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This essay's approach to race and the Tea Party is twofold: to consider the role race plays in Tea Partiers' claim that they have “lost their country” and to question why blacks would be members of the Tea Party given its radically conservative views. To explore the latter, Walker looks to black and other minority conservatives from the past who embraced political conservatism as a means to escape stigmatization. Walker's essay argues that America has become less racist than it used to be, but he resists characterizing the nation as “post-racial.” He uses examples of conflicts between Asians, blacks, and Mexicans to further his point.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx observes, Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this timehonored disguise and this borrowed language.

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