2 - Toward a Theoretical Account of the Tea Party’s Rise and Fall

Summary

When fierce insurgencies such as the Tea Party emerge, they are often considered spontaneous and unpredictable. Over time, sudden bursts of social movement mobilization are typically traced to long arcs of activism that had finally come to fruition. Chapter 2 theoretically contextualizes the decades of conservative activism that ultimately gave rise to the Tea Party. To develop our theory of the Tea Party’s emergence, maturation, and decline we describe 1) the decades of elite-driven efforts to mobilize grievances among White Christians; and 2) the suddenly imposed facilitating conditions stemming from the Great Recession, and status threats linked to the election of Barack Obama. Together these factors produced the perfect interpretive moment that set the Tea Party in motion. To account for the Tea Party’s trajectory and ultimate decline, we focus on the role of its diffuse mobilizing structures, which minimized coordinated event planning and networking between chapters. Also, the hollowing out of American political parties allowed an insurgency like the Tea Party to make rapid inroads that ultimately shaped the Republican Party’s platform.