56. Rebecca E. Klatch, Women of the New Right (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988); and Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).
57. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, which also contains many references to works on the prominent role of women in U.S. civic a.s.sociations.
58. Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), chapters 13.
CHAPTER 2.
1. Video of the Santelli rant is widely available online, including from CNBC"s website: Available as of May 5, 2011.
2. The statement appears at Available as of May 5, 2011.
3. Available at the Tea Party Patriots" Crawford Tea Party page, as of May 5, 2011.
4. Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party"s Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). For a thoughtful review of this book, see Gordon S. Wood, "No Thanks for the Memories," New York Review of Books, January 13, 2011.
5. Notes taken by Theda Skocpol at the event on April 14, 2011 in the North Berwick Maine Community Center. No one followed up in the discussion, so we do not know if DeLemus really wanted to reinstate slavery or male-only suffrage. Other statements in the talk indicated he would probably be supportive of getting rid of the direct election of senators and the income tax.
6. Recounted by DeLemus in his talk in North Berwick Maine on April 14, 2011.
7. Sean Wilentz, "Confounding Fathers: The Tea Party"s Cold War Roots," The New Yorker, October 18, 2010.
8. Available at the Greenville Tea Party website, as of April 5, 2011.
9. Available at the Greenville Tea Party website, as of April 5, 2011.
10. McNaughton"s website includes a detailed description of each figure in the painting, from which these terms are drawn. Available at # as of May 6, 2011.
11. Andrew Romano, "America"s Holy Writ," Newsweek, October 17, 2010.
12. Jeffrey H. Anderson, "Obama Misquotes Declaration of Independence, Again," The Weekly Standard, October 20, 2010.
13. Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol, Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
14. Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril, The Political Beliefs of Americans (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967); and Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs, Cla.s.s War? What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
15. Peggy Noonan, "The Tea Party to the Rescue," Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2010. Other Noonan opinion pieces echo the same refrain.
16. From emails to Theda Skocpol.
17. For instance, David Brooks argued that "big business" was a target for Tea Party anger. David Brooks, "The Tea Party Teens," New York Times, January 4, 2010.
18. Several Tea Party members spoke of unions, particularly those representing public employees and auto industry workers, in terms that made them sound like Gilded Age plutocrats. A Boston Tea Party event was organized under the banner, "Collective Bargaining is EXTORTION." From a Boston Tea Party event listing, available at as of February 28, 2011.
19. CBS News/New York Times Poll, April 512, 2010.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. In Arizona, Tea Partiers who told us they were unconcerned about social issues held their tongues when social conservatives voiced their views.
23. Rosalind S. Helderman, "Virginia fight over climate doc.u.ments will continue," Washington Post, October 5, 2010. Available at as of May 12, 2011.
24. For a fascinating history of modern conservatism, see Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008).
25. We almost never saw any member of a Tea Party audience question statements by visiting speakers, no matter how implausible.
26. CBS News/New York Times Poll, April 512, 2010.
27. Email to Theda Skocpol. Note that Rand likes the individual freedom he enjoys in the single-payer Medicare program, a program that is arguably the most socialized part of U.S. public social provision.
28. Mary Williams Walsh, "Social Security to See Payout Exceed Revenue This Year," New York Times, March 25, 2010, A1.
29. Daily Kos Weekly State of the Nation Poll (1001 registered U.S. voters; margin of error 3.1%), Public Policy Polling, January 23, 2011, pp. 78.
30. McClatchy/Marist poll, April 18, 2011. Available at as of May 6, 2011.
31. DakotaPoll, "DakotaPoll Finds Large Majority of Tea Party Supporters Favor Sales Tax Increase for Education," February 14, 2011. Full results are also available at Asked about trade-offs in the South Dakota state budget between cuts in state support for public schools and nursing homes, on the one hand, and an increase in the sales tax during tourist season for the next three years, nearly three-quarters of the Tea Party supporters favored the tax increase.
33. Outside of Social Security and Medicare, Tea Partiers are generally not aware of all the forms of government a.s.sistance they have received-and they do not record these benefits in their mental ledgers of government"s effect on their lives. Tea Partiers are mostly of the "baby boom" generation, and thus were recipients of very intensive federal spending on education and infrastructure in the postWorld War Two era. Tea Party members we spoke to mentioned their own receipt of student loans, low-cost state college tuition, and public school education, among other government programs. But these comments were always made in pa.s.sing, unconnected to their views of government as a whole. Less tangible expenditures, such as the energy subsidies, home mortgage deductions, and highway funding that make modern suburban life widely affordable, seemed almost entirely invisible to Tea Partiers. For all their concern about government intervention in the economy, many of the government"s most significant redistributions in their favor simply are not on the Tea Party radar. Instead, they typically attribute their own success to the functioning of the free market, and see their personal trajectory in the marketplace as resulting entirely from their own individual or family initiative. For more on government visibility, see Suzanne Mettler, 2010. "Reconst.i.tuting the Submerged State: The Challenges of Social Policy Reform in the Obama Era." Perspectives on Politics 8(03): 803824.
34. DakotaPoll, "DakotaPoll Finds Large Majority of Tea Party Supporters Favor Sales Tax Increase for Education," February 14, 2011. Full results are also available at Because of the public nature of her role on the Tea Party Express tour, we do not use a pseudonym in this instance.
36. "Harper"s Index," Harper"s Magazine, March 2011, p. 13.
37. Liz Schott, "Policy Basics: An Introduction to TANF," Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, March 19, 2009. Available at as of February 27, 2011.
38. Sandra"s views on ent.i.tlements came up in a somewhat surprising context. Knowing that we were coming to interview her local Tea Party, Sandra had done some Internet research on her interviewers. She came across a presentation we had given on our research in Ma.s.sachusetts, which made this same point about the differentiation between ent.i.tlements and welfare. Sandra was somewhat frustrated that we felt this was a point worth making. As she put it, "Well, obviously!"
39. Email to Theda Skocpol, February 24, 2010.
40. See Ronald Brownstein, "The Gray and the Brown: The Generational Mismatch," National Journal, July 24, 2010.
41. David Leonhardt, "In the Process, Pushing Back at Inequality," New York Times, March 24, 2010, A1 and A19. The equality-enhancing aspects of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 are more fully explored in Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol, Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
42. A photo of this sign, at a Tea Party rally in Madison, WI, can be seen at as of May 12, 2011.
43. Christopher Parker, et al., "2010 Multi-State Survey of Race and Politics," University of Washington Inst.i.tute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and s.e.xuality. The website link appears in the following note.
44. Ibid. Parker"s data suggests some very interesting subtleties to racial views in America more generally. Tea Partiers are more negative about everyone"s hard work, intelligence, and trustworthiness. Sometimes, their views of blacks are much more negative than their views of whites. For instance, 14% more Tea Partiers described whites as hardworking than described blacks as hardworking. Skeptics of the Tea Party, by contrast, deem whites and blacks hardworking at almost exactly the same rate. But when it comes to trustworthiness, Tea Party skeptics have larger differences between their views of blacks and whites than Tea Party faithful. 72% of Tea Party skeptics rated whites trustworthy, while only 57% rated blacks trustworthy-a difference of 15%. Tea Partiers were less likely to see either blacks or whites as trustworthy, but the difference was only 9%. Though these data are only for white respondents, they do not control for other factors that may be significant, such as age. For these and other findings, see available as of May 5, 2011.
45. To some degree, this fear of outsiders was warranted, as the April 2010 Tea Party protest on the Boston Common was overrun with local college students and union members, many of whom were carrying ironic and purposefully misspelled signs, with slogans like "I forget what I"m angry about." or "Down with taxis."
46. From a description of upcoming guest speakers at as of February 27, 2011.
47. Muslims actually make up only 0.6% of the U.S. population. Data from the CIA World Factbook, available at as of May 14, 2011.
48. Stanley"s plan for immigration was remarkable in its moderation: "Secure the border, that"s the first thing. Basically, what it amounts to, is a period of time of registration. Criminals are sent back across the border, and the rest are given green cards, they can work here, pay their taxes. At some point in time, if they want to become citizens, they pay a fine, get in the back of the line. There is a path to citizenship. But not amnesty." Stanley would presumably be disconcerted, if not horrified, to discover to what extent his views of immigration coincide with those proposed by President Obama. In a July 2010 speech, the President said: "Today, we have more boots on the ground near the Southwest border than at any time in our history. [...] We are committed to doing what"s necessary to secure our borders. [...] We have to demand responsibility from people living here illegally. They must be required to admit that they broke the law. They should be required to register, pay their taxes, pay a fine, and learn English. They must get right with the law before they can get in line and earn their citizenship. [...] We can create a pathway for legal status that is fair, reflective of our values, and works." A transcript of this speech is available at of May 20, 2011.
49. John Lantigua, "Illegal Immigrants Paying Taxes?" Palm Beach Post, April 25, 2010. For a more complete understanding of the programs for which unauthorized immigrants are eligible, see "Overview of Immigrant Eligibility for Federal Programs," National Immigrant Law Center, available at as of February 27, 2011.
50. James C. McKinley Jr., "Taking to the Streets and Court on Immigration," New York Times, July 23, 2010, A11.
51. Rehberg chairs the House appropriations subcommittee in charge of setting funding for the programs he denounced. He is quoted in Daniel Luzer, "The Lie About Pell Grants, the "Welfare of the 21st Century,"" Washington Monthly, April 5, 2011. Rehberg has his facts wrong because most low-income Pell grant recipients who do not finish college drop out after a semester or two and are not a continuing cost to taxpayers.
52. Chris Isadore, "Job openings remain scarce for unemployed," CNN Money, October 7, 2010. See also "Unemployment rates by age, s.e.x, and marital status," Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics, available at as of February 27, 2011.
53. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-and Turned Its Back on the Middle Cla.s.s. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).
