3.1A Note on Methodology

The purpose of case studies is to illustrate the practical applicability of theoretical constructs. In other words, case studies apply models to the real-world in order to show how these models are useful in explaining and categorizing phenomena in the observable world. In this sense, Chapters 1 and 2 both established and discussed models to explain certain phenomena: while Chapter 1 focused on a model of central theoretical units of rhetorical analysis, Chapter 2 integrated these categories with contemporary empirical research on polarizing language to establish a rhetorical model that describes polarizing orators, strategies, and texts.

Before directly analyzing such strategies within the tea party it is necessary to clearly discuss the methodology to be used in the case study to come. To plausibly apply the models developed earlier, the study must deal with a range of different elements: the orators and orator complexes that made up the nodes of the oratorical network, the relationships that existed between the nodes, the polarizing texts that each node produced and disseminated, and the effects of their polarizing communication on the real-world social and political situation in the United States. The case study has two primary goals: 1) to shed light on the tea party movement as an active oratorical network, and 2) to describe and identify the use of polarizing rhetorical strategies by individuals, organizations, and nodes within the tea party network to meet their real-world goals. The former goal involves identifying and describing the individual nodes that made up the tea party network, and discussing the relationships between each, while the latter will utilize rhetorical analysis to identify the specific textual markers of polarizing communication outlined in Chapter 2 (simplification, hyperbole, provocation). The study will also focus on the various audiences that were the target of such polarizing strategies and the real-world effects of the strategies on American politics and society.

Because the tea party movement has been extensively covered in both traditional journalistic outlets and as the specific subject of a variety of scholarly work, it is important to briefly discuss the data sets that are available and to properly couch the analysis here within the available literature. Indeed, in addition to numerous books on the tea party written by scholars, politicians, media figures, business leaders, and others, the amount of periodical journalistic attention paid to the movement is staggering. According to a 2011 search by Anthony DiMaggio on the LexisNexis journalism database, over 1,000 news reports on the tea party were published by only four major news outlets in one year spanning 2009 to 2010. A more recent search of the LexisNexis database of U.S. media reports finds well over 3,000 individual articles written about the tea party in 2013 alone.307 The majority of books (and some longer form periodical articles) written about the tea party movement have dealt with its philosophical, demographic, historical, sociological, economic, and cultural roots, and have sought to explain, justify, criticize, drive, or otherwise analyze the movement. Some of these works will be used here to provide context, to help establish the coherency of individual orator complexes within to the tea party network, and in a few instances, as actual primary sources (i.e. as examples of polarizing texts by members of the tea party network).

There are also a variety of aspects about the tea party that are not the focus of this work, but which are still clearly relevant. Historical factors such as the story behind of the formation of the modern tea party and the movement’s place in the political and social history of the United States give insight into the motivations that drove specific actors and orator complexes within the movement. As E.E. White has correctly pointed out, it is important to be able to describe the “historical configuration” of any given rhetorical phenomenon in order to fully understand its place and function in the modern world.308 In this vein, at least a brief discussion of the political philosophical underpinnings of the tea party movement will be necessary provide an overview of oratorical worldviews and how these influenced goal setting and messaging. But the case study here is not concerned with a deep analysis of the historical and social significance of the tea party movement; such information will be incorporated only insofar as it is relevant to describing the rhetorical situation that tea party orators acted in.

In addition to the history of the tea party itself, another tangential area of scholarship involves the broader political and social situation in the United States including the phenomenon of political polarization. As discussed in Chapter 2, there has been a wide range of work done in this direction. Some studies have found evidence of increasing polarization in American politics and society over the last thirty years, while others contend that opinion polarization has been limited to “elites.”309 Such research notwithstanding, the case study here is not focused on how the American public has become more generally polarized over the course of history, nor how the trends of society and government in the United States have tended toward social and political polarization, nor how the internal makeup of Congress itself has become polarized over time.

The study of political communication in the United States in general, and of conservative media more specifically, is also clearly relevant to this case study. An incredible amount of research, for instance, has been already devoted to the role of Fox News in the American media landscape, and the role of right-wing talk radio has also been extensively explored.310 Such works are extremely helpful to understanding the internal structures and motivations of such orator complexes, as well as their roles within the tea party network. Still, this book does necessarily not seek to add to the debate on the role of such media on American society and politics. Instead, the available research will be used to help elaborate the role of such media outlets as orator complexes associated with the larger tea party phenomenon.

The vast troves of journalistic media coverage surrounding the tea party also clearly represent a fertile primary data set for empirical research. The primary source material for the textual analysis of polarizing communication includes the public transcripts of interviews and speeches by tea party-affiliated orators, publicly available websites (and archived websites), published books and opinion articles, as well as survey data from well-established polling institutions. Indeed, when reading interviews with, opinion articles by, or the public statements of, tea party-affiliated orators, it quickly becomes clear that they are rife with polarizing textual structures and frameworks. Still, it is important to demonstrate that tea party orators used such texts and frameworks strategically, and to illustrate the effects that their communication had on their target audiences. News reports covering tea party orators offer the raw data for such textual analysis, and continually published voter and public surveys by polling institutions such as the Pew Research Center provide statistical evidence of the polarizing effects of tea party rhetoric. While the interpretation of such polling often differs between sources, the implications statistical findings will be derived from a variety of sources. As will be shown, polling between 2009 and 2016 found increasingly polarized opinions and attitudes surrounding the makers vs. takers framework both within the American public and within the Republican Party.

An interesting, if somewhat unsurprising, feature of the research and writing available about the tea party is that the literature itself is heavily polarized; in this sense, the available literature mirrors the public reaction to the movement. Many of those who have written studies and histories of the tea party were either directly associated with it, or deeply involved with conservative media and politics.311 These works invariably cast the tea party and its values in a positive light, often associating it with positive political movements of the past and especially with the “core values” of the American Revolution.312 On the other side have been authors and scholars who clearly disagreed with the tea party, and may have even found it alarming.313 These writers often cast the tea party and its members as a combination of insidious, corporate-backed pressure groups; a propaganda-spewing media complex; and ignorant, xenophobic, and racist white Americans.314 Due to the fact that many of the arguments used by tea party activists and leaders had only a loose association to empirical reality, even those researchers who have explicitly sought to take a normatively neutral approach to the tea party have still felt compelled to point out factual errors in tea partiers’ versions of ‘truth’. A passage from Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson’s seminal 2012 work on the tea party, which manages to keep a more neutral position than most, illustrates the difficulty of reporting objectively without passing judgment:

At times, to be sure, national right-wing advocates and media stars are handing out a load of bull to the grassroots tea party people, who accept outlandish claims a bit too readily. In meetings and interviews, we found that misinformation was prevalent among tea party supporters, particularly given their relatively high levels of education.315

Many other authors have also written about tea partiers’ resistance to scientific data and “expertise,” and the role of misinformation disseminated by conservative media.316

Despite the dichotomy of opinions in interpreting the tea party phenomenon, most authors purport to provide readers with the ‘real’ truth about the tea party. Indicative of this phenomenon—and the ideological gap between sources—are quotes from two books that take opposite views of the tea party, but which mirror one another in their convictions. In their book Mad as Hell, conservative pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen assert in the first sentence that:

The tea party movement has become one of the most powerful and extraordinary movements in recent American political history […] yet, despite being ignored, belittled, marginalized, and ostracized by political, academic, and media elites, the tea party has grown stronger and stronger.317

Still, they assert that “using our polling research and our on-the-scenes accounts, we will clearly, comprehensively, and definitively define what the tea party movement means.”318 On the other side, leftist scholars Paul Street and Anthony DiMaggio open their book Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics, with this reflection:

The contemporary Tea Party owes its existence and relevance largely to the corporate media, a critical economic and ideological asset of the business elite. Thanks to the dominant media’s distorting hall-of-mirrors effect and to related factors of U.S. political culture, the party’s significance has been magnified far beyond its actual numbers, and its real character has been grossly misrepresented to the American public.319

What to do with such conflicting accounts in secondary source material? Echoing the sentiments of Skocpol and Williamson, this work does not intend to make value judgments or moral claims as to the rightness or wrongness of either tea party politics or the polarizing strategies used by those associated with the movement. At the same time, it is impossible to ignore factual inaccuracies in beliefs held by tea party members as well as in (mis)information presented as reality by conservative media outlets and authors. When such discrepancies exist and are relevant to the arguments presented here, this work will discuss them from a rhetorical analytical perspective, attempting to demonstrate the motivation and function of such misinformation in the strategy of polarization. The goal here is not to “denigrate the intelligence or autonomy” of tea party sympathizers, but rather to understand the inner workings and logic behind the polarizing communication that tea party orators produced.320

3.2Background: What Was the Tea Party Anyway?

