Change They Can't Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America.

• Author: Ekins, Emily
• Position: Book review

Change They Can't Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America

Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto

Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2013, 361 pp.

Political science professors Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto investigate the causes and consequences of support for the tea party movement in their book Change They Can't Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America. They suggest the tea party is a reactionary right-wing movement, akin to the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, that perceives "the election of Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States," to represent change that "threatens to displace the segment of America that the Tea Party has come to represent: mostly white, middle class, middle-aged men." Specifically, they suggest tea partiers believe Obama's position as the most powerful person in the world threatens to "undermine their sense of social prestige" and that tea partiers fear they will no longer receive "the deference to which they have become accustomed" as members of the white majority. Throughout their work, there are a number of methodological problems that lead them to overemphasize the role of racism and social dominance in the tea party movement and place too little emphasis on the economic complaints of the movement.

In this review, I will focus on three main points: their test of whether the tea party is comprised of "reactionary" or "responsible conservatives," their statistical methods testing if racism and a preference for social dominance drive tea party supporters, and their comparison of the tea party to the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s.

The authors prematurely reject the argument that the tea party is primarily motivated by genuine concerns about spending, the size and scope of government, and taxes in part because they rely on a problematic comparison of local tea party group websites to the National Review Online (NRO). From this analysis, they conclude the movement is a contemporary manifestation of paranoid reactionary conservatism.

If the tea party is sincere, argue the authors, then it should be comprised of what they call "responsible conservatives" who prioritize "maintaining order and stability while allowing at least incremental change as a means of avoiding revolutionary change." Responsible conservatives should also "accept gracefully social and economic changes that have firmly been established in a successful way of life." Otherwise, tea partiers must be reactionary conservatives motivated by "extreme reactions to change" and are concerned with subversion and displacement of the "dominant" group leading to "paranoid social cognition and conspiratorial thinking."

This "responsible conservative" litmus test raises several questions. First, why are there only two options? Their method sets up a situation that precludes conservatives from desiring social change without being categorized as nefarious reactionaries. How would libertarians be categorized with this approach? Using their method, the only sanctioned position for conservatives is to ask liberal reformers to slow down, not change course. This also assumes that New Deal economic debates have been resolved, but this is simply not the case.

As part of their method to determine if the tea party is comprised of "responsible conservatives," the authors measure if tea party websites are significantly different from articles on the National Review Online, their measuring stick for responsible conservatism. The authors then categorize and compare articles on the NRO and tea party websites...