54. One person did cite the economic downturn. Asked to explain what rights of hers had been infringed, Arizonan Cheryl Morse, 49, said she "woke up" when her business failed. She had done all the right things, she insisted, and yet her business had gone under. As she saw it, her right to a fair economic shake had been taken away. For more on the interaction of the economic downturn and conservative ideology, see in Chapter 1, "Economic Worries with a Political Edge."
55. Mary C. Waters and Tomes R. Jimenez, "a.s.sessing Immigrant a.s.similation: New Empirical and Theoretical Challenges," Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 31 (2005), pp. 105125.
56. The term "five-minute zones" was drawn from sustainable development literature intended to encourage walkable neighborhoods.
57. Paul Krugman"s blog provides a good review of the bond market"s overall health. See, for example, Paul Krugman, "Bond Vigilantes, Still Invisible," New York Times, December 8, 2010. Available at as of May 21, 2011.
58. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics: And Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
59. In emails to Theda Skocpol.
60. Mark Leibovitch, "Being Glenn Beck," New York Times, September 29, 2010.
61. From the website for the Southwest Metro Tea Party, available at as of May 5, 2011.
CHAPTER 3.
1. With only a few exceptions-such as the work of Amy Gardner and other reporters at the Washington Post-journalistic accounts of gra.s.sroots Tea Partiers are based on b.u.t.tonholing people who attend rallies for short interviews. Journalists also call up advocacy leaders based in Washington DC, and so their articles often quote these elites and attribute their ideological views to the Tea Party as a whole.
2. Quotes from our interview with Tom in February 2011 are used under his real name with his permission.
3. Jean Casanave, "Losing Our Way," letter to the editor, Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal, May 10, 2009.
4. "Government Restraint Group Forms in Mathews," Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal, June 19, 2009.
5. The account of Tea Party activities in Charlottesville comes from email exchanges and phone interviews Theda Skocpol conducted with Carole Thorpe in February and April 2011.
6. Cindy Pugh"s and Mara Souvannasoth"s real names are used because this portrait is entirely compiled form public records. The quote here from Mara is from their November 27, 2010 appearance on the radio show, "The Patriot," broadcast on AM 1280 in the Twin Cities. Both women recounted the story of how they met on that program, and also on "The Sue Jeffers Show," FM 100.3, on September 21, 2010.
7. Bob Cusack, "Bachmann Urges Confronting Lawmakers on Health Care Bill," The Hill, October 31, 2010.
8. Information on the Southwest Metro Tea Party"s activities comes from its website available at as of May 11, 2011.
9. "How to Organize Your Own "Tea Party" Protest," created February 21, 2009, 12:31 A.M., by Brendan Steinhauser and published at FreedomWorks.org.
10. Brandon is quoted in Chris Good, "The Tea Party Movement: Who"s In Charge?" The Atlantic, April 2009.
11. Ibid.
12. The historical patterns and the post-1960 transition are doc.u.mented in Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003).
13. Marshall Ganz is a gra.s.sroots organizer who now teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
14. See, for example, "Organizing for America catches heat," UPI, January 13, 2010.
15. Paul Bedard, "GOP Chairman Michael Steele Denies Tea Party Claim," U.S. News and World Report, April 10, 2009.
16. Amy Gardner, "Gauging the Scope of the Tea Party Movement in America," Washington Post, October 24, 2010.
17. Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington have more than thirty Tea Party groups.
18. For instance, Tea Parties that have a social networking component, using a service like MeetUp or Facebook or Ning, usually make visible the number of people who have joined online. We found online membership data for about one-third of the Tea Party groups; we believe larger groups are especially likely to have membership data visible because smaller groups tend to have less complex websites and are less likely to set up a social network component to their website.
19. Skocpol, Diminished Democracy, especially ch. 3 and pp. 130131, Table 4.1.
20. In fact, several Tea Party organizers we spoke to were somewhat disdainful of 9/12 groups, claiming that those groups were less politically committed and less engaged.
21. Amy Gardner, "Tea-Party Activists Question if Rebel Political Movement has Changed for the Worse," Washington Post, December 31, 2010.
22. As we will see in the following chapter, conservative media were crucial to the spread of the Tea Party idea, and Fox News host Glenn Beck, in particular, helped encourage local meetings via his "9/12 Project."
23. Skocpol, Theda, Marshall Ganz, and Ziad Munson, "A Nation of Organizers." American Political Science Review 94(3): 527546.
24. Our account is based on information from interviews with local Virginia Tea Party leaders who observed or partic.i.p.ated in the formation of the state Federation.
25. On Federation lobbying, see Wesley P. Hester, "Tea-Party Backers Grill Va. Lawmakers," Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 6, 2011; and Anita k.u.mar and Rosalind S. Helderman, "Virginia Tea Party Aims to Put General a.s.sembly Lessons into Practice," Washington Post, March 6, 2011.
26. Wesley P. Hester, "Tea Party All Grown Up and Planning for the Future," Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 10, 2010. The schedule of events is available at as of May 11, 2011.