Is the Tea Party Racist?

Questions such as these do more to measure political ideology -- including core Tea Party values of self-sufficiency and responsibility -- than "racial resentment." When Parker was confronted with this objection, his response fell flat, for reasons Robert VerBruggen explains. Parker attempted to control for ideology by comparing the examples of "conservative" Republican Tea Party supporters with "conservative" Republican Tea Party critics, yet this assumes that "conservative" means the same thing for everyone and thus removes ideological differences. The study is indecisive not only because of its small sample size and its limitation to several states, but because it fails to disentangle ideology from racial attitudes.

The survey also asks whether respondents consider blacks and Hispanics intelligent, hard-working, and trustworthy. Fewer Tea Party "true believers" approved of these characterizations than the "true skeptics." What Parker did not reveal until he was pressed by others, probably because it undercut his conclusion, is that fewer "true believers" approved of these characterizations for all racial categories, including whites. Tea Partiers were more likely to forgo wholesale racial categorizations. When one measures the different rates at which positive stereotypes are applied to whites versus blacks, then Tea Party supporters perform roughly the same as Tea Party critics. Tea Party believers actually rated Asians higher than whites in every category, while "true skeptics" rated whites higher in two out of three. Further, declining to agree that "almost all blacks are hard-working" does not mean that one believes "blacks are lazy," much less that one considers such qualities racially fixed rather than culturally inherited. 

It is worth remembering that even if a higher percentage of racists were found to participate in the Tea Party movement, and even if some were motivated to participate by racist impulses, in neither case does it follow that the Tea Party is a racist movement. Yet even so, the WISER study does not remotely establish that Tea Partiers are disproportionately racist or driven by "racial paranoia" to participate.

Other polls fall even shorter of the mark. Much was made, for instance, of a result in the New York Times/CBS poll that 52 percent of Tea Party supporters felt "too much" had been made recently of problems facing black people. Yet the 73 percent of Tea Partiers who believe that blacks and whites enjoy equal opportunities in America today will be inclined to view affirmative action policies, not to mention rabble-rousing from the likes of Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright, as unnecessary and excessive.

Again, the swiftness with which liberals infer racism, on the basis of evidence that is dubious at best, confirms that liberals were inclined to view Tea Partiers as racist from the start. The reason Jim Wallis claims "there is something wrong" with a mostly-white political movement "like the Tea Party," but does not infer racism amongst the environmental movement -- where "green" activists are even more "overwhelmingly white" in spite of decades of effort to change the fact -- is because the Tea Partiers are white conservatives who listen to country music and enjoy talk radio. Even if the "witch doctor" placards had never been printed, and the WISER study had never been conducted, liberals would have believed the movement racist anyway.

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So much for the elaborate efforts on the part of liberals to justify positions already held. Why do they believe from the beginning that a gathering "like the Tea Party" is racist? 

A clue can be found in a common liberal retort: If the movement is not racist, then why did it only arise after America elected a black man to the White House? Why did these supposed fiscal conservatives not protest the deficit during the Bush years? There are two glaring problems with this response.

First, the deficit spending of the Obama administration is vastly greater than what we witnessed during the Bush years. Even in the midst of the financial meltdown, the Bush administration sought one-time expenditures, and many conservatives were convinced that extraordinary measures might be necessary. This does not begin to compare with the Obama budget plans, which envision trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, or the mountains beyond mountains of debt that will follow from Medicare reform and cap and trade. It is entirely natural that those who grumbled and protested when Bush overspent would shout and march when a new administration presides over the most immense expansion of federal power and bureaucracy that this country has seen for generations.