances and discontent may be defined, created, and manipulated by issue entrepreneurs and organisations.’ In applying that thinking to the TPM, it can be argued that entrepreneurs, those already part of existing conservative social movement organisations and the Republican Party, exploited the gap for a radical right-wing solution to the financial crisis. Business men, such as the Koch brothers, could be considered entrepreneurs manipulating the discontent around the time of the foreclosure crisis effecting millions of Americans. The Koch brothers are the billionaire founders of the two biggest organisations that bankrolled the TPM: FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity (Mayer & Pullum, 2014). For years the Koch brothers have been advocates of libertarian causes, and invested heavily in attempting to derail the Obama administration (Mayer, 2010). The likes of FreedomWorks encouraged grassroots Tea Partiers to run for low level positions within the Republican Party that often went unfilled or were filled by candidates who run uncontested (Pullem, 2014). Tea Partiers were able to get elected to some of these positions and supporters were able to exert influence over Republican politics (Skocpol & Williamson, 2012). The wealthy backers of the TPM exploited gaps in the Republican framework and manipulated grievances to ensure the Republican Party pursued their vision for America: limited government and low taxes.

The influence that conservative groups and wealthy donators, such as the Koch brothers, have had on the TPM has led to a debate around whether the Tea Party is a grassroots social movement. The view of DiMaggio (2011) is that the Tea Party is not a genuine grassroots social movement, but is just a proxy for a Republican elite. Nancy Pelosi, former speaker of the House of Representatives, described the Tea Party as ‘AstroTurf’ (Ashbee, 2011). The Tea Party website describes itself as a ‘grassroots movement’ (Tea Party, 2017); a notion that is hard to take when it’s obvious that the movement relies heavily on the resources of existing conservative organisations and wealthy backers. Skocpol and Williamson (2012, 12), in contrast to DiMaggio, argue the Tea Party ‘is neither a top down creation nor a bottom up explosion.’ Alternatively, they see the Tea Party as three forces intertwined that collaborate to create a strong radical right wing political force in the USA. These forces include: the wealthy backers with their elite advocacy groups; a network of grassroots individuals who have created local and regional tea party groups; the right wing media including Fox News, conservative radio and right wing blogs. Skocpol and Williamson’s (2012) view is much closer to the truth of how the Tea Party works as the movements resources come from all three forces they point out: the wealthy elite, the grassroots activists and the right wing media.

Along with the RMT, the political process model (PPM) is another theory within the American school of thinking. PPM stands in contrast to RMT due to its emphasis on the political dimension of social movements and on ‘dynamism, strategic interaction, and response to the political environment’ (McAdam et al, 2001: 16). Central to PPM is the concept of the ‘political opportunity structure’, which refers to the degree of ‘openness or closure of the formal political system’ (della Porta and Diani, 2006: 16). Scholars of political opportunity contend that social movements are influenced by the political environment within which they function (McAdam et al, 2001). The Tea Party mobilised during, and as a reaction to, a time of political threat, rather than opportunity (Pullum, 2014). Those that responded to Santelli’s call for Tea Party protests felt threatened by a Democratic President who had just taken office with his party in the majority in both Houses of Congress. The Tea Party was built around a focus on creating a movement to bring America back from its perceived shift leftward in both the Republican Party and the Federal government.

The theory around opportunities being a key component to how social movements organise also encompasses debate around divided elites. It has been shown that an economic and political elite had a key role in the success of the TPM. Divisions within a political and economic elite can create opportunities for movements to mobilise and thrive. Tarrow (2011: 79) argues that ‘conflicts within and among elites encourage outbreaks of contention’. These divisions then ‘encourage positions of the elite that are out of power to seize the role of tribunes of the people’ (Tarrow, 2011: 79). With the Republican Party suffering heavy losses across the board in the 2008 Presidential election, the battle for the new direction of the party was up for grabs. Whereas the Koch brothers previously sought to influence politics outside the Republican Party (David Koch was the 1980 VP candidate for the Libertarian Party), the financial crash and subsequent election opened up a space for them, and economic elites with similar political views, to start to influence the Republican Party from within. Whereas before the crash the likes of the Koch brothers were out of power, through the funding of groups that contributed to the TPM, the billionaires could take on the Republican political elite to change the party to adhere to their values. Tarrow (2011: 88) writes that ‘protesters create political opportunities for elites’; the TPM, funded by an economic elite, opened up opportunities for said economic elite to re-model the Republican Party.

