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Tea Party Fairness: How the Idea of Proportional Justice Explains the Right-Wing Populism of the Obama Era
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In this dissertation I argue that the main impulse underlying the tea party movement is a conviction that activist government helps the undeserving at the expense of the truly productive members of society. I say main impulse because racial resentment and other illiberal attitudes also contribute to tea party involvement. But illiberal motives do not play the dominant role that much existing research suggests. When tests are properly conducted, preference for limited government is the strongest and most consistent predictor of tea party support.
Further, I show that the movement catalyzed as a protest against the “bailouts” of undeserving Wall Street banks, other financial institutions, and automakers in 2008, before it acquired the famous tea party moniker from journalist Rick Santelli in February 2009. With repeated fast-paced government interventions in response to the Great Recession and with increasing publicity of the tea party brand early in the administration of President Barack Obama, the movement grew into a heterogeneous coalition, consisting of three distinct groups.
I find the largest of these subgroups has a strongly libertarian flavor and scarcely a whiff of racial animus. Social conservatives comprise another significant group, with strong preferences for limited government and moral traditionalism, and some racially conservative attitudes. Racial conservatives are a substantial subgroup too, but my analysis shows that they are no less motivated by the issue of limited government than others in the movement. These groups are different from one another but came together in the same movement largely because they shared a belief that the federal government had violated basic fairness in its response to difficult economic times.
I go on to argue that tea partiers’ preference for limited government is itself primarily driven by a “reap what you sow” conception of economic justice, rather than, as much tea party rhetoric proclaims, a desire for individual liberty. In the psychological literature on fairness, this conception is called “proportional justice”—the idea that everyone should be rewarded in strict proportion to their achievements and failings, and that government should not shield people from the consequences of their decisions. In sum, I contend the tea party impulse is at its core a demand for what its members see as basic economic fairness. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3663x343#main
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... In theory, there are thus ample reasons to expect populists to use more moral rhetoric than their political opponents. Yet, this moral aspect in the populist message has only rarely been studied (Ekins, 2015;Norocel, 2013) and not yet in a systematic way, comparing populist to nonpopulist elite communication. 24 Indeed, we find that, when looking at tweets, the populist dimension explains the most divergence in the use of moral appeals: Scoring higher on this axis increases the likelihood of publishing a tweet containing a moral appeal more than the other dimensions do. ...
Moral rhetoric is a powerful tool for any politician. Yet knowledge on the actual use of political moral appeals is scarce and mostly limited to two‐party systems. This study is the first to systematically investigate the use of moral appeals in formal and informal political elite communication in the multiparty systems of Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. This allows us to look beyond the unidimensional left‐right axis, instead investigating the extent to which the economic, the sociocultural, and the populist dimension explain differences in moral language. The Moral Foundations Dictionary is used in automated content analyses to study the presence of (different) moral appeals in party manifestos (n = 171,639) and tweets (n = 1,130,073). The results show that West European political elites use a fair amount of moral appeals in their political communication (41.6% of manifesto statements and 33.3% of tweets). Commonalities in the usage of moral language are larger than differences. Yet found differences are multidimensional. Especially when communication is less scripted, political elites tend to distinguish themselves from opponents in their appeals to different moral foundations. Most importantly, these appeals are congruent with ideological values.
ملخص الرسالة:
تُعد الشعبوية من المواضيع المعاصرة المهمة، فباتت تشكل نقطة مهمة على صعيد الدراسات الإنسانية، فالدراسة تكشف النشأة الحقيقية للشعبوية في الفكر السياسي الأمريكي المعاصر، ومدى تغلغلها في السلوك السياسي، والعقلية الأمريكية، وفي السرد التاريخي للشعبوية الأمريكية، بدءاً من التسعينيات في القرن التاسع عشر إلى الزمن الحالي، يظهر أنَّ هذا التراث السياسي تمثل في شكل لغة الشعب، وتمَّ تبنيه من قبل عدد لا يحصى من الشخصيات السياسية في العقود اللاحقة من التاريخ الأمريكي.
