Change They Can't Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America

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Are Tea Party supporters merely a group of conservative citizens concerned about government spending Or are they racists who refuse to accept Barack Obama as their president because he's not white Change They Can't Believe In offers an alternative argument--that the Tea Party is driven by the reemergence of a reactionary movement in American poli

Reviews

"A scathing analysis of the Tea Party movement, linking it in spirit to the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society. Taking today's conservative populists to be dangerous and their ideas self-incriminating, the authors speculate that Tea Party supporters may perceive of social change as subversion. Based on research and interviews, they suggest racism, desire for social dominance ... drives the Tea Party."--Publishers Weekly "Change They Can't Believe In offers valuable empirical data on the Tea Party, and its focus on supporters' antagonism toward Obama is critical to understanding the movement."--Michael O'Donnell, New Republic "[A] rigorous scholarly investigation of the tea party... Parker and Barreto make the case that tea party supporters are driven above all by 'anxiety incited by Obama as President.' Intuitively, this may already make sense to many readers, but the authors muster the evidence in support, dividing and subdividing different categories of political activity and belief to arrive at a firm basis for their conclusion... [S]upported by reasoned facts in place of political passions."--Kirkus Reviews "[Parker and Barreto's] statistically informed analysis helps us understand the Tea Party's priorities, its fervor, and its contempt for compromise."--Glenn C. Altschuler, Huffington Post

Author Bio

Christopher S. Parker is the Stuart A. Scheingold Professor of Social Justice and Political Science at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of "Fighting for Democracy" (Princeton). Matt A. Barreto is associate professor of political science at the University of Washington, Seattle, and director of the Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Sexuality. He is the author of "Ethnic Cues".