This entry is made for Washington political scientist Christopher Parker. He's setting up straw men and then ... grasping at straws.
Posted on 05/21/2013 11:49:10 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Members of tea party claim the movement springs from and promotes basic American conservative principles such as limited government and fiscal responsibility.
But new research by University of Washington political scientist Christopher Parker argues that the tea party ideology owes more to the paranoid politics associated with the John Birch Society — and even the infamous Ku Klux Klan — than to traditional American conservatism.
Parker is the author, with fellow UW political scientist Matt Barreto, of a new book titled “Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America,” published this spring by Princeton University Press.
At the heart of their book is a nationwide telephone survey overseen by Parker in early 2011 of 1,500 adults — equal numbers of men and women — across 13 geographically diverse states. The results starkly illustrate where tea partyers and true conservatives part ideological ways.
Responses place tea party members far to the right of the mainstream Republican conservatism of Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and even George W. Bush — viewing President Obama as a faux citizen, a Muslim and socialist agitator, bent on America’s demise.
“Tea party conservatives believe in some conservative principles, to be sure, but they are different from more mainstream conservatives in at least one important respect,” Parker said. “True conservatives aren’t paranoid; tea party conservatives are.”
Asked flat-out if they think President Obama is “destroying the country,” only 6 percent of non-tea party conservatives agreed, a number that rose to 36 percent among all conservatives regardless of tea party affiliations. By contrast, 71 percent of self-identified tea party supporters thought this extreme statement true.
“And that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Parker, a UW associate professor of political science. “It’s no secret that tea party conservatives view President Obama with such contempt, but I am the first to document it empirically.”
Other survey results include:
Three-quarters of tea party conservatives said they think President Obama’s policies are politically socialist while only 40 percent of non-tea party conservatives held that view.
Twenty-seven percent of tea party conservatives said they think President Obama is a practicing Muslim, while 18 percent of non-tea party conservatives took that view. Similarly, 46 percent of non-tea party conservatives allowed that President Obama is a practicing Christian, while only 27 percent of tea party conservatives believed it so.
Was President Obama born in the United States? A majority — 55 percent — of conservatives allowed that this was true, but of tea party conservatives, only 40 percent agreed.
And perhaps not surprisingly, fully three-quarters — 75 percent — of tea partyers said they wish President Obama’s policies to fail, compared with 32 percent of conservatives.
Parker called the tea party a continuation of what political scientist Richard Hofstadter in the 1960s described as “the paranoid style in American politics,” characterized by exaggeration, suspicion and conspiratorial fantasy.
Parker said, “Consider me a skeptic when tea party supporters call upon a conservative tradition to which they have but a slight claim.”
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For information or interviews, contact Parker at 510-285-7770 or csparker@uw.edu, or Barreto at 206-569-4259 or mbarreto@uw.edu.
The entire Ivy League nest of Leftists should be emptied and sent to the interior of Alaska to create their own Utopia. It would solve everyone’s problems.
Well let's see here...Nixon froze wages and prices, Reagan managed the one-two punch of amnesty and forcing hospitals to take all comers, and "even George W. Bush" needs no rebuttal at all.
OK. Now that this guy has established that he has absolutely NO idea what he's talking about, why should we believe even one word of this? The Tea Party is the John Birch Society and the KKK? Really?
Maybe if he pulled his wiener out of his boyfriends mouth for a few minutes a day he could actually talk to real Tea party members.
Not the ones he made up in his head.
And I'm sure that all of these alleged Tea partiers were just delighted to speak with some obvious leftist kook.
Rockefeller being labelled as a “Conservative” is hysterical. He was such a leftist spendthrift that he almost makes Zero look like Calvin Coolidge... almost.
Same leftist university pablum, different school.
All poly-sci profs are leftists. Their whole life experience is in academia, not the real world. They aren’t qualified to comment on anything.
A man who tells you there is no tyranny to fear is a man who wants to be a tyrant.
Just because you ARE paranoid does not mean they are NOT out to get you.
These are enablers of government intrusions into your life. They provide the pseudo-scientific "justification" that allow agents of the state to denigrate you in DHS publications as terrorists, and IRS agents to harass you.
And for the right amount of grant money, they will find a way to label you as an enemy of the state.
This entry is made for Washington political scientist Christopher Parker. He's setting up straw men and then ... grasping at straws.
Not Alaska, maybe NJ or Hawaii.
The left can get hosed. THEIR MEANS HAS JUSTIFIED THEIR END.
And in 2014 we start house cleaning.
The corollary of which is that 68% of conservatives hope Obama's policies suceed a somewhat dubious proposition at best.
Obviously got their information from the Southern Poverty Law Center which lumps Christians, Skin-heads, Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, John Birchers, Republicans, the Tea Party, etc, all together. I wish the Tea Party would grow some balls and become an effective party for rolling back communism.
I don't believe that Obama™ is any of the above or that he isn't - Obama™ is a manufactured image with no connection to reality, so we have no clue whether he is a natural born citizen, a citizen but not natural born, or a foreign Manchurian Candidate; whether he is Christian as he claims, Muslim as he acts, or an Atheist faking both as a route to power; whether he is a communist, a socialist, or just at the far left extreme of progressive democrat; and whether he is bent on America's demise or just consistently choosing policies that push in that direction. It's all guesswork because we never see anything real from Obama™.
. . . if President Obama is “destroying the country,” . . . 71 percent of self-identified tea party supporters thought this extreme statement true.
To be fair, I'm not certain whether Obama™ is destroying the country through malice or incompetence. But is it really "extreme" to say that adding more than $1T a year to our debt, trampling freedom of religion with the HHS mandate, trampling freedom of the press with the AP searches, and trampling the right to keep and bear arms with executive orders and attempts to pass clearly unconstitutional legislation, and forcing ObamaCare through to nationalize 1/6 of our economy is at least "fundamentally transforming" what used to be a free country?
Three-quarters of tea party conservatives said they think President Obama’s policies are politically socialist while only 40 percent of non-tea party conservatives held that view.
Agreeing with 40% of the non-TEA Party population is extreme? Any objective observer would admit that the researcher has a clear agenda.
Parker called the tea party . . . “the paranoid style in American politics,” characterized by exaggeration, suspicion and conspiratorial fantasy.
Really? The week we find that they were right about the IRS persecuting the TEA Party is not the time to call them paranoid, any more than we should call the AP and those whistle-blowers who are now too intimidated to talk to reporters paranoid.
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