THEDA SKOCPOL produces consistently interesting work that makes many other political scientists (and most journalists, for that matter) look shallow by comparison. In 2011 she co-wrote a book about the Tea Party in which she identified some of the things that would later propel Donald Trump to the Republican nomination. At the time, most people understood the Tea Party to be a libertarian revolt against big government. Employing a radical method, which involved asking a large number of Tea Partiers what they actually thought, Ms Skocpol and her co-author discovered that this was not the case.
The folks who showed up to Tea Party meetings were not acolytes of Ayn Rand or Ron Paul. They were in fact very keen on public spending, so long as it was directed to people they thought had earned it. These Tea Partiers seldom made straightforwardly racist remarks, and probably thought of themselves as without racial prejudice. But their attitudes to government had a racial tinge, because most of the people who they thought deserved government help were...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2FDgMPZ
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