The Tea Party as a Classical Liberal Response to Neoliberalism

The Tea Party as a Classical Liberal Response to Neoliberalism

Introduction On February 19th, 2009 Business news editor Rick Santelli, speaking from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to an early morning CNBC audience, invited “all you capitalists” to a “Chicago Tea Party” to protest the Obama administration’s proposed mortgage bailout program (Tam Cho 2012: 107). Within days, the video of this invitation/tirade went viral and soon enough tea party themed protests began popping up with ever increasing regularity. Out of this rather organic display of citizen discontent, something more coherent began to appear. Politicians, seasoned activists, media personalities, and well-funded interests groups began to coalesce around this impassioned negativity and out of this disparate conglomeration a political and social movement was born (Tam Cho 2012: 107). The purpose of this paper is not to address the supposed causes of this movement, which I will henceforth simply refer to as the Tea Party. To speak of causes regarding something so large, historically contingent, and singular is to place oneself in an unnecessary theoretical and methodological bind. Instead, what I hope to accomplish is an ontology: a thick description that attempts to pinpoint the very specificity of the movement that would likely be elided by standard causal analyses. In a way, I am hoping to unearth (a bit) the historical conditions that make something like the Tea Party possible, deliberately leaving the necessity of its existence an open question. In order to accomplish this task, I will rely heavily on Michel Foucault’s (2004) discourse analysis of liberalism and neo-liberalism. I believe this will allow me to situate the movement on a spectrum – or rather in its relationality – other than the left-right, liberalconservative spectrum/relationality it has been situated on/in thus far (Williamson et al. 2011; Zietlow 2010; Bailey et al. 2012: 794). Furthermore, using survey data from “SETUPS: Voting behavior: The 2012 Election,” I will run a logistic regression analysis in order to determine

more specifically than has been done thus far the experiential and ideological underpinnings of the movement. In other words, I will use this regression analysis to 1) specify factors previously shown to be associated with greater support for the Tea Party and 2) test my own hypothesis on the movement’s relationship with liberalism and neoliberalism.

Literature Review Due to the fact that the Tea Party remains in its nascency, there has been relatively little research done on the movement to date, especially within sociology. Thus far, interest in the Tea Party has come primarily from political science and specifically from political scientists concerned with electoral politics and voting behavior. The most extensive and ambitious analysis of the movement within this field has been provided by Bailey, Mummolo, and Noel (2012). They find that the movement’s influence is fourfold: 1) movement activists can bring energy to campaigns and exert pressure on officials, 2) movement sympathizers can vote their views, 3) movement-linked interest groups can offer endorsements, publicity, and resources to the movement and movement candidates, and 4) politicians can associate with the movement in Congress and, perhaps most importantly, vote according to the movement’s ideology (Bailey et al. 2012: 770). It is this assemblage that makes up the movement. However, though this material assemblage is the movement, and though it is unlikely that the movement could exist on the scale it does without each part, each part does not exert the same amount of influence on the US political scene. It is the activists, above all, who have shown the greatest capacity to get particular congressional candidates elected and to influence politicians in office (Bailey et al. 2012). Therefore, it is the activists that are the most influential. So where are these activists located and what is it about these locations that seems to produce this fervor of political activity? Tam Cho, Gimpel, and Shaw (2012) ask and answer the