Depending on who you ask, the tea party movement in the United States was either a legitimate populist and grassroots uprising against the excesses of an out-of-control government and President Barack Obama’s administrative overreaching, or it was a dangerous, top-down and corporate driven, far right-wing phenomenon that manipulated both the American people and the government with misinformation and racist rhetoric. Writing from a decidedly positive perspective, Republican pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen described the tea party as “a genuine grassroots phenomenon [...] a movement that has unprecedented broad-based support,” in which “there is a deep distrust of the elite in government and in business, and a pervasive sense […] that the powerful are conspiring against ordinary Americans.”322 Similarly, in her popular profile of the tea party, New York Times reporter Kate Zernike described the movement as “an authentic popular movement, brought on by anger over the economy and distrust of government—at all levels, and in both parties.”323 On the other side, Anthony DiMaggio called the tea party a “rancid populist force,” a “front for pro-business groups,” and (explicitly contradicting Zernike’s account) claimed that the tea party “is lacking in all of the requirements for a social movement.”324 Instead, he claimed that it “relies upon elite, top-down organizing for its success as the group serves the interests of the Republican Party and business power.”325 As Skocpol and Williamson have described the situation:

The “mass movement” portrayal overlooks the fact that the tea party, understood in its entirety, includes media hosts and wealthy political action committees, plus national advocacy groups and self-proclaimed spokespersons—elites that wield many millions of dollars in political contributions and appear all over the media claiming to speak for grassroots activists […] What kind of mass rebellion is funded by corporate billionaires like the Koch brothers, led by over the hill former GOP kingpins like Dick Armey, and ceaselessly promoted by millionaire celebrities like Glen Beck and Sean Hannity?326

At the same time, they insist that:

The opposite illusion is also there among those who proclaim the tea party to be nothing more than an “Astroturf” phenomenon, an illusion that is pushed by Fox News, or a “billionaire’s tea party” [...] This take on the tea party as a kabuki dance entirely manipulated from above simply cannot do justice to the volunteer engagement of many thousands of men and women.327

The truth, of course, lies somewhere in between these divergent perspectives. While interpretations have differed significantly, there is general agreement that the tea party phenomenon was the result of legitimate concerns among the American public regarding the economy and politics in the country. Despite his particularly negative viewpoint toward the tea party, even DiMaggio admits that “the group would be nowhere near as successful if it were not for the legitimate grievances and anger of a general public, which is seeing its wealth stagnate after three decades of outsourcing, deregulation, deindustrialization, attacks on the social welfare state, and toxic speculation on Wall Street.”328 Rasmussen and Schoen clearly agree, illustrating that:

failed leadership in Washington, obscene greed and abuse on Wall Street, and continued economic suffering on Main Street have provoked widespread anger, resentment, and frustration. There is a deep distrust of the elite in government and in business, and a pervasive sense […] that the powerful are conspiring against ordinary Americans.329

In the fall of 2008 and spring of 2009, two major events triggered the rise of the tea party in the United States: the election of Barack Obama as the 44th president and the collapse of the financial system that triggered a global economic recession. As has been well documented by authors profiling the tea party, resentment about the direction of the country had been growing on both sides of the political divide at the end of George W. Bush’s term. On one side were Democratic voters who were fed up with what they saw as Bush’s mismanagement of the country as manifested in two wars, the botched response to Hurricane Katrina in 2006, and the collapse of the economy. At the same time, conservative Republicans also felt betrayed by the Bush administration for the ballooning national deficit and debt and the overall expansion of the federal government that had occurred since 2001. Indeed, research has shown that the tea party “did not suddenly emerge on the American political scene in 2009 in response to the progressive policy agenda set forth by President Obama and the Democratic Congress. Rather it was the natural outgrowth of the growing size and conservatism of the activist base of the Republican Party.”330 In other words, it “can be seen as part of a larger trend toward increasing partisan polarization in American politics.”331

Still, the election of Mr. Obama (as well as strong showings for the Democratic Party in Senate and House races) led many on the right end of the political spectrum to worry about the future of the country and the economy. As Skocpol and Williamson recount:

For the opening months of his term, President Obama enjoyed wide public approval. Rank-and-file Republicans remained sullen and strongly opposed to Democratic initiatives; conservatives at the rightward edge of the Republican Party were angrier than ever, not just about the Democrats in office, but also about what they took to be Bush-era betrayals of small-government principles.332

By engineering a bailout of the nation’s critical financial institutions and the automobile industry, as well as passing a 700+ billion-dollar economic stimulus bill in early 2009, the Obama administration and Congress quickly did what many experts felt was necessary to stabilize the economy. But many Americans, feeling the harsh effects of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, became resentful of what appeared to be the perpetuation of existing inequalities in society: precisely those organizations that had contributed most to the crisis seemed to be getting assistance while ‘normal’ Americans were losing their homes and jobs. As Rasmussen and Schoen write:

Financial institutions that were “too big to fail” received unheard of rescue packages; proceeded to make record profits, and subsequently disbursed billions in bonuses to the wealthiest of Americans. All the while, middle-class families have been forced from their homes by the very banks propped up by the federal government.333

Instead of blaming the bankers for the crisis, however, conservative Americans (and libertarian political groups) largely focused on the government’s role in saving institutions that they felt should have been allowed to fail.

Given the polarized nature of the reaction to (and reporting on) the tea party movement, it is perhaps little surprise that its origins and its name have also been a subject of debate. While supporters of the movement have emphasized its origins in grassroots protests that were held in Seattle and Florida, opponents have focused on an interview given by conservative media figure Rick Santelli at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on February 19, 2009. Because both of these events are representative of different orator complexes that would soon become linked together in the tea party oratorical network, and because both utilized polarizing strategies and frameworks that would later permeate tea party communication, both are of interest to the case study here as catalysts of the movement.

As reported by Kate Zernike (and described by supporters of the movement) the “real” origins of the tea party are to be found in “spontaneous” protests that took place in response to government bailouts and spending.334 According to Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe (the leaders of the FreedomWorks political action group), the first tea party protest was organized by a woman in Florida named Mary Rakovich, who was frustrated by the government’s response to the economic crisis: “‘President Bush listened to his advisors and made mistakes,’ Mary said. ‘The bank bailout was ridiculous. If you can’t pay your bills and your business model has failed, you simply close your doors. That was the way it was supposed to work in our system.’”335 When newly elected President Obama “began to push for a trillion-dollar stimulus bill […] she was upset and concerned for her children and grandchildren. Inspired to act, Mary began searching for more ways to make her voice heard.”336

After attending an activist training seminar organized by FreedomWorks, Mary was encouraged by a representative of the political action group to organize a protest on her own: “He urged them to take it to the streets, saying, ‘You only need two of you and a few signs to make your voices heard.’”337 The result was a small protest of an event held on February 10, 2009, by President Obama and Florida Governor Charlie Crist to promote the stimulus plan. Ms. Rakovich and her husband held signs that exclaimed “REAL JOBS, NOT PORK,” and “STOP STEALING OUR CHILDREN’S FUTURE.”338 Soon, Ms. Rakovich was interviewed by Fox News, and her story of grassroots protest spread around the country: “Fox producers quickly got her to a local affiliate so she could be interviewed via satellite by Neil Cavuto in New York, even though her protest had, by her own account, consisted of herself, her husband, and one other person.”339

A few days later, something similar happened on the other side of the country in the liberal bastion of Seattle. Keli Carender was a libertarian-leaning member of the Young Republican organization in Seattle who was also frustrated with the party’s move away from fiscal conservatism: “None of them seemed to understand what conservatives didn’t like about Bush,” she said, “that it was the spending.”340 After starting a blog under the pseudonym Liberty Belle, Carender began posting about economic issues and attempted to contact her congressional representatives to voice her displeasure. Ultimately, she decided to organize a protest, “and she came up with a name, ‘The Anti-Porkulus Protest,’ borrowing a term Rush Limbaugh had been using on his radio show.” She contacted conservative media figures to promote her event, including “Michelle Malkin, the conservative blogger and a Seattle native, who agreed to post something about the protest.”341

It is clear why supporters of the tea party emphasize these origin narratives. Both examples speak to the grassroots foundations of the movement and show how normal Americans became involved in (and were critical to) the emergence of the tea party as a political force. Until their involvement in organizing their own protests, neither Ms. Rakovich nor Ms. Carender had been politically active, although they were fairly well politically informed. And through their personal engagement, and the personal engagement of many others, the tea party movement became a force in American politics by organizing protests in cities across the country in the months that followed their separate protests.

