Is the Tea Party Racist?
July 08, 2010 |
The charge that the Tea Party is racist is a perfect object lesson in liberal misinterpretation of conservatives. It is, of all the charges leveled against the Tea Party movement, the most inflammatory and the most politically damaging. Yet the accusation says more about the accusers than the accused.
Critics of the Tea Party point to a smattering of racist signs at rallies around the country, to the low percentage of minorities involved in the movement, and to a study that purports to show high levels of "racial resentment" among tea party supporters. These arguments are, however, mere justifications for a position already taken. Liberals were inclined to believe Tea Partiers racist even before such "evidence" was available. That is, the belief that Tea Partiers are racist is not an evidence-based belief. It is a belief in search of evidence.
What I propose, then, is the Theory of the Missing Motive. Since the education establishment has failed to convey a thorough and unprejudiced perspective on differing political points of view, even highly educated liberals possess a cartoonish, easily-dismissed image of American conservative thought. Liberals cannot believe that Tea Partiers are actually motivated by the passions and the reasons that Tea Partiers claim motivate them, because liberals in general are alienated from those passions and insufficiently educated in those reasons.
It is essentially a failure of imagination. Liberals cannot imagine themselves into a way of thinking in which conservatives do what they do and believe what they believe for good reasons. And since they cannot believe that conservatives are motivated by rational beliefs and admirable motives, they must appeal to darker, more primitive impulses to explain their behavior. The racist motive presents itself as a natural and convenient explanation.
Liberals, in other words, were always going to believe that a movement dominated by white conservatives is racist.
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If you were not already inclined to consider Tea Partiers racist, you would not find the evidence compelling. I will treat the evidence -- the placards, the absence of blacks, and the "racial resentment" survey -- in turn.
1) The rally signs are easily dismissed. I do not defend the signs themselves; some are juvenile, some ignorant, and some racist and hateful. It is plainly flawed logic, however, to conclude that the Tea Party movement itself is racist. Every movement has its fools and offenders. Counter-activists infiltrate the Tea Party rallies with misspelled or outrageous placards. And liberal reporters are attracted to displays of conservative idiocy like flies to honey.
If there were a higher percentage of racists at Tea Party rallies than in the general populace, would this mean the movement is racist? To answer yes is to confuse correlation with causation. Even a movement that has nothing to do with a particular -ism may arise among or appeal to a constituency in which that -ism happens to be more common. The vegan movement may, due to its history and location and demographics and even the set of beliefs associated with it, have a higher than usual percentage of anti-semites, yet this would not make veganism anti-semitic.
If some participate in the Tea Party with racist motives, perhaps because they loathe the thought of an African-American President, would this make the movement racist? Again, the answer is no. The human psyche is a complicated wreck, and when millions of people participate in a movement they will do so for a thousand different reasons. Any protest against President Obama, even if it were a protest against the continuation of the Afghanistan war, will provide an occasion for racists who seek to oppose Obama for any reason whatsoever.
Photos of rally placards are also used in a more subtle way to argue that the protestors are simply so angry and so exaggerated in their criticisms that they must be driven by racist impulses. Yet anyone who believes that the Tea Party protests are uniquely angry or offensive, or filled with Nazi comparisons and allusions to violence against the President, should take a stroll down memory lane in Bush-Hitlerville -- where "Kill Bush" shirts can be purchased alongside bumper stickers with nooses and signs of Bush beheaded; where you can take your family to visit a guillotine with a decapitated Bush at an Obama rally; where you can entertain yourselves by burning Bush effigies or watching "Death of a President" or making assassination threats on YouTube with your children; and where everyone from Nobel Peace Prize winners to Democratic governors and Presidential candidates speak openly of killing the President. Here are samplers of the anti-Bush signs merely from San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The mainstream media largely ignored the hateful rhetoric directed against President Bush, and waxed lyrical over the protestors. Now they fret over the "seething anger" of these "very angry," "rabid," "outraged" Tea Party protestors, and warn that those who encourage the Tea Party are making "sweet music to the ears of Lee Harvey Oswald wannabes."
There is gross immaturity and aggression on both sides of the aisle, and "the other side does it too" is no excuse. To borrow from Michael Gerson's recent Washington Post column, there are parts of the "grown-up party" and the "ugly party" in every movement. The grown-ups should impose discipline, and movement leaders are already excluding those with racist messages. But the sheer animosity I have seen from the Tea Party so far does not hold a candle to the hatred for Bush that was evident throughout his presidency, and the "anger" presents no reason to conclude that it is irrational racism, rather than a rational and justified response to a government gone off the rails.
