According to the author, the Tea Party was not motivated by outright racism but by the coded racial hatreds contained in dog whistle politics. While members of the Tea Party denied being motivated by racism, they were, the author points out, "united in their hostility towards Obama" (page 150) because they did not feel that Obama could possibly represent them. This rejection of the idea that Obama could be President motivated their continuing the falsehood that Obama was not born in the U.S.--the so-called "birther" movement.
The Tea Party was motived, the author suggests, by the following "four hatreds (page 152):"
Welfare: The Tea Partiers see welfare as taking money away from hardworking white people and giving it to the undeserving poor (who are, in their minds, nonwhite).
Immigration by undocumented people: The Tea Party sees immigrants, particularly brown immigrants, as taking money away from white taxpayers and causing crime.
Arab Muslims: Tea Partiers regard Arab Muslims as the enemy within the nation.
Obama himself: The Tea Party regards Obama as the incarnation of the hatreds and fears they feel about welfare, undocumented immigrants, and Arab Muslims and therefore as the devil incarnate.
The author states that dog whistle politics explains the contradictions of the Tea Party philosophy. For example, they hate entitlement programs such as welfare, which they link to nonwhites, but they support government entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security, which they feel benefit white people.
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Based on Chapters 5-9 of Ian Haney López's Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class: According to the author, what led to and fueled the creation of the Tea Party? What are the "four hatreds," according to Haney Lopez, that motivated the Tea Party?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment