# Michael Lind: The Tea Party -- "Newest Right" -- is not a populist movement **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [October 8, 2013, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709 "2013-10-08T18:54:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/1 "2013-10-08T18:54:08Z")
In [this analysis](http://www.salon.com/2013/10/06/tea_party_radicalism_is_misunderstood_meet_the_newest_right/), the Tea Party movement – what Lind renames the “Newest Right” – is not merely an “extremist” version of conservatives; nor is it a bunch of ignorant yokels; nor, despite its populist pretensions, is it a populist movement. It is simply the latest iteration of the Jacksonian movement, which was not really populist either. > [@](#): > > The Tea Party right is not only disproportionately Southern but also disproportionately upscale. Its social base consists of what, in other countries, are called the “local notables”—provincial elites whose power and privileges are threatened from above by a stronger central government they do not control and from below by the local poor and the local working class. > > Even though, like the Jacksonians and Confederates of the nineteenth century, they have allies in places like Wisconsin and Massachusetts, the dominant members of the Newest Right are white Southern local notables—the Big Mules, as the Southern populist Big Jim Folsom once described the lords of the local car dealership, country club and chamber of commerce. These are not the super-rich of Silicon Valley or Wall Street (although they have Wall Street allies). The Koch dynasty rooted in Texas notwithstanding, those who make up the backbone of the Newest Right are more likely to be millionaires than billionaires, more likely to run low-wage construction or auto supply businesses than multinational corporations. They are second-tier people on a national level but first-tier people in their states and counties and cities. And what the TP/NR movement is all about is simply preserving these local notables’ local power and privileges from federal interference. They dominated the federal government for decades, but now that predominance is doomed by demographics, and they’re desperate to keep what they have. And they’re using the same tactics they’ve always used: filibusters, disenfranchisement, and pushing for localization/privatization of federal functions. Seems very convincing to me. It would explain why the TP is mostly silent on social issues – even those that really appeal to a conservative-populist base, such as immigration – but hammers hard on fiscal and biggummint issues. The [Contract from America](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_from_America) could easily have been written with the local notables’ interests in mind. Anyone have a different opinion? ---
**Author:** ![DigitalC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ebca7d/32.png) [@DigitalC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DigitalC)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/2 "2013-10-08T19:30:45Z")
That is most definitely not the kind of people you see at Tea Party rallies. ---
**Author:** ![Belowjob2.0](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Belowjob2.0](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Belowjob2.0)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/3 "2013-10-08T19:56:43Z")
Spot on analysis. Explains much. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/4 "2013-10-08T20:02:50Z")
So dead-on. My best friend’s wife came from a small, isolated Central Valley town where her father was the Cadillac dealer. One of those thoroughly “nice” women who subsequently weeded my BF’s social circle down to those who qualified; I wasn’t in it. I know the “Rockefellers of Smalltown” very, very well and this portrait is dead-on. Telling story: Mr. Rockefeller was a classmate of Herb Caen’s. According to Little Rockie, he HATED Caen because (basically) the world-famous columist didn’t show him enough deference at a high school reunion. And here he was, the #1 Caddy salesman in towns under 20k in the whole USA! ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/5 "2013-10-08T20:07:50Z")
> [@DigitalC](#): > > That is most definitely not the kind of people you see at Tea Party rallies. But, IME, those who **speak** at the rallies are often professionals or businesscritters. ---
**Author:** ![Bridget\_Burke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7cd45c/32.png) [@Bridget\_Burke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bridget_Burke)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/6 "2013-10-08T20:18:39Z")
> [@DigitalC](#): > > That is most definitely not the kind of people you see at Tea Party rallies. No, but they think the TP’ers are “their sort of people.” Just like the poor Southerners who never owned a slave. But went to war, anyway… ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2013, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/7 "2013-10-08T20:47:56Z")
Sounds plausible. I have a couple of old college fraternity brothers from PA who are the sort who constantly post right wing Tea Party rhetoric on Facebook. One is basically Dwight Shrute. He was the biggest jerk in our fraternity, and not in a cool frat guy sort of way. The other was sort of small-town privileged kid who grew up near the college, went to the college, went to grad school at the college, then raised a family in the same area as the college. The sort who thinks they are hot shit because their parents were in the local “upper class” of affluent professionals and local small business owners and bought him a shitty little red sports car to tool around in. Not quite millionaires running local businesses. But certainly entitled douches who never had an original non-conforming thought in their heads and think they hit it out of the park because their parents slow-pitched them all the way to the minors. ---
**Author:** ![Debaser](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/3da27b/32.png) [@Debaser](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Debaser)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2013, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/8 "2013-10-09T14:27:32Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Anyone have a different opinion? His analysis starts off rooted in reality. The Tea Party isn’t new. It’s just a new label for people that have always been there. They aren’t dumb. They are more educated and wealthier than average. They tend to be small business owners and are more likely to be millionaires than billionaires. None of this is news to anyone who has been paying attention. But Lind goes quite a bit too far. He takes the fact that the Tea Party is slightly disproportionately southern and somehow infers that to mean a whole lot of things about race that just aren’t true. Of course the Tea Party is more popular in the South. There are more conservatives there. That doesn’t mean that it’s fair to tie the Tea Party to some non-existent roots in “white Southern terrorism” and somehow lay their entire ideology in protecting white power over Blacks and Hispanics. You don’t need some centuries old conspiracy theory to explain the motivations of the Tea Party. It’s a movement of people frustrated over the ever increasing size and scope of the Federal government and high taxes. Of course these people are conservative, and thus disproportionately southern. Also, of course they tend to be small business owners or “local notables” as Lind calls them. By reading so much more into it than that Lind is going a bit off the rails. ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2013, 3:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/9 "2013-10-09T15:16:29Z")
IMO the Tea Party includes those factions, andthose factions approve of the Tea Party, but they are not 100% identical. That faction of conservatives, and the political minds around them, were quick to hitch on to popular dissatisfaction that actually was starting **before** Obama arroved on the scene. The Movement Conservatives out in the red heartlands had already become disillusioned with the Neocons late in the Bush years, and the economic downturn was souring both the man on the street and the hometown businesspeople on the wisdom of the NY/DC “mainstream” business/political leaders. Absent Obama there would still have been an insurrection against “establishment” Pubs who were “not true conservatives”. Obama however was a godsend in that he could be conveniently used by candidates, pundits and string-pullers to say, in effect, never mind that the big screwing of your interests happened **before**'08, we’ve got this dire threat here now that is what will really ruin your life, and stopping it is all that counts, we need to go hardline. Some opportunistic conservative politicians, both carreer and upstart, wanted to use the passion of the TP as a tool to regain power, without pausing to consider that this time around they would demand that they immediately act to deliver on the rhetoric. Their problem is all of ours now. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2013, 3:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/10 "2013-10-09T15:17:20Z")
> [@Debaser](#): > > But Lind goes quite a bit too far. He takes the fact that the Tea Party is slightly disproportionately southern and somehow infers that to mean a whole lot of things about race that just aren’t true. Of course the Tea Party is more popular in the South. There are more conservatives there. That doesn’t mean that it’s fair to tie the Tea Party to some non-existent roots in “white Southern terrorism” and somehow lay their entire ideology in protecting white power over Blacks and Hispanics. Actually, what Lind says about race here is: > [@](#): > > Although racial segregation can no longer be employed, the tool kit of the older Southern white right is pretty much the same as that of the Newest Right: > > **The Solid South.** By means of partisan and racial gerrymandering—packing white liberal voters into conservative majority districts and ghettoizing black and Latino voters–Republicans in Texas and other Southern and Western states control the U.S. Congress, even though in the last election more Americans voted for Democrats than Republicans. The same undemocratic technique makes the South far more Republican in its political representation than it really is in terms of voters. > > \ > > **Disenfranchisement.