The Bush hatred is instructive. In the early years of the Bush administration, I lived among elite liberal academics in Princeton, New Jersey, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. I remember well how Bush was thoroughly loathed before the invasion of Iraq, before the terrorist attack in September 2001, even before the Florida election fiasco. Late night show host Craig Kilborn showed clips of a Bush speech over the words, "SNIPERS WANTED" -- at the nominating convention in 2000. Liberal elites hated Bush even when they knew very little about his character or record or governing philosophy. They knew he was a white conservative from Texas who wore cowboy boots and spoke with a muddled drawl, and who had found Jesus at the bottom of a beer glass. That was all they needed to know.
Likewise, liberals never needed to see the Tea Partiers carrying "witch doctor" signs. They saw a group of largely white conservatives who listened to country music and talk radio. The belief that the Tea Party is racist followed as a matter of course.
2) The largely white composition of the Tea Party rallies is also given as evidence of the movement's racism. The allegation of racism is explicit when progressive leader Jim Wallis writes, "There is something wrong with a political movement like the Tea Party which is almost all white."
Yet the Gallup poll shows that Tea Party supporters are only 4 percent more white (79 percent against 75 percent non-Hispanic white) than the general adult populace. Seventy-nine percent does not comprise "almost all" in my book, especially when it is not far removed from the average.
Other studies suggest a somewhat higher proportion of whites in the Tea Party movement, but the most compelling explanation for the whiteness of the movement is simply that African-Americans are strongly devoted to Barack Obama. In the same Gallup poll, non-black minorities participate in the Tea Party in the same proportion as they appear in the general populace. The different racial composition of Tea Party supporters and non-supporters is caused not by the predominance of whites -- because Hispanics and Asians are present in a proportional measure -- but by the absence of African-Americans.
Ninety-six percent of African-Americans voted for Barack Obama. African-Americans in general are stalwart Democrats, and are especially strongly inclined toward progressive positions on the economic issues at the heart of the Tea Party movement. In this political context, and the historical context of the first African-American Presidency, it is entirely understandable that few African-Americans would participate in a political movement that strongly condemns the policies of President Obama.
3) Finally, what of the "racial resentment" study, which was widely and happily cited throughout the liberal media as confirmation of their caricature of the Tea Partiers?
The numbers emerge from a study by Christopher Parker at the University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Sexuality (WISER). Questions designed to measure "racial resentment" included whether one agrees or disagrees with the view that "Over the past few years blacks have gotten less than they deserve." That's right: if you do not believe that blacks should have gotten more in recent years, then you are harboring racial resentment. Questions such as these are designed to stigmatize conservatism. Another question asks whether "Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class." Notice the present-tense "make." Those who agree that slavery and discrimination (even now) "make" social uplift difficult are presented as acknowledging a simple reality. Those who disagree are blinded by "racial resentment."
Questions such as these do more to measure political ideology -- including core Tea Party values of self-sufficiency and responsibility -- than "racial resentment." When Parker was confronted with this objection, his response fell flat, for reasons Robert VerBruggen explains. Parker attempted to control for ideology by comparing the examples of "conservative" Republican Tea Party supporters with "conservative" Republican Tea Party critics, yet this assumes that "conservative" means the same thing for everyone and thus removes ideological differences. The study is indecisive not only because of its small sample size and its limitation to several states, but because it fails to disentangle ideology from racial attitudes.
The survey also asks whether respondents consider blacks and Hispanics intelligent, hard-working, and trustworthy. Fewer Tea Party "true believers" approved of these characterizations than the "true skeptics." What Parker did not reveal until he was pressed by others, probably because it undercut his conclusion, is that fewer "true believers" approved of these characterizations for all racial categories, including whites. Tea Partiers were more likely to forgo wholesale racial categorizations. When one measures the different rates at which positive stereotypes are applied to whites versus blacks, then Tea Party supporters perform roughly the same as Tea Party critics. Tea Party believers actually rated Asians higher than whites in every category, while "true skeptics" rated whites higher in two out of three. Further, declining to agree that "almost all blacks are hard-working" does not mean that one believes "blacks are lazy," much less that one considers such qualities racially fixed rather than culturally inherited.
It is worth remembering that even if a higher percentage of racists were found to participate in the Tea Party movement, and even if some were motivated to participate by racist impulses, in neither case does it follow that the Tea Party is a racist movement. Yet even so, the WISER study does not remotely establish that Tea Partiers are disproportionately racist or driven by "racial paranoia" to participate.
