Four years ago, the modern Tea Party seemed to emerge from nowhere, leaving journalists bewildered and the public with few reference points to understand seemingly spontaneous rallies by middle-class people seeking lower tax rates. A search for the phrase \u201ctea party\u201d in connection with \u201cpolitics\u201d in major newspapers yielded fewer than 100 mentions in 2008\u2014and when the words did appear linked together, they suggested studied formality and decorum. The next year, they appeared more than 1,500 times, often connected to \u201cprotest demonstration.\u201d<\/span> Four years ago, the modern Tea Party seemed to emerge from nowhere, leaving journalists bewildered and the public with few reference points to understand seemingly spontaneous rallies by middle-class people seeking lower tax rates. A search for the phrase \u201ctea party\u201d in connection with \u201cpolitics\u201d in major newspapers yielded fewer than 100 mentions in 2008\u2014and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
But little was spontaneous about the new party. \u201cSocial movements that explicitly defend the interests of the rich and the almost-rich have been a recurring feature of American politics,\u201d Isaac William Martin, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, reminds us in his new book,\u00a0<\/span>Rich People\u2019s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent<\/i>. \u201cSuch movements shook the American polity before the Obama era, before the Reagan era, and before Barry Goldwater ran for president\u2014before, even, the New Deal.\u201d<\/span>
With meticulous research, Martin shows how the modern Tea Party grew from decades of efforts by American oligarchs to de-tax themselves. They relied on cranks, rogues, and a few scholars to polish the most effective ideological marketing pitches. Their goal was selling the notion that if the rich bear less of the burden of government, all of us will somehow end up better off. These pitches have worked best when some newly proposed government initiative\u2014like President Barack Obama\u2019s Affordable Care Act\u2014arrives to pose the threat of major policy change. They have depended on diverting attention from obvious questions, such as just how does a smaller tax bill for the Koch brothers benefit us?<\/span>
Spanning decades, the residue of relationships, movement-building skills, and organizations from past enlistments of the affluent many to agitate for the interests of the super-elite few could be seen merely as an example of what Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab called \u201ccultural baggage\u201d in their 1971 book\u00a0<\/span>The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America<\/i>, 1790-1970. Instead, Martin says, these movements bequeathed to us \u201cnot just a suitcase we drag along behind us\u201d but \u201ca toolkit\u201d to remake American public policy. Martin also concurs with historian Richard Hofstadter, who pointed out a half-century ago how many practitioners of his famous theory\u2014the paranoid style in American politics\u2014found their roots in the arrival, in 1913, of the 16th Amendment. That amendment, ratified on the eve of World War I, resolved disputes over the meaning of the phrase \u201cdirect taxes shall be apportioned,\u201d and in doing so ushered in the modern income tax.<\/span><\/span>
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