In contrast to the American approach to social movements, the European, or identity approaches are much more concerned with why people protest. One approach in the European school of thinking is that of frame alignment. Frames ‘render events or occurrences meaningful…to organise experience and guide action’ (Snow et al, 1986: 464). The notion of framing is based on the theory of social constructivism, which believes that events, objects or other aspects of our everyday lives do not have inherent meanings (Snow & Soule, 2010). In reference to social movements, ‘this means that particular events are defined by activists in relations to the movement’s goals’ (Pullum, 2014: 1380). Mayer (2015: 237) argues that the mobilising frame of the Tea Party ‘is a restoration of America to a lost greatness via lower taxes and smaller government’. In conveying Constitutional values and principles, alongside a more pragmatic approach to irresponsible public spending and government power, the Tea Party has been able to accomplish the core framing tasks of: ‘diagnostic framing (problem identification and attribution) and motivational framing (rationale for engaging in…collective action)’ (Schons, 2011: 36). However, Schons (2011: 37) argues that the Tea Party have unsuccessfully completed the third core task known as ‘prognostic framing (articulation of a proposed solution to the problem)’. This is due to, in Schons’ (2011: 37) words, a ‘disjuncture in the goals in which the movement activists and supporters wish to accomplish.’ However, this is a harsh accusation of the TPM as its activists have proposed solutions to the problems. The main solution being a hostile takeover of the Republican Party to shift it further to the right under the themes of fiscal conservatism and the preservation of personal liberties.

Building on the frame alignment process is the idea that culture and one’s surroundings are a key reason why social movements form and develop. Thompson (2012) has tried to explain the emergence of conservative movements by analysing them in sociospatial contexts in which individuals are socialised. For Thompson (2012: 513) this ‘emphasis on personality is important because’, he argues, ‘we need to see that there are certain social-environmental conditions that can affect the ways that individuals…feel about certain moral and political themes’. The data suggests ‘that the less urban an area is, the more its residents choose conservative political candidates’ (Thompson, 2012: 514). The argument is essentially that the high concentrations of conservative voters in rural and non-urban areas is due to those areas being where closed sociospatial structures predominate. In such closed structures it creates individuals that approach the world with a dogmatic style of moral cognition. Individuals are ‘less likely to consider the ideas of others and more likely to assert what he believes in to be true’ (Thompson, 2012: 524). This is a narrative that fits with that of the TPM. The movement is built on the fear of the other and in particular mobilised around the fear of Obama’s ‘otherness’ — including ‘his race, his foreign father and his background as a college professor and community organiser’ (Skocpol & Williamson, 2012: 79). Obama also represented many of the other symbols that Tea Partiers hate due to their view on ‘over-educated, arrogant liberals who try to impose their view on the rest of the country through their control of the liberal media, government and universities’ (Dreier, 2012: 760). The TPM proved to be very successful in mobilising support in small towns and rural communities where these closed structures dominate (Westermeyer, 2017).

In summary, it is clear that both PPM and RMT offer adequate explanations as to how the TPM successfully developed. The Tea Party had a unique advantage over other radical movements mobilising after the financial crash due to its wealthy backers and, therefore, its wide range of use of resources. When you compare it to a left-wing American social movement that developed at the same time, such as Occupy, it is clear to see the impact that a greater access to resources had on the Tea Party. The more radical right Tea Party candidates now hold many of the top positions in the Republican Party; the same cannot be said for the radical left inside the Democratic Party. Through a concoction of political opportunities and elite entrepreneurs, the movement was able to mobilise and have success in radicalising the Republican Party towards more libertarian views. On why the movement mobilised there are certain approaches within the European thinking that provide suitable arguments. However, there are some important issues within some of the approaches mentioned. Framing, for example, can be criticised as you can’t control how your arguments will be understood or used so is a theory that cannot be heavily relied on. Also, the general bias focus on left-wing movements within identity concepts is a major fall back and means it sometimes can’t best explain a movement like the Tea Party. Overall, the Tea Party has had a lasting impact on American politics and it could be argued that it began the shift towards the Trump administration we see today.

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