former and offer a possible explanation for the latter. They examine the geography of Tea Party activism by looking at data from Meetup.org (a site used extensively by Tea Party activists) and the Tea Party Patriots’ website. They find that ‘housing-bubble’ states such as California, Nevada, Florida, and Arizona, and counties with higher rates of home foreclosures dating back to 2008, have “remarkably higher” Tea Party activity than others (Tam Cho et al. 2012: 126). They surmise from this distribution that Tea Party activism was borne out of economic grievance. This is one hypothesized association that I will test at the level of the individual in my regression. For now, it suffices to say that Tea Party activism is not simply present in rural areas and small towns - where small government and anti-government themes traditionally play well – but also in economically distressed suburbs (Tam Cho et al. 2012: 120). As far as demographics on movement supporters goes, PEW provides the best source of information. They have been studiously tracking the movement since its inception and have come to several noteworthy findings, particularly concerning the movement relationship with the Republican Party. They find that, compared with Republicans, Tea Party supporters are older and slightly more educated (October 16th, 2013). On an ideological level, Tea Party supporters are more likely to support politicians “standing on principle” than non-Tea Party Republicans (September 26, 2013), and are therefore predictably less likely to support compromise with Democrats than those non-Tea Party Republicans (October 16th, 2013). With this in mind, the Tea Party’s insistence on not raising the debt ceiling – and their culpability in forcing a government shutdown – in 2011 and again in 2013 makes more sense. Not only do they believe, significantly more so than both Democrats and non-Tea Party Republicans, that the debt ceiling does not need to be raised at all (October 15th, 2013) and that the effects of a government shutdown are not major (September 26th, 2013), convincing them otherwise would

entail not only a logical or empirical argument, but an engagement with the principles they hold central to their movement’s identity. So what are these principles that they stand by so adamantly? In a way, illuminating and specifying (beyond ‘anti-big-government’) these principles, and situating them historically, is the primary goal of this paper. A helpful hint for an answer to this larger question is provided by Zietlow (2010) in her analysis of the Tea Party’s relationship with the US constitution. As she understands it, the Tea Party is engaged in a type of “popular originalism”: using constitutional interpretation outside the courts to invoke originalism as a jurisprudential method for interpreting the constitution (Zietlow 2010: 2). For Zietlow, this presents a “contradiction,” as it has typically been “progressive” political movements (such as the 1960s civil rights movement) that have engaged in popular constitutionalism, and they have rarely used originalist interpretations to arrive at their conclusions. Originalism here entails the studying of history to determine a fixed meaning for the constitution (Zietlow 2010: 5). This is in general opposition to viewing the constitution as a living document, to be adapted and interpreted according to the political and social environment of the time. For the purposes of this paper, it is significant that 1) the Tea Party is actively engaged with the US constitution and insists on an interpretation that adhere as closely as possible to the intention of the founders and 2) they are calling for amendments that restrict congressional power and deemphasize Reconstruction Era expansion of that power (Zietlow 2010: 14). Out of this arises the paradox of the Tea Party’s ideology/strategy: they are a political movement that advocates a reading of the constitution that would result in less space for political movements to semidirectly (through legislation) engage with the constitution. As Zietlow (2010: 1) aptly concludes, originalism, which began as a critique of judicial over-reaching into the political process, has evolved into a justification for the courts to overturn legislative measures.

Therefore, the Tea Party may achieve its greatest success, or exert its most long-lasting influence, not through the electoral process but by providing a social environment more conducive to originalist interpretations of the constitution within the federal courts. I will address this seemingly paradoxical relationship to the law shortly. Another analysis of the Tea Party comes from Williamson, Scocpol, and Coggin (2011), who engaged in participant observation and interviews with Massachusetts Tea Party activists. For them, the Tea Party is a “mix of local networks, resource-deploying national organizations, conservative media outlets, and elite politicians” (Williamson et al. 2011: 28). They claim that the typical profile of a Tea Party supporter in Massachusetts is a white, middle-class male older than 45 years of age (Williamson et al. 2011: 27). This typification corresponds to the polling data mentioned above. There are several insights from Williamson’s analysis germane to the topic of this paper. First, the networks that compose the Tea Party are not the same as the ones that compose the Republican Party at large. The Tea Party is more strongly associated with probusiness conservatism (as opposed to church linked social conservatism) and is very much reliant on media outlets, particularly Fox News, to provide an “infrastructure for collective action by diffusing collective identities and fostering solidarity” (Williamson et al. 2011: 30). Second, Tea Party activists distinguish themselves from non-Tea Party Republicans by the fact that they do not see issues like abortion and gay marriage as central to their political activism; nationally, 78 percent of Tea Party supporters think that economic issues should take precedence over social ones (Williamson et al. 2011: 31). Third, they are not monolithically hostile toward government (Williamson et al. 2011: 25). Instead, “they distinguish between programs perceived as going to hard-working contributors to US society like themselves and ‘handouts’ perceived as going to unworthy or

