Andrew Foltz-Morrison

The Tea Party combines a programme tailor-made for the transnational corporate agenda with an utterly irrational, fanatically anti-Obama and often bizarre discourse about a secret ‘socialist plot’ to take over the US and about the need to restore a mythical past – cloaked in codes – of patriarchy, white supremacy and the restoration of middle-class stability and conservative community. […] An overwhelmingly white movement, the Tea Party is the voice of the vulnerable Christian white lower and middle classes, whose world is in crisis and collapsing around them. Their race-/ethnic-based social privileges no longer provide protection against the ravages of global capitalism and, in response, they are attempting to retreat into a soothing fortress of rage and alignment with the Christian Right, with other neo- or proto-fascist organisations and with an ideological fanaticism and moral absolutism promoted by their corporate sponsors. When decoded, Tea Party calls to ‘take back the country’ should be read as taking back the caste privileges that Partiers feel they have lost as a result of the breakdown of the traditional white race/culture supremacy that has underpinned those privileges. Tea Party rallies and Christian Right events exude mass popular enthusiasm as well as the anger characteristic of a neo-fascist current that cannot be reduced to the manipulation by capital and the reactionary Right.

William I. Robinson and Mario Barrera, “Global capitalism and twenty-first century fascism: a US case study,” Race & Class, vol. 53, no. 4