** In state after state controlled by Republican governors and legislators, a fictitious epidemic of voter fraud is being used as an excuse for onerous voter registration requirements which have the effect, and the manifest purpose, of disenfranchising disproportionately poor blacks and Latinos. The upscale leaders of the Newest Right also tend to have be more supportive of mass immigration than their downscale populist supporters—on the condition, however, that “guest workers” and amnestied illegal immigrants not be allowed to vote or become citizens any time soon. In the twenty-first century, as in the twentieth and nineteenth, the Southern ideal is a society in which local white elites lord it over a largely-nonwhite population of poor workers who can’t vote. > > \ > > When the election of Lincoln seemed to foreshadow a future national political majority based outside of the South, the local notables of the South tried to create a smaller system they could dominate by seceding from the U.S. That effort failed, after having killed more Americans than have been killed in all our foreign wars combined. However, during Reconstruction the Southern elite snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and succeeded in turning the South into a nation-within-a-nation within U.S. borders until the 1950s and 1960s. > > Today the white notables of the South increasingly live in states like Texas, which already have nonwhite majorities. They fear that Obama’s election, like Lincoln’s, foreshadows the emergence of a new national majority coalition that excludes them and will act against their interest. Having been reduced to the status of members of a minority race, they fear they will next lose their status as members of the dominant local class. All of which **is** true. And it’s not only racial minorities they want to dominate/mariginalize/disenfranchise, it’s also lower-class whites; it has always been so, since long before the Civil War. > [@Debaser](#): > > You don’t need some centuries old conspiracy theory to explain the motivations of the Tea Party. Nor does Lind posit one. He’s covered this before in his discussions of the power of the national American “White Overclass” – it is not a conspiracy theory, it is only a matter of members of a social class mostly serving their own class interests, an entirely predictable thing that requires no secret collusion. > [@Debaser](#): > > It’s a movement of people frustrated over the ever increasing size and scope of the Federal government and high taxes. True, but, N.B.: They are frustrated not because of any financial burden that puts on them, but because it threatens their local predominance. > [@Debaser](#): > > Of course these people are conservative, and thus disproportionately southern. Now, why **is** that, I wonder, that the South is disproportionately conservative? I daresay the answer only supports Lind’s thesis. ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2013, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/11 "2013-10-09T15:29:40Z")
So, where is the Tea Party these days, anyway? Used to see them all the time, huge rallies numbering in the hundreds. How come they aren’t out there showing the flag, offering their massive support? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2013, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/12 "2013-10-09T15:31:44Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > So, where is the Tea Party these days, anyway? In Congress. Hadn’t you noticed?! And outside it, too, threatening to primary Pubs from the right. Apparently the TP has reached the stage of organization where mass rallies are less important. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2013, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/13 "2013-10-09T16:13:38Z")
The origins of the Tea Party are well known to have been purest astroturf. It’s not at all amazing that its base should be the poliltically active conservatives that are the base of the Republican Party. But it IS interesting that the Tea Party has been silent on issues like restricting women’s rights and persecuting gays, very popular with the poorer whites that form the base of the more general Republican Party. And the fact that they try to restrict voting rights maybe indicates a confluence of interest between the Teapublicans and the lower class conservative base: the lower class types like restricting voting rights because of its racist elements, the upper class because it keeps power in their hands. It’s a wonderful thing, democracy: two groups of people with different interests working together to keep a third group from enjoying the fruits of democracy! ---
**Author:** ![Zakalwe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zakalwe/32/270_2.png) [@Zakalwe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zakalwe)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2013, 4:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/14 "2013-10-09T16:44:12Z")
> [@Debaser](#): > > It’s a movement of people frustrated over the ever increasing size and scope of the Federal government and high taxes. Except that federal taxes are at historic LOWS. Hell, the “good old days” many of these people pine for had MUCH higher marginal tax rates. There’s got to be something else going on, the tax thing is a chimera, not based in reality. ---
