The Tea Party Movement and the Co-optation of the White Nationalist Movement

• In Event: Attitudes toward Political Protest and Violence

Abstract

In 2017, Americans were both shocked and horrified by the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, during which disturbing images of white nationalist protestors wearing Klan robes and carrying Nazi flags were broadcast around the world. Worse, Trump, as President, was reluctant to criticize them in spite of the fact that a young counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was viciously murdered by a white supremacist who participated in the rally. This rally, as well as other public expressions of support for Donald Trump by white nationalist figures, has led many political analysts to conclude that the white nationalist movement has become reinvigorated and now plays a significant role in American politics. How can we explain this alarming development?

Social scientists have long sought to understand the growth of this dangerous subculture, citing the role of economic decline and frustration, as well as increased anxiety regarding the political and cultural threat posed by growing nonwhite and Latinx populations. Such explanations are at best incomplete as they fail to capture the inherent contingency of social movement mobilization, and how extremist ideology is translated into political action. The need for greater theoretical attention to causally proximate factors in this literature is underscored by recent trends in the total number of white hate groups in the United States. Based on data from the Southern Poverty Law Center, after reaching a record 762 active chapters in 2010, by 2016 the number of active white hate groups reached the lowest level ever seen since the SPLC began reporting this data in 1997. Unless we are willing to believe that the rise of white nationalism surrounding the 2016 election is merely an illusion, the explanations that have been offered to explain the contemporary rise of white hate groups surely fail to explain the organizational dynamics of the movement over the last decade.

In this paper, we argue that the growing importance of white nationalists in American politics has resulted from the co-optation of white nationalists into mainstream political organizations to further their goals in ways that they believe will be less costly and more effective. One of the most important developments that set this process in motion, we argue, was the rise of the Tea Party Movement (TPM). Prior to the emergence of the TPM, the most ardent white racists had few options for participating in the white nationalist movement beyond the traditional white hate groups, such as the Klan, Neo-Nazi’s, or other racist fringe groups. Participation in these groups is potentially costly because they are viewed as deviant by all but the most extreme racists and they are often targeted by law enforcement. The TPM offered white supremacists an opportunity to avoid these costs and participate in conventional politics, which suddenly became attractive due to the presence of sympathetic Tea Party candidates and elected officials. Although the Tea Party movement has declined over the last few years, we argue that it served as an important conduit for white nationalists into mainstream electoral politics, through which they became mobilized into conventional politics and eventually, the Trump campaign.

We test our argument using several types of empirical data. First, we estimate the effect of Tea Party candidates on the mobilization of white racial extremists through an analysis of anti-minority campaign rhetoric on voter turnout in the 2010 election. We find that white racial extremists were more likely to support Tea Party candidates whose campaign rhetoric was most hostile toward Blacks, Latinx immigrants and Muslims.
Second, we present county-level analyses of the determinants of white nationalist organizational “death,” which we operationalize as the year in which a white hate nationalist group ceased to be active (after at least one year of activity). Consistent with a co-optation process, we find white nationalist group activity was most likely to decline in counties where Tea Party organizations were most active in the peak years of the Tea Party movement between 2009 and 2012. Overall, we find strong support for the argument that the Tea Party movement played a critical role in moving white racial extremists from the fringe to the mainstream of American politics, providing a ready-made base for Donald Trump in 2016.

Authors

• Richard C. Fording, University of Alabama

• Sanford F. Schram, Hunter College, CUNY