Talking About Taxation: Comparing Logics of Mutual Obligation in Community Organizing and the Tea Party

• In Event: 187 - Regular Session. Political Culture

Abstract

Based on two years of ethnographic research in a local Tea Party group and a progressive faith-based community organization, this paper compares the ways in which members of these groups talk about taxation and redistribution, and asks how the different moral visions of mutual obligation that they express shape their practical efforts to enact their obligations to their fellow citizens, through both public policies and their everyday lives. The analysis reveals five key dimensions on which the groups’ discourses of obligation differ, including: 1) their view of citizens’ willingness to share across differences; 2) the proper role of government in structuring relationships of obligation; 3) the nature of these relationships; 4) the structure of these relationships; and 5) legitimate beneficiaries of these relationships. It then shows how each group drew on these discourses (and the relational logics inherent in them) to justify policy positions or adjudicate between different lines of action. Overall, the analysis shows that both groups’ approaches to these issues are grounded in how they position themselves in relation to others on an imagined field of mutual obligation, complicating prevailing understandings of a straightforward relationship between conservative identification and individualism on one hand, and progressive identification and collectivist values on the other. Moreover, the paper offers an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between talk and action, and suggests that individual accounts, group discourses, and patterns of behavior at the individual and group levels must be understood as mutually constituted through group interactions.

Author

• Ruth Braunstein, University of Connecticut