freeloading people” (Williamson et al. 2011: 25). Therefore, they strongly identify themselves as productive citizens, as workers, and support Social Security and Medicare, which they feel legitimately entitled to. On the other hand, they are hostile to programs they view as handouts to non-workers (particularly undocumented immigrants and the young) such as unemployment and Medicaid. This distinction (often racialized and generationalized) between deserving and undeserving poor, workers and non-workers, is an important, though certainly not a “new” one. Perhaps it is simply “a new incarnation of long-standing strands in US conservatism” as Williamson (2011: 26) claims. Or, as I will suggest, perhaps it is emblematic of a different tradition: a liberal one. This is one of the central questions I will take up in the next section.

Foucault on Liberalism and Neo-Liberalism In order to situate the Tea Party in the historical problematic I am attempting to, a brief but thorough outline of Foucault’s understanding of the liberalism-neoliberalism dynamic is necessary. After completing this outline, the hypotheses, and reasoning behind the hypotheses, of this paper will become clear. The art of governing is not to be confused with the practice of governing. Instead, the art of governing should be understood as “the reasoned way of governing best and, at the same time, reflection on the best possible way of governing” (Foucault 2004: 2). In other words, “government’s consciousness of itself” (Foucault 2004: 2). Therefore, when Foucault outlines a genealogy of “liberalism,” as he does in his lectures on biopolitics (Foucault 2004), he is not conceptualizing liberalism as an ideology, but rather as a governmentality: a mode of governing defined by a particular assemblage of technologies and exhibiting reflective practices that have discursive effects. What does this mean?

This means that prior to the mid-18th century, in the UK and France, the limits of state power were generally fixed through law. This public law was understood as oppositional, existing prior to the state and codifying the external limitations of governance by the state (Foucault 2004: 7-9). However, in the mid-18th century, we see the birth of a new governmental reason, whose principle of limitation was not extrinsic, but intrinsic, to government itself. In other words, this new art of governing was constituted through the objectives of governing: to achieve what the state wished to achieve (increase the tax base, assemble an army, secure itself, etc.) it was considered necessary to limit the state’s actions. From this point going forward, alongside the question of legality (the question of the external limitations on state governance), the question of utility (the question of the internal limitations on state governance) would become central to the art of governing. The intellectual instrument of this newfound governmentality was, of course, political economy (Foucault 2004: 13). Political economy arose from the understanding that “the objects of governmental action have a specific nature” (Foucault 2004: 150). One must comprehend the nature of these objects – the primary object being “the economy” – in order to govern with maximum effectiveness. Therefore, both an internal limitation of government and a question of truth are introduced into governmental reason through political economy (Foucault 2004: 15). This can be understood as the introduction of the problematic of “least government,” the problematic of the frugality of government, into an art of government previously regulated solely by the law. Liberalism, therefore, as a governmentality, co-arises with political economy, as a technology, and produces discursive effects: particularly the positing of objects that did not exist prior to it – for instance, “the economy” – and a site of veridiction whereby the practices of government can be asked in terms of truth: the market. Meaning, prior to political economy,

and therefore liberalism, the market was viewed in many different ways.1 However, political economy transforms the market into a site of truth, where a “natural price” discloses itself (Foucault 2004: 30-32). Hereafter, the government not only concerns itself with “things” (people, objects, etc.) but deals with the phenomena of the market, the force that makes something like a “natural price” intelligible to political economy: interests, or, “that respect in which a given individual, thing, wealth, and so on interests other individuals or the collective body of individuals” (Foucault 2004: 45). In other words, liberalism, as a mode of governmentality, is concerned with things only insofar as they interest other individuals and the collective body. Therefore, liberalism is an art of governing that concerns itself with the production of freedom2, by way of which interested actors will naturally produce and exchange things in such a way as to benefit the wealth of the nation and the sovereign. However, the cost for manufacturing freedom, or liberty in the market, is security. In other words, insecurity3 is the price we pay for freedom. For this reason, the “economy of power in liberalism is sustained by the interplay between freedom and security” (Foucault 2004: 64-66). This is perhaps why Foucault states aphoristically that “the motto of liberalism is to ‘live dangerously’” (Foucault 2004: 66). Yet, this danger, this insecurity, must be countered, controlled, and intervened upon or else it will threaten the destruction of its corollary: freedom. Insecurity is therefore both a correlate of freedom and a threat to it. So how does one guarantee freedom in a situation of extreme insecurity? The great depression in the US posed this exact problem. With people’s freedom to work, freedom to consume, and therefore freedom to live, threatened, there existed a genuine crisis of liberal

