More on the Tea Party

Let me continue with the article I was reviewing last time about the Tea Party phenomena in American politics.

So, who makes up this Tea Party and what do they believe? The author refers to a couple of  surveys by the New York Times  and the Public Religion Research Institute. They find tea-party supporters espouse an ensemble of conservative beliefs with special intensity. Fifty-eight percent think that minorities get too much attention from government, and 65% view immigrants as a burden on the country. Most of the respondents see President Obama as someone who doesn't understand them and doesn't share their values. In their eyes, he's an extreme liberal whose policies consistently favor the poor. In fact, 92% believe that he is moving the country toward socialism. Although some tea-party supporters are libertarian, most are not. The Public Religion Research Institute found that fully 47% regard themselves as members of the Christian right, and 55% believe that America is a Christian nation today—not just in the past. On hot-button social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, tea partiers are aligned with social conservatives. Seventy-one percent of tea-party supporters regard themselves as conservatives.

A lot of liberals turn their noses up at the Tea Party people, assuming they must be a bunch of uneducated bumpkins. Not so. The New York Times survey found the opposite. Only 26% of tea-party supporters regard themselves as working class, versus 34% of the general population; 50% identify as middle class (versus 40% nationally); and 15% consider themselves upper-middle class (versus 10% nationally). Twenty-three percent are college graduates, and an additional 14% have postgraduate training, versus 15% and 10%, respectively, for the overall population. Conversely, only 29% of tea-party supporters have just a high-school education or less, versus 47% for all adults.

The survey also reveals something interesting—these Tea Party people are not an outside force trying to impose foreign values on the Republican Party. Fully 76% of its supporters either identify with or lean toward the Republican Party. Rather, they are a dissident reform movement within the party, determined to move it back toward true conservatism after what they see as the apostasies of the Bush years and the outrages of the Obama administration.

Many tea-party supporters are small businessmen. They view  taxes and regulations as direct threats to their livelihood. Unlike establishment Republicans who see potential gains from government programs such as infrastructure funding, these tea partiers regard most government spending as a deadweight loss. Because many of them run low-wage businesses on narrow margins, they believe that they have no choice but to fight measures, such as ObamaCare, that reduce their flexibility and raise their costs—measures to which large corporations with deeper pockets can adjust. So, strangely enough, we see many large corporations pushing the Obama agenda.

It's no coincidence that the strengthening influence of the Tea Party is driving a wedge between corporate America and the Republican Party. The author believes it will be difficult for the U.S. to govern itself unless corporate America pushes the Republican establishment to fight back against the tea party—or switches sides.

So, the battle continues in the Republican Party. I like the fervor of the Tea Party since the G.O.P. has for too long turned into a debating society only interested in getting along. We’ll see in the 2014 elections where the Republicans are headed. It should be fascinating.