Since 2008, the Tea Party and the Resistance have caused some major shake-ups for the Republican and Democratic parties. The changes fall outside the scope of traditional party politics, and outside the realm of traditional social science research. To better understand what’s going on Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Strategy at Harvard and Director of the Scholars Strategy Network, convened a group of researchers to study the people and organizations and at the heart of these grassroots movements.
Skocpol joins us this week to discuss their findings and the new book Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance. Her work in particular focuses on the Tea Party and includes interviews with Tea Party members across the country. We also discuss the Resistance and whether these oppositional forces to the party in power are likely to continue after November’s election.
Additional Information
Upending American Politics from Oxford University Press
Skocpol on the Scholars Strategy Network
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Episode Credits
This episode was engineered by Democracy Works host Jenna Spinelle, edited by WPSU’s Chris Kugler, and reviewed by WPSU News Director Emily Reddy. A huge thank you to Abby Peck in Theda Skocpol’s office for arranging the interview and providing technical support.
Interview Highlights
[6:45] How did we arrive at our current moment in American politics?
Well, I was surprised in the early Obama presidency by the sudden emergence of the Tea Party and perhaps I wasn’t surprised for exactly the same reason that a lot of other people were. First there were some demonstrations, but then there were hundreds of regularly meeting local groups of tea partiers and that attracted our attention because we realized that since the 1960s a lot of the organizing on the civic side in the United States had taken the form of national advocacy groups and maybe some local things, but usually not very connected into anything national.
Then if you fast forward eight to 10 years later, the same thing happened when Trump was elected and in both cases these were presidents that shocked the other side, elected at the same time as Congress was controlled by their own party. And the grassroots resistance emerged even more quickly after the Trump election, which was an even bigger shock to the people on the other side.
[10:01] What was it about Barack Obama’s election that changed the paradigm?
It’s in Americans’ DNA to organize when something strikes citizens as needing action and both grassroots tea partiers and the grassroots resisters, now they faced a shocking event and that event is probably very important. I think social movement scholars often don’t pay attention to events. But it’s a pretty shocking thing in American democracy when a president who looks like they’re going to carry through radical changes is elected at the same time as a Congress of their own party.
And in the case of Barack Obama, of course it was an African American. He looked like he was coming to power at a moment of economic crisis that was going to lead to sweeping changes led by Democrats, and at that moment, a lot of grassroots conservatives just said to themselves, we can’t depend on the Republican Party to do anything. We don’t trust the Republican Party. Who’s going to do it? We’re going to do it. And so they started organizing face to face.
[12:15] How does today’s organizing relate to older styles of civic engagement and civil society?
In the Tea Party it was more men and women often married couples together, but women were more present than you might think and more present than you would think for conservatives because women tend to do things and these are