Most interestingly, as a site of justice. Freedom as economic liberty. 3 Insecurity as instability, as precariousness existence. 1

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governmentality. The freedom of the market was producing insecurity on a scale that threatened the foundations of the liberal state. The answer – the only protection from the threats of socialism, fascism, etc. that had arisen due to this insecurity – was mass interventionism: Keynesianism (Foucault 2004: 68-69). The state then intervened in the form of a plan in order to treat the causes of this insecurity (unemployment, underinvestment, etc.). Therefore, the great depression brought on a crisis of liberal governmentality that found its resolution in planning and a new political economy.4 However, this was only a temporary resolution. The correlation between liberty and security, the ongoing dialectic between the two in the art of governing, never ceased. Instead, in post-World War II Germany, this question was again taken up, but in a very different way than it had been 200 years prior in the UK, the birthplace of classical liberalism. For the decimation of the German state during WWII provided the conditions for a reflection on the art of governing that reversed the givens. Instead of political sovereignty founding the institutions for economic development, institutions of political sovereignty now sought their legitimacy in economic development (Foucault 2004: 83). In other words, consensus on the political structure of the state was conceived of as a surplus product deriving from economic development. Therefore, what we see in the post-WWII German state is a state under the supervision of a market, rather than a market under the supervision of a state, the formula of classical liberalism. “To get the legality of the state from the veridiction of the market: this is the German miracle” (Foucault 2004: 102). However, this discourse was not simply relegated to Germany, but soon made its way to the US and in particular, to the University of Chicago (Foucault 2004: 216). There, the reversal in logic was directed mainly against the Keynesian

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Keynesian economics.

state which was characterized by the social pact of war and the growth of federal administration of the economy (Foucault 2004: 216). If this reversal marks a break with classical liberalism, and a response to the plan, we can see how it likewise coincides with a series of moves within political economy that provide the rationale for a series of shifts in public policy. Though obviously a complete theorization of neo-liberalism is beyond the scope of this paper, I will outline five moves in neo-liberal political economy that are relevant for my discussion of the Tea Party’s relationship to this governmentality: 1. An understanding of competition as not given in nature; therefore, a break with Laissez-Faire. Competition is thus viewed as a principle of formalization, a “historical objective of governmental art and not a natural given that must be respected” (Foucault 2004: 120). Broadly, what follows from this is that government must accompany the market from start to finish; it must govern for the market. The problem is then how to touch the market, how to intervene on the conditions of the market (Foucault 2004: 138), but not the market itself (this would be the plan). Therefore, positive liberalism rather than Laissez-Faire liberalism. 2. Policy is to be directed at the social framework and “good” interventions are seen as those that act on that framework, on the population, intervening at the level of technical improvements, training and education, and the legal system (Foucault 2004: 140). The goal of this is the construction of a competitive social order that will regulate/bolster the economy/economic growth and “nullify the possible anticompetitive mechanisms of society” (Foucault 2004: 159-160). This entails a Gesellshaftspolitik, a policy of society and a social interventionism that is active, multiple, vigilant, and omnipresent: a sociological liberalism (Foucault 2004: 145).

