Really Hate Tea

Race and the TEA Party:

The headline reads "Academics dub tea partyers devout, racist." That's pretty aggressive; what's the evidence?

“Tea Party activists have denied accusations that their movement is racist, and there is nothing intrinsically racist about opposing ‘big government’ or clean-energy legislation or health care reform. But it is clear that the movement is more appealing to people who are unsympathetic to blacks and who prefer a harder line on illegal immigration than it is to other Americans,” Gary C. Jacobson, a professor at the University of California at San Diego, wrote in his paper, “The President, the Tea Party, and Voting Behavior in 2010.”...

Like Mr. Jacobson, Mr. Abramowitz also said they were more likely to harbor racial resentment, which he judged based on their answers to questions such as whether blacks could succeed as well as whites if they “would only try harder,” and whether they agreed with the statement that Irish, Italians and Jews overcame prejudice and “blacks should do the same without any special favors.”

Racism is, apparently, believing that blacks are just like everybody else?

There was a graduate student present, with a "working paper," who got closer.

Other academics saw other mechanisms at work. Emily McClintock Ekins, a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles, said tea partyers have more faith in the fairness of capitalism, which she said could explain their attitudes on race.

“This makes it less surprising that nearly all Tea Partiers believe that hard work, rather than luck, drives success. This might also explain their lower levels of racial empathy, as they are less aware for how opportunity may be different for particular groups of people,” she wrote in a working draft paper.

Perhaps the problem is that you aren't asking the right questions.

A fair number of supporters of the TEA Party are veterans, whose experience in the Army or the Navy supports the idea that hard work and dedication to duty are most of the answer. Not all of the answer, to be sure: the military has strong controls against overt displays of racism. While no system can rule over what may be hidden in the heart, these controls establish a ground in which black servicemembers do very well.

Most of corporate America has a similar system in place, if only to protect themselves from lawsuits. Without asserting either that racism is not a problem, or that controls of this type aren't necessary to level the playing field, it is nevertheless the case that success has been possible in this environment.

I say "has been" rather than "is" possible because the structural changes around this recession are only the leading edge of a decades-long reduction in American wealth that will accompany the aging of our society. I don't know that upward mobility remains possible for large swathes of society, though exceptional individuals will do well.

The general decline in prosperity will also cut into both tax-funded professions, like the military, which will limit the degree of opportunity available in organizations with those kinds of strict anti-racist controls discussed above. That may have a negative effect on blacks particularly. It will also tend to be disruptive of small businesses, which is the means for independent wealth generation that doesn't depend on other people 'giving you a chance.' That's going to be hard on all of us.

The one group that is likely to remain profitable are the large corporations, who will use their power to cut special deals for themselves. These environments are likely to have the strong anti-racist controls, but they are also likely to be exploitative on other terms. Those familiar with the history of the South will recognize a number of the business practices of the Monsanto corporation, especially in India; much the same loan practices were used by Northern banks after the Civil War to turn free farmers who had owned their own land into sharecroppers or tenet farmers.

Does that constitute an abiding faith in the fairness of capitalism? Not really; it constitutes an abiding faith in small business and the military, I suppose, combined with a populist attitude about what Ms. Palin was calling "crony capitalism" just the other day.

If Ms. Palin is speaking about it, it's on the minds of a lot of the TEA Party. That should be expected: the movement was spurred in large part by outrage over the bank bailouts, wherein ordinary Americans who made bad investments lost their homes, while banks who had profited wildly on those same investments were paid off at taxpayer expense. The TEA Party movement is as populist as it is capitalist. The failure of political scientists to understand the distinction suggests to me that they don't even know what questions to ask; they are too distant from the movement to know how to begin understanding it.