Other polls fall even shorter of the mark. Much was made, for instance, of a result in the New York Times/CBS poll that 52 percent of Tea Party supporters felt "too much" had been made recently of problems facing black people. Yet the 73 percent of Tea Partiers who believe that blacks and whites enjoy equal opportunities in America today will be inclined to view affirmative action policies, not to mention rabble-rousing from the likes of Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright, as unnecessary and excessive.
Again, the swiftness with which liberals infer racism, on the basis of evidence that is dubious at best, confirms that liberals were inclined to view Tea Partiers as racist from the start. The reason Jim Wallis claims "there is something wrong" with a mostly-white political movement "like the Tea Party," but does not infer racism amongst the environmental movement -- where "green" activists are even more "overwhelmingly white" in spite of decades of effort to change the fact -- is because the Tea Partiers are white conservatives who listen to country music and enjoy talk radio. Even if the "witch doctor" placards had never been printed, and the WISER study had never been conducted, liberals would have believed the movement racist anyway.
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So much for the elaborate efforts on the part of liberals to justify positions already held. Why do they believe from the beginning that a gathering "like the Tea Party" is racist?
A clue can be found in a common liberal retort: If the movement is not racist, then why did it only arise after America elected a black man to the White House? Why did these supposed fiscal conservatives not protest the deficit during the Bush years? There are two glaring problems with this response.
First, the deficit spending of the Obama administration is vastly greater than what we witnessed during the Bush years. Even in the midst of the financial meltdown, the Bush administration sought one-time expenditures, and many conservatives were convinced that extraordinary measures might be necessary. This does not begin to compare with the Obama budget plans, which envision trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, or the mountains beyond mountains of debt that will follow from Medicare reform and cap and trade. It is entirely natural that those who grumbled and protested when Bush overspent would shout and march when a new administration presides over the most immense expansion of federal power and bureaucracy that this country has seen for generations.
Yet the second problem is more important: conservatives did protest the big-government spending habits of the Bush administration. Most conservatives loathed the Medicare expansion. The very same FreedomWorks that has thrown its weight behind the Tea Party movement pushed hard to "Stop the Wall Street Bailout" in late 2008, for exactly the same reasons that Tea Partiers now oppose much of the Obama agenda. The Heritage Foundation also objected that TARP exceeded the enumerated authorities given the federal government in the constitution.
That liberals do not know these things points to the heart of the problem. Since liberals control the American education establishment, and nearly all of the major news organizations, conservatives generally are better educated in liberal ways of thinking than liberals are in conservative ways of thinking. How many of us, in high school or college, heard thorough, eloquent, and charitable defenses of conservative theories of society, economy, and government? The faculties at major universities and the staffs at major news organizations are overwhelmingly liberal. This has not served our country well. Liberals in general get their views of "conservatism" second-hand through liberal caricatures, and this has made them better able to demonize conservatives than understand them.
Even among educated liberals, few have more than a single-layered view of conservatism. They may know the conservative argument superficially, and they are armed with their own objections, but they are ignorant of how conservatives would respond to their objections. This is worse than knowing nothing at all, as it gives liberals the false impression that they have addressed and defeated conservatism. Yet they have only conquered a Potemkin village, where the people are thin and false.
But the problem is not merely ignorance. Liberals are also alienated from core conservative values. Liberals are trained to believe that many of the traditional American ideals and values that conservatives inherit in their families and churches are cruel and intolerant, imperialistic, and implicitly racist, sexist, and classist. They are trained, for instance, not to be motivated by patriotism and American exceptionalism, but by an ideal of world citizenship and parity.
Liberals consistently misinterpret what motivates conservatives because they really cannot see the world from the conservative perspective. Liberals cannot imagine that Tea Partiers are really motivated by concern for their country, and by frustration with a White House hemorrhaging red ink and a government less concerned to represent the interests of the citizenry than to pay off the special interests that fund their campaigns.
Thus, the Theory of the Missing Motive applies. Unable to see a rational and noble motive at the center of the Tea Party movement, liberals supply a darker and more convenient motive instead. Just as ancient cartographers wrote "there be dragons here" beyond the bounds of the world they knew, so liberals write "there be racism here" because the mind of the Tea Partier is undiscovered country in their map of the world. The Tea Party cannot be rationally and nobly motivated, the liberal believes, because the Tea Partiers are not rational and noble.
In other words, the problem is not that liberals dislike the principles promoted at Tea Party rallies. Most do not understand those principles. The problem is that liberals dislike the kind of people who go to Tea Party rallies.
Long before liberals rejected the placards, they rejected the people holding them.
For more articles like this, see the Evangelical Portal or the Cross and Culture blog.
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