According to political science academics, Tea Party activists are knowledgeable and religiously devout - but hypocritical and more likely to be motivated by “racial resentment,” according to the Washington Times:
Gathering this weekend in Seattle for the annual American Political Science Association convention, several professors argued that tea party Republicans are more likely than other voters and more likely than most others in the GOP to harbor racial hostility, as judged by their answers in a broad pre-election survey administered in October.
“Tea Party activists have denied accusations that their movement is racist, and there is nothing intrinsically racist about opposing ‘big government’ or clean-energy legislation or health care reform. But it is clear that the movement is more appealing to people who are unsympathetic to blacks and who prefer a harder line on illegal immigration than it is to other Americans,” wrote Gary C. Jacobson, a professor at the University of California at San Diego.
Emory University professor Alan I. Abramowitz found that Tea Party members are more likely to be registered to vote, older, wealthier, more evangelical, and of course, more likely to "hold racial resentment."
The Times reports that Abramowitz came to this conclusion "based on their answers to questions such as whether blacks could succeed as well as whites if they “would only try harder,” and whether they agreed with the statement that Irish, Italians and Jews overcame prejudice and “blacks should do the same without any special favors.”"
In other words - supporting hard work is the same as being racist.
“Tea Party supporters displayed high levels of racial resentment and held very negative opinions about President Obama, compared with the rest of the public and even other Republicans,” he wrote.
The Times adds:
More than a dozen papers at the conference peered into the tea party, the movement’s philosophical underpinnings and its role in the 2010 elections. Titles included “Civil Rights and LGBTQ Scapegoats in the Tea Party Movement,” “Passionate Patriotism: Gender and the Discourse of Anger in the Tea Party Movement” and Mr. Abramowitz’s “Partisan Polarization and the Rise of the Tea Party Movement.”
According to the Times, Tea Party leaders "laughed off the scrutiny and chuckled when they heard the names of the papers."
“This is good. You’re making my day,” said Mark Meckler, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots.
“Statistics show that the vast number of folks that are in the world of academia are liberals,” he said after collecting himself. “Liberals don’t like the tea party movement. I don’t think that’s news.”
“From my perspective, they’ve literally become a caricature of themselves,” he said of the academy, adding that there are a “few exceptions.”
Liberals - most notably those in the Democrat-media complex - have long argued that any criticism of Obama is rooted in racism.
The Times observed that not all those at the Seattle event called the Tea Party overtly racist:
Christopher S. Parker, a political science professor at the University of Washington, put the tea party’s proclaimed beliefs in limited government to the test on three questions: whether they supported limits on free speech, whether they believed in indefinite detention and whether they wanted broader police powers for racial profiling.
Using his own survey data, he concluded that tea party supporters were more likely than the general public to believe speech should be free of restrictions and were just as likely to support indefinite detention of suspected terrorists, but were more willing for police to use racial profiling to stop crimes.
“It’s not about law and order, it’s not about education, it’s not even about racism as racism, per se. And it’s not completely tied into race. It’s this diffuse idea that our country is slipping away from us,” Parker said.
UCLA graduate student Emily McClintock Ekins said tea party activists have more faith in the fairness of capitalism, which she said could explain their attitudes on race.
“This makes it less surprising that nearly all Tea Partiers believe that hard work, rather than luck, drives success. This might also explain their lower levels of racial empathy, as they are less aware for how opportunity may be different for particular groups of people,” Ekins wrote.
Another paper engaged in a bit of revisionist history that minimized the role of the Tea Party in the historic 2010 elections that gave Republicans a majority in the House, and saw hundreds of Republicans elected to state houses nationwide. The Times reported:
"We failed to find any systematic evidence that the Tea Party was responsible for the Republican success in 2010,” professor Jon R. Bond and several colleagues wrote in their analysis. “Instead, we find that variables long cited by scholars of congressional elections [-] in particular, the incumbent’s previous electoral performance, the normal party vote in the district, candidate spending, and challenger experience - best explain the district-level outcomes of the 2010 elections.”
The Times, however, did not specify if any of the academics spent any time speaking to any actual Tea Party members.
A commenter at Fox Nation wrote: "When did the term academic mean: a person who is intelligent but does not use his/her brain?"
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