The Tea Party’s Long History

Many of us fall into the trap of thinking the Tea Party is something new.  Rick Perlstein, however, traces their roots back to Senator Joseph McCarthy.

“First, a conceptual distinction. there is in-deed little new under the wingnut sun; if studying the right full time for sixteen years has taught me anything, it is that. But the structural context for their attempts to get what they want is different from what it was in previous decades.

The reactionary percentage of the electorate in these United States has been relatively constant since McCarthy’s day; I’d estimate it as hovering around 30 percent. A minority, but one never all that enamored of the niceties of democracy—they see themselves as fighting for the survival of civilization, after all. So, generation after generation, they’ve ruthlessly exploited the many points of structural vulnerability in the not-very-democratic American political system to get their way.”

I would quibble with some of Perlstein’s assertions (I do think the role of Obama’s race has heightened the passion of the Tea Party types) but his overall assertion seems spot on.

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.