But these examples also illustrate how intertwined the various rhetorically relevant orator complexes within the tea party already were, even at this early stage. As a long-established organization dedicated to training political activists and supporting libertarian causes, the FreedomWorks political action group clearly played a critical role in Ms. Rakovich’s initial protest, going so far as to directly suggest that she take to the streets in the first place. It seems safe to say that without FreedomWorks Ms. Rakovich’s small protest would not have taken place. And without her subsequent interviews on Fox News and other conservative media, the idea of privately organized protests against the bailout and stimulus packages would not have spread nearly as rapidly. Ms. Carender’s protest illustrates the connections between the grassroots activists and conservative media even more clearly. Although she wasn’t specifically trained as an activist, Ms. Carender based the name and central framework of her “Anti-Porkulus” protest on ideas and slogans she had heard in conservative media. And without the direct advertising and support provided by conservative media figures such as Michelle Malkin, Ms. Carender’s protest would not have had nearly as many attendees, nor would its existence have been reported across the nation and associated with other protests around the country.

It is important to emphasize that both Ms. Carender and Ms. Rakovich agreed with and personally espoused the ideas and slogans at their protests—they weren’t simply thoughtlessly parroting what they had learned and heard. But by mirroring the narratives and frameworks of conservative media and conservative libertarian organizations, both women helped to create a common identity for tea party activists across the nation, and to associate that identity with libertarian political ideals as represented in the conservative media and by such political action groups. In particular, the Porkulus protesters promoted the idea of capitalist competition in which companies that go bankrupt should be allowed to fail. By intervening in the free-market with bailouts and stimulus, they believed that the government was rewarding undeserving bankers and companies while handing the bill to the public in the form of massive government deficits and increasing debt. An associated driving idea behind of the protests was a dichotomy between the people vs. the government—that the government was not acting in the best interests of average people, and that it should “stay out” of people’s lives across a whole range of issues. As John M. O’Hara from The Heartland Institute would write a few years later:

Millions of Americans joined the tea party movement in 2009 to protest reckless government spending in the pork-laden stimulus package, the earmark-clogged budget bill, the massive mortgage entitlement program, taxpayer-funded corporate rescues, the environmentally fraudulent cap-and-trade monstrosity, and the debt exploding government health care takeover.342

While the Porkulus protests displayed the political underpinnings of the emerging political movement, it wasn’t until a February 19, 2009, CNBC television report by Rick Santelli that the tea party movement got its name. In what appeared to be an impromptu “rant” against the Obama administration’s new mortgage bailout plan during an appearance at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Santelli railed against the bailouts and the expansion of the government under the new administration. In his rant, Santelli focused his ire on individuals who had bought houses using loans that they could no longer afford:

The government is rewarding bad behavior [...] How about this, Mr. President and new administration: why don’t you put up a web site to have people vote on the internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages, or would we like to, at least, buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people who might have a chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people that could carry the water, instead of drinking the water.343

Turning and addressing the stock traders on the floor behind him, Santelli exclaimed, “This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand. President Obama, are you listening?” He then turned to the camera and declared: “We’re thinking of having a Chicago tea party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing.”344 And with that, the modern tea party movement had a name.

Santelli’s outburst quickly garnered a flurry of attention and followed a well-worn path through conservative media outlets. As Skocpol and Williamson describe it:

Video of the Santelli rant quickly scaled the media pyramid. The rant headlined the Drudge Report and was widely re-televised […] When Santelli issued a call for “tea party” protests, web-savvy activists recognized this rhetorical gold. Operating at first through the online social networking site Twitter, conservative bloggers and Republican campaign veterans took the opportunity offered by the Santelli rant to plan projects under the newly minted “tea party” name.345

From O’Hara’s perspective, “when Santelli ranted extemporaneously on-air, it was like compressed steam being released. All of a sudden, we could talk openly about our concerns.”346 Similarly, Rasmussen and Schoen relate that

Santelli gave voice to a growing sentiment among independent minded voters in the wake of the bailouts. It wasn’t just the sheer size of government spending; it was where those tax dollars were headed. And in the minds of many, they were headed to the undeserving at best, and those who had in fact caused the economic crisis at the worst.347