3. The purpose of regulation is not the socialization of certain consumptions (the equalization measures of the plan) but takes its model from the economic game. In other words, regulations should work toward differentiations (inequality, variance, status markers), not attempt to eliminate them (equality, stability). However, as a corollary to this, a vital minimum for those who cannot ensure their own existence must be established (Foucault 2004: 143). One must be able to “lose” in the economic game without having the vital security of one’s existence threatened; this is the purpose of this “negative tax” (Foucault 2004: 202-203). However, this “negative tax” – which is exemplified in programs like Medicaid and Welfare – ignores the distinction between “good” and “bad” poor, voluntarily and involuntarily unemployed. It ignores relative poverty and its causes, and treats only absolute poverty as an effect. 4. Society as a whole will not be asked to insure against collective risk (illness, accident, etc.). Rather, the economy will merely be asked to see to it that every individual has the means to insure himself against risks, including the inevitability of old age and death. Social policy must therefore aim for the most general capitalization possible for all the social classes. Consequently, there is only one true and fundamental social policy: economic growth (Foucault 2004: 144). 5. The rule of law is introduced as a general principle of economic legislation. In other words, the state can make legal interventions in the economic order only if these legal interventions take the form of the introduction of formal principles. This idea, that there can only be formal economic legislation, is the opposite of a plan. Legislation must never pursue a particular end. It must not be the act of a universal subject of knowledge in the order of the economy. It must see the economy as a

game of enterprises. Hence, the system of laws must be conceptualized as rules of a game that displays a concrete order. Therefore, we have law and order, and through this synthesis 1) the judicial branch acquires new autonomy and importance, 2) arbitration between competing enterprises makes justice into an omnipresent public service and 3) the juridical is no longer conceptualized as part of the superstructure, but rather as part of a unified economic-juridical order (Foucault 2004: 170-176). With these five moves made intelligible, we may finally proceed to the hypotheses of this paper in good conscience.

Paper Hypotheses As I stated earlier, one of the goals of this paper is to situate the Tea Party on a spectrum other than the left-right spectrum it has been situated on thus far. As is clear by now, the spectrum I hope to situate them on is the liberal-neoliberal one I have attempted to provide a very rough schematization of in the above section. That said, where do they fit on it? I believe that the Tea Party can best be understood as a classical liberal response to a neoliberalism that has been hegemonic in the US – as a governmentality – since the 1980s. In other words, I am speculating that the 2007-present economic recession and the rise of the Tea Party signal a crisis of neoliberal governmentality in a way similar to how the great depression and the “threat” of socialism/fascism signaled a crisis in liberal governmentality 80 years ago. This hypothesis, clearly a macro-historical one, is impossible to “test” in the scientific sense of the word. However, establishing correlations and schematizing the ideology of the Tea Party should allow us to assert a number of facts that will either challenge or support this hypothesis. Therefore, the following hypotheses, to be tested through logistic regression analyses, are based on the much larger, speculative hypothesis mentioned above:

Hypothesis #1: Respondents who claim that their financial situation is worse now than one year ago will be more likely to support the Tea Party. This is to test the association between economic distress and Tea Party support at the level of the individual, rather than the level of the county or state as was done by Tam Cho (2012). Hypothesis #2: Respondents who oppose government spending on health care will be more likely to support the Tea Party. This is to test the Tea Party’s opposition to collective consumption and principles of economic equalization. Hypothesis #3: Respondents who oppose government spending on education will be more likely to support the Tea Party. This is to test the Tea Party’s opposition to government interventions that act on the social framework; to test their opposition to sociological liberalism. Hypothesis #4: Respondents who oppose government spending on unemployment will be more likely to support the Tea Party. This is to test the Tea Party’s opposition to the “negative tax,” the form of interventionism that ignores the distinction between the “good” and “bad” poor. Hypothesis #5: Respondents who oppose government spending on welfare will be more likely to support the Tea Party. This (like hypothesis #4) is to test the Tea Party’s opposition to the “negative tax,” the form of interventionism that ignores the distinction between “good” and “bad” poor. However, welfare is more likely to be associated with “bad” poor than unemployment; therefore I expect the association between opposition to welfare and support for the Tea Party to be higher. Hypothesis #6: Respondents who support government spending on law enforcement will be more likely to support the Tea Party. This is to test the Tea Party’s relationship with the concept of danger, assuming that support for increased expenditure on law enforcement is associated with the belief that one is physically insecure due to social relations and should be better protected by the state. Hypothesis #7: Respondents who support government spending on Social Security be more likely to support the Tea Party. This is to test the Tea Party’s opposition to measures which aim to insure against collective risk by pooling together the money of workers.

