“We're losing our country”: Barack Obama, Race & the Tea Party

Abstract

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.

How Local Factions Pressure Parties: Activist Groups and Primary Contests in the Tea Party Era

“…Table 1 summarizes these 'true confounders' (Austin 2011): percentage of white voters, median household income, median age, rural-urban population, and pre-treatment partisan control. These variables are exogenous to but predictive of both our treatment variable of Tea Party presence (Walker 2011;Willer, Feinberg, and Wetts 2016), our outcome variables of voting behaviour (Gelman et al 2007;Gramlich 2020), and ideological position (Jardina 2019;McCall and Manza 2011). Data on district whiteness, median household income, and median age come from one-year American Community Survey (ACS) estimates.…”

“Taking Back Our Country”: Tea Party Membership and Support for Punitive Crime Control Policies

“…This line of reasoning characterized the TPM as being, in many ways, analogous to the various anti‐black backlashes that have followed past challenges and threats to white dominance in America. Walker (), for example, has suggested that the TPM is comparable to the white, conservative reaction to the delegalization of racial discrimination in the 1960s, a backlash that many scholars have implicated as a key contributing factor to mass incarceration (Beckett and Sasson ; Tonry ; Weaver ).…”