Indeed, not only is Santelli’s rant widely regarded as the first usage of the tea party name, it also represented an important shift in the rhetorical targets of the protest movement. Unlike the Porkulus protests, which focused their ire on the government bailing out what they saw as undeserving banks and corporations, Santelli explicitly reserved his anger for undeserving individuals who had taken out loans on houses that they could no longer afford. This shift was extremely significant for the movement as a whole, and epitomized the polarizing makers vs. takers framework that would become so central to tea party rhetoric. Based on the textual markers described in Chapter 2, the polarizing structure of Santelli’s text is easily identifiable: he vastly simplified the massive economic problems related to the housing crisis into a clear dichotomy between “those who could carry the water,” and those were just “drinking the water.” Not only was the government acting illegitimately, it was directly “subsidiz[ing] losers’ mortgages.” Instead, Santelli sarcastically stated that the government should buy property “in foreclosure” to give “to people who might have a chance to actually prosper down the road”—a clearly dichotomous and hyperbolic suggestion. And by directly challenging the president to “put up a website to have people vote on the internet,” calling for “capitalists” to come join him for a protest, and yelling, “President Obama, are you listening?” on national television, Santelli’s rant was certainly provocative as well.348

Less than two weeks later, with organizing help from both national political groups such as FreedomWorks and publicity provided by conservative media, the first “tea party” protests were held on February 27, 2009. As Zernike details, there were

fifty-one events across the country, with thirty thousand people attending in all […] Everywhere, people brought flags and a sea of homemade signs: STIMULATE BUSINESS; NOT GOVERNMENT. YOUR MORTGAGE IS NOT MY PROBLEM. THE GOVERNMENT HAS NO RIGHT TO TAKE OURS. FREE-MARKETS NOT FREELOADERS.349

Such slogans illustrate the ways in which the polarizing makers vs. takers framework had already made its way onto posters carried by protesters in the streets. Within just a few months, “after cable giant Fox News took up the rallying cry in March and April, hundreds of thousands rallied on Tax Day 2009 to reiterate the anti-government message.”350

From the perspective of the theory of oratorical networks outlined in Chapter 1, it is clear that neither the “top-down” criticisms of the tea party nor the “bottom-up” depiction by supporters fully account for either the emergence nor the later structure of the movement. According to Skocpol and Williamson, the tea party network is

best understood as a combination of three intertwined forces. Each force is important in its own right, and their interaction is what gives the tea party its dynamism, drama, and wallop. Grassroots activism is certainly a key force, energized by angry, conservative-minded citizens […] Another force is the panoply of national funders and ultra-free-market advocacy groups that seek to highlight and leverage the grassroots efforts to further their long-term goal of remaking the Republican Party […] Finally, the tea party cannot be understood without recognizing the mobilization provided by conservative media hosts who openly espouse and encourage the cause. From Fox News to right-wing radio jocks and bloggers, media impresarios have done a lot to create a shared sense of identity that lets the otherwise scattered Tea Parties get together and feel part of something big and powerful.351

As they emphasize, each of the constituent “forces” played a distinct and important role in the tea party movement, and the interactions and connections between each of these nodes gave the network its political and social power.

While Skocpol and Williamson considered politicians (and particularly Republican politicians) as targets of tea party activism—and thus did not include them in their list of “forces”—it is also clear that at least some politicians rapidly sought to associate themselves with the tea party movement. And by 2010, there was an entire cohort of Republican politicians seeking election or reelection by mirroring tea party rhetoric in their public comments, directly associating with tea party groups, and taking advantage of the energy present at tea party rallies. In July 2010, Representative Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) founded the congressional Tea Party Caucus, and after their strong showing in the midterm elections, elected officials associated with the movement exerted significant political influence in Congress. Thus, while politicians and political decision makers were clearly targets of the tea party network, tea party-affiliated politicians also represented an important constituent node of the network in their own right.

Based on the discussion of oratorical network mapping in Chapter 1—and taking cues from sample network diagrams provided by Manheim’s work—Figure 3 represents a visualization of the tea party oratorical network. This diagram depicts the network as a combination of a ‘star’ network and an ‘all-channel’ network.352 It is important to keep in mind: “Everyone is trying to leverage something they want from others in the network.”353 Thus, the links between the separate network nodes in the diagram (depicted as arrows linking the different circles) illustrate the relationships between them from a rhetorical perspective, i.e. what each node offered to and needed from others in the network. At the same time, it helps to illustrate the ways in which each node played a role in maintaining rhetorical uniformity (and thus a common identity) across the tea party network: without the support of other nodes in the network, none of the individual nodes would have been able to effectively meet their diverse real-world sociopolitical goals.

