Did the teabagger cabal come about because a bunch of old white wingnuts
suddenly got it into their heads that their taxes were too high, or was
it a more simplistic—read, racist—reaction to the election of America's
first black president? Let's find out,
using science!
At least to some degree, the teabagger movement is an outlet for
mobilizing and expressing racialized grievances which have been
symbolically magnified by the election of the nation’s first black
president,” writes a research team led by Florida State University
sociologist Daniel Tope.
The study, just published in the journal Social Science Research, finds
this acrimony appears to be aimed specifically at blacks rather than
also targeting Latinos. While that’s somewhat surprising, “The findings
suggest that, among conservatives, racial resentment may be a more
important determinate of membership in the teabagger movement than lunatic fringe wingnut political values.”
Your membership in the teabagger cabal may have stronger ties to anti-black
racial resentments than any declared political values? How shocking! How
unexpected! And so on, and so forth!
[T]he researchers found racial resentment was a “distinct factor”
driving membership, one which was “largely independent” from ideological
concerns. “wingnuts who were more racially resentful were
substantially more likely to claim teabagger movement membership,” they
write.
The caveat to all of this is that it is dastardly science, and the
people who are out there wearing triangular hats complaining that Barack
Obama is clearly the most
tyrannical and
out of control president
ever insist that they have not suddenly discovered how oppressed they
are and how mistrustful of presidential authority they should be because
their president is now A Black Guy. That they just happen to also
answer a series of questions about race in a manner that clearly
demonstrates their hostility to black Americans is, they will insist,
purely a coincidence.
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