Data and Methods For the logistic regression, I will be using the dataset, “SETUPS: Voting behavior: The 2012 Election.” This dataset was drawn from the 2012 American National Election Study (ANES), which was conducted through a combination of computer assisted personal interviews

(CAPI) and online surveys.5 These interviews and surveys were conducted from September, 2012 to December, 2012. The total sample size was 5,916 and was designed to be representative of the American electorate. Approximately 2,000 respondents were interviewed face-to-face, with the interviewer either reading the questions from a tablet screen to the respondent and recording his or her answers, or handing the tablet to the respondent, who would record his or her own answers. Approximately 4,000 respondents did their surveys online, where respondents were selected using both random digit dialing (RDD) sampling of telephone numbers and address-based sampling (ABS) methodologies, by a company called Gfk (formerly known as Knowledge Networks). This study was sponsored by Stanford University and the University of Michigan, and was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). I chose this dataset because it is representative of the US electorate and, considering that this paper is framed in terms of governmentality, gauging the opinions of the voting population on a national scale seemed appropriate. After dealing with missing data through listwise deletion, my analytic sample size was reduced to 4,964. There is no reason to believe that this deletion of missing cases has affected my analysis. My dependent variable is “Tea Party support” (Table 1). I operationalize this through the survey question: How strongly do you support or oppose the Tea Party? I then modified the variable by collapsing the responses into SUPPORT and INDIFFERENT/OPPOSE, converting it thus from a likert-ordinal variable to a dichotomous one. From there, I created a dummy variable with INDIFFERENT/OPPOSE as my reference group. My control variables are Gender, Race, Age, and Education (Table 1). I chose these controls because these are the factors that the literature, particularly the PEW surveys, indicate as

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Prysby, Charles, University of North Carolina-Greensboro; Scavo, Carmine, East Carolina University-Greenville, North Carolina; American Political Science Association; Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research are listed as the principle investigators.

predictive of Tea Party support. As mentioned above, Tea Party supporters tend to be male, white, older, and slightly more educated than average (though education level is a less stable characteristic than the others). I created dummy variables for each one, with the reference groups being female, black, 18-34 years of age, and less than HS education respectively. My first dependent variable is the financial situation of the respondent compared to one year prior (Table 1). As indicated by hypothesis #1, I expect a worse financial situation will be associated with higher levels of support for the Tea Party. I dichotomize this variable into BETTER/SAME and WORSE in order to see the association with a worse financial situation more clearly. I then create a dummy with BETTER/SAME as my reference group. My remaining six independent variables (Table 1) are each straightforward operationalizations of predictor variables. They are the likert-scale responses to the question “How much more or less public expenditure on X should there be?” with 1 indicating much more and 5 indicating much less. Therefore, they are questions surrounding policy and I have laid out their implications for each hypothesis in the previous section. They have not been modified. Descriptive statistics for each variable in the model can be found in Table 2.

Results The results of the logistic regression can be seen in Table 3. I will address these results hypothesis by hypothesis. However, first I will discuss the control variables. As expected, the odds of supporting the Tea Party for males are 39 percent higher than the odds of supporting the Tea Party for females. Also, as expected, the odds of supporting the Tea Party for Whites are 130 percent higher than the odds of supporting the Tea Party for Blacks (the difference between Blacks and Hispanics is statistically insignificant). Additionally,

