Tea Party as State-Corporate Crime

• In Event: Comparative and International Perspectives on State and Political Crimes

Abstract

I make the case that the Tea Party (TP) has been deviance prone since it emerged as an outgrowth of the Republican Party as a reaction to the Obama administration and its healthcare reform. TP represents a form of state-corporate crime, potentially facilitating both political and corporate deviance, and therefore warrants critical criminological attention. The recent IRS “scandal” evidenced TP-affiliated political power to undermine state regulatory control over its behavior which, because of its national scope, has the potential to inflict significant injury. Mass media and the TP’s own self-representations have socially constructed the TP as a populist political movement of disaffected non-elites. Deviance is represented as individual, idiosyncratic rather than endemic to elites who exercise proprietary control over TP organizations or their corporate benefactors. I apply an integrated model of state-corporate crime to identify and explain TP deviance and consider its criminological and practical implications.

Author

• Paul R. Schupp, Niagara University