Stay for tea: the real Tea Partiers are worth getting to know. Because they're going to be here a while. And they might prove useful.

• Author: Teles, Steven M.
• Position: Critical essay

The Tea Party and the Remaking

of Republican Conservatism

by Theda Skocpol and

Vanessa Williamson

Oxford University Press, 264 pp.

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For the last three years, the Tea Party has been something of a Rorschach test for members of the nation's political class. Some have looked at the citizens screaming about the Constitution at marches and town halls and thought they were witnessing the birth of homegrown fascism. Others have imagined that the overreaching of the Obama administration had given birth to a genuine grassroots movement for constitutional reform and limited government. Even as the din coming from the Tea Party has quieted slightly, the gap between these perceptions does not seem to have narrowed.

Noted Harvard political sociologist Theda Skocpol and her promising young graduate-student coauthor Vanessa Williamson spent months observing the Tea Party firsthand, attending meetings and rallies of Tea Party-affiliated groups in Virginia, Maine, Massachusetts, and Arizona and plunging themselves into all the studies available on the subject. Their findings have been published in a new book, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, a fascinating and clear-eyed analysis that lays out the decidedly imperfect understanding of the movement on both the right and the left.

"I think the pundit class tends to treat popular ideologies as products of ignorance," Skocpol told the New York Times. "Rather than assume [their] ignorance, we should recognize that what appear to be contradictory or uninformed views of federal government programs make better sense once we understand how Tea Party activists view themselves in relation to other groups in society." The left fails to see that the overwhelming majority of Tea Party activists are neither angry nor racist. They are generally quite normal people worried that the hour is very late for saving the values they hold dear: "They are asserting a desire to live again in the country they think they recall from childhood and young adulthood. Their anger evinces a determination to restore that remembered America, and pass it on to their children and grandchildren (whether or not they are asking for this gift)." The Tea Partiers are a peculiarly American merging of radical and right, in that they believe enormous change is necessary to reestablish a nation worth conserving.

Unlike many liberal analysts, Skocpol and Williamson show great sympathy for the ordinary activists of the movement: for their willingness to engage in the hard work of politics--attending meetings, learning the rules, doing your homework, banding together with your fellow citizens. But they have only scorn for the movement's elites, who, they suggest, have filled the activists' heads with "wildly inaccurate things ... about what government does, how it is financed, and what is actually included (or not) in key pieces of legislation or regulation."

Skocpol and Williamson found that these activists are not the puppets of the Koch family or Dick Armey. While they responded to a call they heard from places like Fox News, the organizations they have created are their own, built to last, and their autonomy jealously guarded. Local Tea Party groups have created genuine social connections and organizational...