The Tea Party

Abstract

In The Tea Party: Three Principles, constitutional law professor Elizabeth Price Foley takes on the mainstream media's characterization of the American Tea Party movement, asserting that it has been distorted in a way that prevents meaningful political dialogue and may even be dangerous for America's future. Foley sees the Tea Party as a movement of principles over politics. She identifies three 'core principles' of American constitutional law that bind the decentralized, wide-ranging movement: limited government, unapologetic US sovereignty and constitutional originalism. These three principles, Foley explains, both define the Tea Party movement and predict its effect on the American political landscape. Foley explains the three principles' significance to the American founding and constitutional structure. She then connects the principles to current issues such as health care reform, illegal immigration, the war on terror, and internationalism.

Populism and the political system: A critical systems theory approach to the study of populism

“…Following this structural approach, which analyses authoritarian populisms as an inversion within its political form, it becomes possible to make sense of the paradoxical alliances of democratic impetus and authoritarian politics as they, again, resurface in our contemporary world (Blokker, 2019). Currently, this alliance can be observed in originalist approaches to the US Constitution as expressed by the Tea Party movement (Foley, 2012), culturalist understandings of a pre-political 'historical' constitution as they dominate constitutional reform in the Viségrad-Countries in Eastern Europe (Kovács, 2017;Kim, 2020; cf. also the case of judicial review in Israel: Harel and Kolt, 2020), or rights-based 'illiberal liberalism' as advocated by Scandinavian right-wing parties (Moffitt, 2017).…”

The Tragic Fall of Better Angels: Nationalism, Neoliberalism, and the Failure of Responsibility in American Conservativism

“…Into this context emerged the Tea Party in 2008. In 2010, a Harris poll revealed that only a third of adult Americans supported the Tea Party (Foley 2012). The movement was fragmented and could not settle on a single platform or set of ideas.…”

The Madisonian Republic and Modern Nationalist Populism: Democracy and the Rule of Law

“…The modern nationalist variant of populism in America is right‐wing white identity politics. The ‘blood and soil’ nationalism found in the Trump/Bannon version of populist nationalism has not historically been a dominant feature of American political culture (Bazelon 2017; Foley 2012). In fact, it was among the notable healthy characteristics Alexis de Tocqueville highlighted as absent in American social and political life.…”