Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

TEA PARTY MOVEMENT: THE AMERICAN ‘PRECARIAT’?

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 47; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00344893.2011.581057

1749-4001

Lisa Disch,

Social Policy and Reform Studies

Abstract This article juxtaposes the Tea Party movement in the US with the European 'precarity' movement to advance a counterintuitive argument. Whereas Tea Party supporters' politics is conservative, their material commitments and aspects of their rhetoric place them in a liberal genealogy: they defend interests and distinctions that are a New Deal inheritance. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This article was produced with the support of a fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. An earlier version of it was delivered at the Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements at the University of California, Berkeley, October 2010. I am grateful to Larry Rosenthal and Christine Trost for the invitation that sparked me to write that version and to the participants in that conference for their response. I thank Lawrence Jacobs, Joe Soss and two anonymous reviewers at Representation for their constructive criticism. Notes To be sure, there were spectacular losses as well (notably the Senate seats in Delaware and Alaska) but the Tea Party unquestionably energised a Republican base that had seemed flattened by President George H. W. Bush's precipitous fall from popularity and the Party's drubbing in 2008. Overall, more than 40 candidates supported by the Tea Party were elected to the House and Senate in 2010, a stunning result for a movement that was less than two years old. This is the term that the Milan-based radical union activist ChainCreW uses to refer to precarious workers. Critics suggest that the movement has already or is bound to fail because the differences in power, status and vulnerability of various kinds of precarious work inevitably frustrate its coalitional aspirations (Mitropoulos 2006; cf. Ross 2008 ROSS, ANDREW. 2008. The new geography of work: power to the precarious?. Theory, Culture & Society, 25(7–8): 31–49. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). There are six national organization networks associated with Tea Party movement: FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet and Tea Party Express. According to a report by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (Burghart and Zeskind 2010 FRASSANITO NETWORK,,THE. 2006. "Precarious, precarisation, precariat?". In Mute available at http://www.metamute.org/en/Precarious-Precarisation-Precariat [Google Scholar]), the leadership in all of these groups except FreedomWorks has significant ties to white nationalism, including the mainstream militia movement and the birthers. Leading figures in 1776 Tea Party are also leaders in the anti-immigrant vigilante organization, the Minuteman Project. The preferences of the Tea Party base on this issue have been consequential in the case of Tea Party-backed Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who made an about-face regarding the need to reduce Social Security and Medicare benefits. Compare Witt 2010 WITT, RYAN. 2010. Rand Paul concedes he will cut Medicare and Social Security to pay for tax cuts. Examiner.com, 4 October, available at www.examiner.com/political-buzz-in-national/rand-paul-concedes-he-will-cut-medicare-and-social-security-to-pay-for-tax-cuts (accessed 24 March 2011). [Google Scholar] to Paul 2011 PAUL, RAND. 2011. A modest $500 billion proposal. Wall Street Journal, 7 February [Google Scholar]. They wrongly attribute this quote to Thomas Jefferson. These signs can be seen on Google images searching for 'tea party signs'.