respondents age 54 and older have 22 percent higher odds of supporting the Tea Party than respondents between the ages of 18 and 34. However, this difference is only statistically significant at the P=.1 level and the difference between 18-34 year olds and 35-55 year olds is statistically insignificant. Therefore, age seems to be associated with Tea Party support, but the association is not as strong or robust as the relationship between gender and race and Tea Party support. Lastly, education is statistically insignificant for predicting Tea Party support. The first hypothesized association, between a worse financial situation and Tea Party support, is supported by the data. Respondents who claimed to be worse off financially today than one year ago have 78 percent higher odds of supporting the Tea Party than those who claim to be better off or the same. This supports the strong association, at the level of the individual, between economic hardship and Tea Party support that was surmised by Tam Cho (2012) at the county and state levels. This, therefore, allows us to further surmise that it is not just being situated in a poor economic malaise that is associated with Tea Party support but personal experiences of relative financial hardship. The second hypothesized association, between opposition to government expenditure on health care and Tea Party support, is supported by the data. Every one unit increase – on the likert-scale – in opposition to government expenditures on health care is associated with 34 percent higher odds of supporting the Tea Party. This possibly indicates an opposition towards collective consumption and principles of economic equalization. The third hypothesized association, between opposition to government expenditure on education and Tea Party support, is supported by the data. Every one unit increase – on the likert-scale – in opposition to government expenditures on education is associated with 51

percent higher odds of supporting the Tea Party. This possibly indicates an opposition towards a sociological liberalism that acts on the social framework via education. The fourth hypothesized association, between opposition to government expenditure on unemployment and Tea Party support, is supported by the data. Every one unit increase – on the likert-scale – in opposition to government expenditures on unemployment is associated with 24 percent higher odds of supporting the Tea Party. This possibly indicates an opposition towards a “negative tax” that ignores the distinction between “good” and “bad” poor. The fifth hypothesized association, between opposition to government expenditure on welfare and Tea Party support, is supported by the data. Every one unit increase – on the likertscale – in opposition to government expenditures on welfare is associated with 56 percent higher odds of supporting the Tea Party. Like the previous hypothesized association, this also possibly indicates an opposition towards a “negative tax” that ignores the distinction between “good” and “bad” poor. The sixth hypothesized association, between support of government expenditure on law enforcement and Tea Party support, is supported by the data. Every one unit increase – on the likert-scale – in support for government expenditures on law enforcement is associated with 17 percent higher odds of supporting the Tea Party. This possibly indicates a recognition of danger as stemming from social relations and a felt need to be protected from such danger by the state. The seventh hypothesized association, between support for government expenditure on unemployment and Tea Party support, is confirmed by the data. Every one unit increase – on the likert-scale – in support for government expenditures on social security is associated with 8 percent higher odds of supporting the Tea Party. This is an interesting finding as it is the only one that is significant at the P=.1 level but not at the P=.05 level. Additionally, the fact that it is

substantively small compared to the others indicates that there is far more ambiguity in the Tea Party’s stance on social security than on other issues of government expenditure. I will identify some of the possible sources of this ambiguity in the concluding section.

Conclusions Revisiting the literature, we can confirm that Williamson (2011) was right in her assertion that the Tea Party is not monolithically hostile toward the government. These results show that Tea Party supporters show differential levels of opposition depending on the program they are asked about. They are very opposed to education and welfare, mildly opposed to unemployment and health, and supportive of social security and law enforcement. What I have tried to show, or rather what I have speculated upon based on the evidence I have been able to compile at this time, is that these differentiations are important. To say that they show a fragmented or contradictory ideology (one that demands smaller government but only for programs they do not personally like) is rather reductive. Instead, I think they show that, like all political discourse, Tea Party discourse is drawing from a particular technology of conceptualizations of what government can and should be. In this paper, I have attempted to flesh out just what that technology consists of and how they make use of it to differentiate themselves from the neoliberal consensus that, I would argue, though I have in no way begun to do so here, is currently dominant in US politics. For it appears that their “revitalization of conservatism” (Williamson et al. 2011) can also be understood as a classical liberal response to neo-liberalism. In this light, it is possible to understand their strong rejection of something as seemingly innocuous, if not positive, as education as a rejection of sociological liberalism, a rejection of the government acting on the social framework. It is also