**Author:** ![Debaser](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/3da27b/32.png) [@Debaser](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Debaser)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2013, 4:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/15 "2013-10-09T16:46:44Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Actually, what Lind says about race here is: Yeah. I know. I read it. Although, I didn’t realize this was the same “white overclass” guy who you often cite. He seems to see everything through a prism of race. > [@](#): > > True, but, N.B.: They are frustrated not because of any financial burden that puts on them, but because it threatens their local predominance. It can be both. ---
**Author:** ![Debaser](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/3da27b/32.png) [@Debaser](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Debaser)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2013, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/16 "2013-10-09T16:50:12Z")
> [@Zakalwe](#): > > Except that federal taxes are at historic LOWS. Hell, the “good old days” many of these people pine for had MUCH higher marginal tax rates. There’s got to be something else going on, the tax thing is a chimera, not based in reality. Rates might have been higher before Reagan, but that’s not what people actually paid because of loopholes. The size of government as a percentage of GDP is much higher now and that’s what matters. Not counting WWI and WWII spending was about 10% of GDP in 1920. 30% in 1960 and over 40% now. It’s clearly trending up and has been for a long time. It’s based in reality. ---
**Author:** ![Zakalwe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zakalwe/32/270_2.png) [@Zakalwe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zakalwe)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2013, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/17 "2013-10-09T16:58:48Z")
> [@Debaser](#): > > Rates might have been higher before Reagan, but that’s not what people actually paid because of loopholes. The size of government as a percentage of GDP is much higher now and that’s what matters. > > Not counting WWI and WWII spending was about 10% of GDP in 1920. 30% in 1960 and over 40% now. It’s clearly trending up and has been for a long time. > > It’s based in reality. I agree that spending as a percent of GDP has gone up, but how is that possible when tax rates continue to drop? I see two causes, you got one of them (closing loopholes - although not enough of them - carried interest anyone?), the other is that more of the country’s income is subject to higher rates now due to the increasing disparity between the Top 1-5% and the rest. Forgive me if I don’t cry for the millionaire’s giant tax burden when my real income (even with tax breaks) has been declining for the past 5 years. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2013, 5:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/18 "2013-10-09T17:11:06Z")
> [@Debaser](#): > > Yeah. I know. I read it. Although, I didn’t realize this was the same “white overclass” guy who you often cite. He seems to see everything through a prism of race. In both that theory and this, race as such is less important than class; but, in American society, there is a historical correlation between the two, which however does **not** suffice to make all whites upper- or middle-class. From [_The Next American Nation:_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Next_American_Nation:_The_New_Nationalism_and_the_Fourth_American_Revolution) > [@](#): > > The chief danger confronting the twenty-first century United States is not Balkanization but what might be called Brazilianization. By Brazilianization I mean not the separation of cultures by race, but the separation of races by class. As in Brazil, a common American culture could be indefinitely compatible with a blurry, informal caste system in which most of those at the top of the social hierarchy are white, and most brown and black Americans are on the bottom – _forever._ Behind all the boosterish talk about the wonders of the new American rainbow is the reality of enduring racial division by class, something that multicultural education initiatives and racial preference policies do not begin to address. In the absence of sustained popular pressure from below or concern about America’s international status, the white overclass has no incentive to combat Brazilianization in the United States. For one thing, any serious effort to reduce racial separation by class would inevitably mean higher taxes on the affluent – not just the rich, but the politically powerful upper-middle class. What is more, the dominance of the white oligarchy in American politics is strengthened by the emergent dynamics of a polarized society. In a more homogeneous society, the increasing concentration of wealth and power at the top might produce a populist reaction by the majority. But in a society like that of present-day America where a small, homogeneous oligarchy confronts a diverse population that shares a common national culture but remains divided along racial lines, the position of the outnumbered elite can be very secure. This is because the resentments caused by economic decline are likely to be expressed as hostility between the groups at the bottom, rather than as a rebellion against the top. In the Los Angeles riot, black, Hispanic, and white rioters turned on Korean middlemen, rather than march on Beverly Hills. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2013, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/19 "2013-10-09T17:17:01Z")