Despite the was the network is diagrammed here, these four constituent nodes are not conceived as exclusive from one another or with hard boundaries between them: as alluded to earlier, many individual orators associated with the movement had multiple group affiliations or moved from one node to another over time. To use just one example that has been previously mentioned, the (now former) co-chairman of the FreedomWorks political action group, Dick Armey, is a former Republican politician who has also been a regular contributor of opinion articles and pieces in conservative media outlets. Another example that will be discussed in more detail here (and was mentioned in Chapter 2) is Roger Ailes, the former CEO of Fox News. Similarly, as the movement developed, some grassroots activists became the leaders of new national political action groups, while others ran for election to Congress, and still others were hired by conservative media outlets.

While this case study will describe the use of explicitly polarizing strategies by individual orators associated with each of these nodes, the sheer number and variety of communicators across the tea party network makes any description necessarily partial. And it is important to reiterate that although the tea party can be considered to be a coherent rhetorical unit—an oratorical network—each of the constituent nodes was itself a highly complex network of individually acting orators and orator complexes, each with their own rhetorical motivations and real-world goals. In the analysis to come, it will be important to describe these reasons and goals for each individual, each node, and for the network as a whole.

Despite this broad range of orators and motivations, it is also clear that there was significant uniformity in the rhetoric of tea party orators across the network. Some researchers have used precisely this fact to argue that the tea party was not a “social movement” at all: as DiMaggio put it, “such uniformity is unlikely to emerge in an organic, decentralized movement, but rather through top-down coordination via elite Republican and media actors.”354 Indeed, one trend that emerges from existing research on the movement is the flow of rhetorical frameworks and strategies from the more centralized, organized, and well-funded political action groups through media outlets and politicians, to the more diffuse level of grassroots tea party groups across the country. The analysis to follow will also proceed in this order, first describing the centrally organized political action groups, then moving on to more diverse and less-coordinated network nodes such as the conservative mass media and tea party-affiliated politicians. Finally, the focus will shift to the least centrally coordinated and most diffuse node: the grassroots activists and local tea party organizations.

It is also possible to divide different network nodes between elites and non-elites, and it may even be legitimate to claim that certain nodes ‘steered’ the movement to a certain extent both rhetorically and ideologically. But a unidirectional and hierarchical conception ignores the myriad feedback loops that existed back up the hierarchy from individuals on the ground, as well as the individual motivations for each orator in mirroring and matching the rhetorical frameworks and strategies of the others. While FreedomWorks trained Ms. Rakovich as an activist and suggested she protest, she was the one who actually stood with her husband holding signs surrounded by Obama supporters, she was the one who came up with the slogans on the signs (likely influenced by the conservative media reports she had been consuming), and she was the one who agreed to appear in a television interview. The semantic argument about whether the actions of Ms. Rakovich and thousands of others who took part in tea party protests should count as “astroturfing” or grassroots is thus largely irrelevant to this work. As discussed in Chapter 1, however, the fact that individual orators from each node utilized uniform rhetorical frameworks and strategies is critical to the idea that the tea party as a whole can be analyzed as an oratorical network at all.

The mirroring and matching seen in the tea party network created a common narrative, highlighted common values, helped define the philosophical and political underpinnings of the movement, and crystallized polarizing flag issues and polarizing frameworks. In this respect, the shared use of polarizing rhetorical strategies directly paralleled developments in the environmental movement described in Chapter 2 and constituted the shared identity of the tea party movement.355 Even from its earliest stages, this shared identity included a skepticism of government action, anger at undeserving individuals and institutions being helped by economic bailouts and stimulus programs, and fears about the future of the country. And many of the political philosophical underpinnings of the movement came from Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, which emphasizes self-interest, the right to self-determination, and political libertarianism.356 Indeed, FreedomWorks was originally founded in the 1980s under a different name (Citizens for a Sound Economy) explicitly to promote libertarian policies and economic theories, including advocating for lower taxes, less government regulation, opposition to unions, and a large reduction in the size of the government.357

At the grassroots level, however, the ideas and values which formed the basis of the movement were not monolithically about a free-market ideology. As Skocpol and Williamson describe the situation:

Rank-and-file tea party participants evaluate regulations and spending very differently, depending on who or what is regulated, and depending on the kinds of people who benefit from various kinds of public spending […] Almost all Tea Partiers favor generous social benefits for Americans who “earn” them; yet, in an era of rising federal deficits, they are very concerned about being stuck with the tax tab to pay for “unearned” entitlements handed out to unworthy categories of people.358

This distinction between the “deserving” vs. the “undeserving,” between those who had “earned” their entitlements and those who were, “placing a burden on hardworking taxpayers,” can be clearly seen in Rick Santelli’s rant and on the placards at early tea party protests. As the researchers phrase it: “A well-marked distinction between workers and non-workers—between productive citizen and the freeloaders—is central to the tea party worldview and conception of America.”359 Further, “in tea party ideology, redistribution transfers money from the industrious to the lazy, a process that is fundamentally unethical and un-American.”360 This dichotomy was at the core of the polarizing rhetorical strategies used by tea party orators and orator complexes. As the following will illustrate, each node in the tea party network integrated this makers vs. takers framework into depictions of a variety of flag issues, from mortgage relief packages to President Obama’s health care reform (Obamacare), and from debates surrounding immigration to discussions of tax policy.

Overall, the tea party network had a wide range of political and social goals, from influencing specific policy measures being debated in Congress to shifting the overall tone and political mood of political discourse. The tea party sought to very loudly and publicly voice objection to President Obama’s political agenda with the hope of derailing new policies its members saw as further handouts and bailouts. In a similar vein, the tea party sought to pressure both Democratic and Republican legislators to vote against, and to withhold their support from, legislation designed to enact this agenda, most prominently when it came to the expansion of health care, the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, and immigration reform. Perhaps the most famous instances of such direct action came in August 2009, when “anti-healthcare reform protesters flocked to town-hall meetings,” held by congressional representatives to meet with their constituents. “Throughout the country […] these meetings became explosive venues for right-wing populists furious with the economic and social policies of the Obama administration.”361 Such protests represented an effort to directly influence politicians and policy to the right by forcing Republicans to take more extreme and inflexible positions in their negotiations and by attempting to drive a wedge between Democratic representatives and their president. This point deserves emphasis: the tea party network sought to drive division in both political parties, and the established Republican Party may indeed have been the primary target. While

tea party people aim to defeat Obama and Democrats […] above all, they want Republicans in office to refuse compromises with Democrats […] They “go nuclear” when GOP officeholders take any steps toward moderation and negotiation. If tea party-oriented Republicans have even tiny margins of control, they are expected to ram through maximalist programs.362

From a broader perspective, the tea party oratorical network sought to shift the narrative frames of political debate in the United States as a whole. With brash protests and slogans, exaggerated claims, and flamboyant stunts, tea party-affiliated orators sought to gain more attention for their cause, particularly from mass media outlets on both the left and the right. By loudly expressing opposition to government policies and by polarizing around specific flag issues, the tea party network was able to focus the broader public discourse on topics and frameworks of its choosing:

The huge media coverage for tea party complaints about “big government” spending and bailouts—not to mention the coverage of the dramatic protests about ObamaCare and cap-and-trade legislation—helped Republicans and conservatives to reset national agendas of debate. People stopped talking about Obama and “change we can believe in” and started talking about government tyranny.363

By the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010, rhetorical efforts began to include mobilizing and energizing tea party-sympathetic voters for the coming midterm elections by generating solidarity within the movement, so that those who already identified with the tea party network would be motivated to support their in-group candidates more strongly and to oppose candidates outside of the tea party movement (including many moderate Republicans) more vehemently.364

Polarizing strategies seek to have precise, functional effects on audiences, namely: establishing and solidifying in-group and out-group identities, driving in-group members and non-members to more extremely dichotomous positions, generating solidarity within the in-group to mobilize for action, and gaining widespread attention for issues and narrative frames selected by the orator. As the analysis to come will show, in addition to helping each constituent orator meet their individual real-world goals, the rhetorical strategy of polarization directly helped the tea party network as a whole reach its real-world goals. Indeed, looking back on the movement from our perspective today, it is unlikely that anyone associated with the movement then could have dreamed it would end up being as successful and effective at shaping the discourse and politics in America as it was.

3.3The Tea Party Oratorical Network in Four Parts