فقد مثلت الشعبوية نوعاً من (البراغماتية) في الفكر السياسي الأمريكي بكل تجلياته، ولا سيما على الصعيد الخارجي، ومنطق العلاقات الدولية، وبشكل خاص مع تسنم دونالد ترامب الرئاسة في الولايات المتحدة بعد فوزه في الأنتخابات الرئاسية، عبر توظيفه للشعبوية، وتحشيده لخطاب الكراهية، وفوبيا الأرهاب الإسلامي، وهو ما أنعكس على مجمل السياسة الأمريكية المعاصرة، عبر أنعكاسها على الصعيدين الداخلي والخارجي، إذ مثل الخطاب الأمريكي( شعبوية قومية عرقية)، يغذيها الأستياء في مجمل جوانبها، مع تنامي الدوافع الإجتماعية والإقتصادية، والثقافية والسياسية التي تغذيها، بما في ذلك عدم المساواة في الدخل، والخوف من تأثير العولمة على الوظائف، والهوية الوطنية، والتغيرات الديموغرافية، والأستياء الشعبي من المؤسسة السياسية، والإقتصادية التقليدية.
Populism is considered one of the important contemporary topics. It has become an important point in the field of human studies. The study reveals the true emergence of populism in contemporary American political thought, and the extent of its penetration into political behavior, the American mentality, and in the historical narrative of American populism, starting from the 1890s to the present. This political legacy appears to have been represented in the form of the language of the people and adopted by countless political figures in the subsequent decades of American history..
Populism represents a kind of pragmatism in American political thought in all its manifestations, especially on the external level, and the logic of international relations, especially with Donald Trump assuming the presidency in the United States, after winning the presidential elections, through his employment of populism, his mobilization of hate speech, and the phobia of Islamic terrorism,which is reflected on the entirety of contemporary American politics through its reflection on the internal and external levels. The American discourse (Ethnic Nationalist Populism ) is fed by resentment in all its aspects, with the growth of social, economic, cultural and political motives that feed it, including income inequality, fear of the impact of globalization on jobs, national identity, demographic changes, and popular discontent of the traditional political and economic establishment.
In this paper I argue that the main impulse underlying the tea party movement is a conviction that activist government unfairly rewards the undeserving at the expense of the productive leading them to demand limited government. I say main impulse because racial resentment and other illiberal attitudes also contribute to tea party involvement. But illiberal motives do not play the dominant role that much of the leading research suggests. When tests are properly conducted, preference for limited government is the strongest and most consistent predictor of tea party support. Further I show the tea party is a heterogeneous coalition, consisting of three distinct groups. I find the largest of these subgroups has a strongly libertarian flavor and scarcely a whiff of racial animus. Social conservatives comprise another significant group, with strong preferences for limited government and moral traditionalism, and some racially conservative attitudes. Racial conservatives are a substantial subgroup too, but my analysis shows that they are no less motivated by the issue of limited government than others in the movement. These groups are different from one another but came together in the same movement largely because they shared a belief that the federal government had violated basic fairness in its response to difficult economic times.
The motivation, planning, production, comprehension, coordination, and evaluation of human social life may be based largely on combinations of 4 psychological models. In communal sharing, people treat all members of a category as equivalent. In authority ranking, people attend to their positions in a linear ordering. In equality matching, people keep track of the imbalances among them. In market pricing, people orient to ratio values. Cultures use different rules to implement the 4 models. In addition to an array of inductive evidence from many cultures and approaches, the theory has been supported by ethnographic field work and 19 experimental studies using 7 different methods testing 6 different cognitive predictions on a wide range of subjects from 5 cultures.
While the Tea Party movement has gained much support and media attention over the past several years, the debate remains about the sources of support for the movement. Some argue that supporters are drawn to the movement by concerns about the state of the U.S. economy. Others believe the movement attracts those who are most disgruntled with the size and direction of the national government. Further, charges of racism and anti-immigrant attitudes among movement supporters continue to arise. Finally, some wonder what role moral issues play in this movement, if any. We believe that much of this debate results from the varied attraction of the Tea Party movement across the nation. Using data from a June 2010 nationwide USA Today/Gallup Poll, investigate the sources of movement support, finding that the basis of support varies by geographic region. We find that traditional, moral values, and counter to much popular sentiment, racism play no role in movement support in any region of the nation. Instead, concerns about illegal immigration, the economy, and the size of federal government predict movement support, but vary by region.