I think the key differentiating factor is age – other polls find the Tea Partiers are mostly over 45, Gallup does not. If the former is true, then the movement might be born to die in our lifetimes, just by generational attrition – that is, it represents a world-view which its members’ children do not necessarily acquire, and as Tea Partiers die off, they will not be replaced by commensurate numbers of those now young.
On that note, looking at the Pew Political Typology, I would say the groups most likely to make up the Tea Party’s base are the Enterprisers and the Social Conservatives – certainly not the Pro-Government Conservatives, nor the Conservative Democrats – and the Social Conservatives are “the oldest of all groups (average age is 52; 47% are 50 or older).” And, I don’t think it’s a matter of people growing more conservative as they grow older. While you could find many counterexamples, I don’t think most people change their basic political views or values much after the age of 25. No, this is a case of a generation that sees things in a way no later generation will. And of the Enterprisers, “Only 10% are under age 30.”
“Tiiiiiiime is on my side . . . Yes, it is!”
The youngest group, BTW, is the Bystanders; the next-youngest is Liberals; then Pro-Government Conservatives and Upbeats.
Well, no. But we’re all going to be Starving Artist one day. I can hear it already in myself when somebody brings up autotune or romantic vampire flicks.
“Get your soft, non-arthritic hands off my Medicare!”
My prediction: We hear a lot about the Tea Party in the 2010 elections. We’re going to hear a lot more about the Tea Party in the 2012 elections. We’re going to hear a bit about the Tea Party in the 2014 elections, “Is the Tea Party still relevant?” We’ll only hear a tiny bit about the Tea Party in the 2016 elections, and that will be stuff like, “Remember the Tea Party? Yeah, me neither.”
This isn’t to say that people who are currently Tea Partiers are going to go away or stop voting or the issues they care about won’t matter anymore. It’s just that they’ll stop self-describing as Tea Partiers. They’ll be on to the next thing.
Political movements are going to move faster in the future, and will burn out or ascend to the mainstream more quickly. The Tea Party is the latest instance of the sort of thing that lead to the Reform Party, and it’s going to go through its life cycle more quickly. Get used to the roller coaster.
While I think this is basically correct, our generation of Tea Partiers will be fighting against the young generation for things that might seem unthinkable now. For instance, perhaps 40 years from now the big raging debate will be legalizing public nudity. Young people will be all for it, while the older buggers (who are young now) will be protesting against it.
Tea Partiers/old people nowadays are against things like public health care and gay marriage. They grew up in a time when bigotry against gays was the norm and private health care worked just fine. As the world changes, they want things to stay as they were and fear/do not adapt well to changes.
Similarily, really old people I’ve encountered often have really outdated views showing a high degree of racism. But when they were young in 1920, being racist was the norm. They grew up in that culture and never really left it.
But by the time todays generation is old and today’s old have passed on, gay marriage rights will be looked at as something that is the norm, much like today most people are cool with letting anyone sit anywhere on the bus.
Historically speaking, in the US third parties have usually been a one election deal. Ross Perot had a huge influence, for one election. We heard a lot about the Green Party, for one election. Going back further, the Bull Moose party was a player, for one election. The Know Nothing party was kinda big, in one election. And so on. In fact there’s only been once when a third party actually became large enough that it stayed a major player in politics, and the Republican party did that by replacing the Whigs as one of the two large parties rather than by becoming a third alternative.
I predict the Tea Party will be the same. We’ll hear about them a lot in this election cycle. They’ll be around in 2012 and may actually influence things a bit. After that, they’ll be about as unimportant as Perot’s Reform Party is today. Age of the supporters has nothing to do with this, it’s simply that third parties aren’t viable in the long term under the US system.
Of interest on that point is this recent blogpost from science-fiction writer Jerry Pournelle, who happens to be that rarest of animals, a paleoconservative with a brain. (He sees the movement as being set against “the Country Club Republicans and the so-called moderate Republicans” – and as a continuation of a tendency the latter have been systematically frustrating ever since Reagan.)
BG, I notice over the years you like to make threads suggesting that crazy conservatives are old and when they die that will be it for them. This strikes me as whistling past the graveyard. They’ve been old for 30 years yet getting stronger all the time while moving that Overton window and making the Dems their bitches. And I’m not going to claim my personal environs encompasses a statistically representative sample, but I notice a ton of young, upstanding conservative whackaloons ready to give ammo to tomorrow’s satirists.
As an aside, and I could be wrong, but don’t you also like to, from time to time, point to studies that show conservatives think differently than their more tender hearted brethren in very fundamental ways? If so, wouldn’t it be rather odd if an entire sub-population of brains just up and vanished absent genetic engineering?
FDR had the Liberty Leagues, JFK and LBJ had the Birchers, Clinton had a gigantic right-wing freakout, Obama has the teahadists. The next librul prez will have the same thing with a different name.
I’ve posted, or commented on, such studies now and then – not very often; but, IIRC, the studies never seem to shed any light on whether the differences are hereditary or environmental or what.
I think there is a difference between the self entitlement felt by baby boomer teabaggers and the sort of movement we would see from the Reagan generation (those of us who grew up during Reagan).
It seems you’ve missed the numerous posts I’ve made where I pointed out that my political views have been conservative since I first became politically aware in my late teens. (Actually my POV had always been conservative but I first began to apply it to politics in my late teens.) Yes, I was loathing drugs, hippiedom, the breaking up of the family unit, government encroachment and entitlement programs, stupid clothes and patchouli long before you were born (and at an age much younger than you are now).
Firstly BrainGlutton is someone who posts a lot about how {insert group he politically detests} is bound for extinction through the “natural course of history.”
The unstated assumption he makes is that of course, his views perfectly align with where humanity is going. Further, of course, that makes them “right” at a fundamental level. Essentially he doesn’t see social decision making (in the form of our political system) as something in which there are many valid answers, there is one answer and his is the true answer. The natural progression of history will always rid society of the outliers that don’t have the true answer.
Well, whatever, I don’t view things that way. There isn’t one true answer and there is no way to predict the specific viewpoints people will have 25 years from now or the label they’ll have 25 years from now.
However, movements like the Tea Party movement come and go all the time. If you’re a student of American political history you shouldn’t expect them to last very long. The Progressive movement was at most two generations, you had various bursts of anit-immigration movements (Know-Nothings), and the list goes on and on.
What’s important to note is that even short lived political movements in the United States, that never gain a huge amount of representation in government often have fundamental and lasting impacts on American politics.
Ha! If I’m protesting either side of public nudity, I’m going nakers! Then again, I’d probably be one of those “atypical” in my age group who really doesn’t care.