> [@Evil\_Captor](#): > > The origins of the Tea Party are well known to have been purest astroturf. It’s not at all amazing that its base should be the poliltically active conservatives that are the base of the Republican Party. But it IS interesting that the Tea Party has been silent on issues like restricting women’s rights and persecuting gays, very popular with the poorer whites that form the base of the more general Republican Party. And the fact that they try to restrict voting rights maybe indicates a confluence of interest between the Teapublicans and the lower class conservative base: the lower class types like restricting voting rights because of its racist elements, the upper class because it keeps power in their hands. It’s a wonderful thing, democracy: two groups of people with different interests working together to keep a third group from enjoying the fruits of democracy! Remember the [White Citizens Council](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Citizens%27_Council)? (AKA the Citizens’ Councils of America; NKA the [Council of Conservative Citizens](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_conservative_citizens).) Founded in the 1950s as an anti-integration organization, known as the “Uptown Klan,” its members were exactly the kind of local notables Lind is talking about. And I daresay they did not think much of the actual Klan, despite a shared agenda; but, because of same, the latter was sometimes useful to them, and there was even some membership overlap. > [@](#): > > Unlike the Ku Klux Klan, the WCC met openly and was seen as “pursuing the agenda of the Klan with the demeanor of the Rotary Club.”[7] The group eschewed the use of violence,[1] instead using economic and political tactics against activists.[3] But, the historian Charles Payne notes, “Despite the official disclaimers, violence often followed in the wake of Council intimidation campaigns.”[7] Occasionally some Councils directly incited violence. For instance, in Montgomery, Alabama, during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Senator James Eastland addressed a large Council meeting in the Garrett Coliseum saying (this was also distributed as a mimeographed flyer): > > > [@](#): > > > > When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, sling shots and knives. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all whites are created equal with certain rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers.[8] > > The Citizens’ Councils used economic tactics against African Americans they considered as supportive of desegregation and voting rights, or for belonging to the NAACP; the tactics included “calling in” their mortgages, denying loans and business credit, and boycotting black-owned businesses.[9] In some cities, the Councils published lists of names of NAACP supporters and signers of anti-segregation petitions in local newspapers in order to encourage economic retaliation.[10] For instance, in Yazoo City, Mississippi in 1955, the Citizens’ Council arranged for the names of 53 signers of a petition for school integration to appear in a local paper, and soon afterward, the petitioners lost their jobs and had their credit cut off.[11] As Charles Payne puts it, the Councils operated by “unleashing a wave of economic reprisals against anyone, Black or white, seen as a threat to the status quo.”[7] > > Medgar Evers’ first work for the NAACP on a national level involved interviewing Mississippians who had been intimidated by the Citizens’ Councils and preparing affidavits for use as evidence against the Councils if necessary.[12] Evers was assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the Citizens’ Council as well as the Ku Klux Klan.[13] The Citizens’ Council paid his legal expenses.[14] ---
**Author:** ![Belowjob2.0](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Belowjob2.0](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Belowjob2.0)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2013, 11:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709/20 "2013-10-09T23:25:46Z")
> [@Debaser](#): > > His analysis starts off rooted in reality. The Tea Party isn’t new. It’s just a new label for people that have always been there. They aren’t dumb. They are more educated and wealthier than average. > > They tend to be small business owners and are more likely to be millionaires than billionaires. > > None of this is news to anyone who has been paying attention. > > But Lind goes quite a bit too far. He takes the fact that the Tea Party is slightly disproportionately southern and somehow infers that to mean a whole lot of things about race that just aren’t true. Of course the Tea Party is more popular in the South. There are more conservatives there. That doesn’t mean that it’s fair to tie the Tea Party to some non-existent roots in “white Southern terrorism” and somehow lay their entire ideology in protecting white power over Blacks and Hispanics. > > You don’t need some centuries old conspiracy theory to explain the motivations of the Tea Party. It’s a movement of people frustrated over the ever increasing size and scope of the Federal government and high taxes. Of course these people are conservative, and thus disproportionately southern. Also, of course they tend to be small business owners or “local notables” as Lind calls them. By reading so much more into it than that Lind is going a bit off the rails. What BG said. Also, this: > **[Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/)** > > The forty-two-minute recording, acquired by James Carter IV, confirms Atwater’s incendiary remarks and places them in context. > [@](#): > > You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/michael-lind-the-tea-party-newest-right-is-not-a-populist-movement/670709.md?page=2)