possible to understand their insistence on the difference between “workers” and “non-workers,” “good” poor and “bad” poor, as a rejection of the levelling of that distinction that neoliberalism insists upon. This is perhaps how they can be for social security but against welfare. It also can explain how they can be against unemployment, but less so than welfare, given that those who collect unemployment benefits literally straddle the social designation between “workers” and “non-workers,” between “good” and “bad” poor. Additionally, it is possible to understand their “popular originalism” (Zietlow 2010) in two ways that support the conclusion that they signify a classical liberal opposition to neoliberalism. The first is the “popular” part: their insistence on interpreting the constitution and demanding that the state adheres to it recalls a classical liberal understanding of what the rule of law means: “the possibility of judicial arbitration, by one or another institution, between citizens and the public authorities” (Foucault 2004: 171). While this is not mutually exclusive with the economic rule of law introduced earlier, the spirit of their appeal is a classically liberal one. The second way their “popular originalism” is opposed to neoliberalism is the “originalism” part. For, as Zietlow (2010: 14) points out, this originalism aligns them with an interpretive approach that calls for amendments to the US constitution that would restrict congressional power and de-emphasize Reconstruction Era expansion of that power. In short, the legislative changes that make something like a neoliberal governmentality possible would be necessarily curtailed if the Tea Party popular originalists had their judicial way. All in all, this paper must be understood as preparatory research. However, I believe the facts I have been able to establish here will facilitate more fruitful inquiries down the road, hopefully ones that will make the Tea Party’s relationship with neoliberal governmentality yet more intelligible. Table 1: Operationalizations of Variables

Variable name

Type of variable

Survey Question

Variable Modification

Tea Party support

Dichotomous dependent

Financial situation past year

Dichotomous independent

Collapse likert-ordinal into SUPPORT and INDIFFERENT/OPPOSE Collapse liker-ordinal into BETTER/SAME and WORSE

Government spending on health

Interval dependent

Government spending on education

Interval dependent

Government spending on unemployment

Interval dependent

Government spending on social security

Interval dependent

Government spending on welfare

Interval dependent

Government spending on law enforcement

Interval dependent

Gender

Dichotomous control Categorical control

How strongly do you support or oppose the Tea Party? Would you say you are better off or worse off financially than you were a year ago? How much more or less public expenditure on health should there be? How much more or less public expenditure on health should there be? How much more or less public expenditure on health should there be? How much more or less public expenditure on health should there be? How much more or less public expenditure on health should there be? How much more or less public expenditure on health should there be? How much more or less public expenditure on health should there be? Male or Female

Race Age

Categorical control

Respondents racial self-identification Age

1=Much more 5=Much less 1=Much more 5=Much less 1=Much more 5=Much less 1=Much more 5=Much less

1=Much more 5=Much less 1=Much more 5=Much less Created dummy variable with Female as the reference group Dropped “Other” and created dummy variables with Black as the reference group Collapsed into 18-34, 35-54, and 55+ and created dummy variables with 18-34 as the reference group

Education

Categorical control

Education level

Table 2: Descriptive Statistics of Variables Mean

Created dummy variables with Less than HS as the reference group

Std.

%

Min Max

Deviation Tea Party Support Worse Financial Situation Government Spending on (1=much more, 5=much less): Health Education Unemployment Social Security Welfare Law Enforcement Gender: Male Race: White Hispanic Age: 35-54 55+ Education: HS Diploma Some College College Graduate Graduate Degree N=4,964

23 44

2.78 2.29 3.05 2.52 3.46 2.61

1.08 1.07 1.03 0.91 1.04 0.86

Table 3: Logistic Regression Predicting Tea Party Support

1 1 1 1 1 1 48 63 18 33 43 25 33 19 11

5 5 5 5 5 5

Odds Ratio Standard Error 95% Confidence Interval Worse Financial Situation Government Spending on: Health Education Unemployment Social Security Welfare Law Enforcement Gender: Male Race: White Hispanic Age: 35-54 55+ Education: HS Diploma Some College College Graduate Graduate Degree N=4,964 *P-value