That's the theme of a handful of recent stories. Here are a couple examples
- ‘People don’t fully appreciate how committed the tea party is to not compromising'
- The Tea Party Doesn’t Want Compromise; It Wants Surrender
Most highlight a recently published book which tries to detail how Tea Party members are distinct from other Republican Party identifiers. The authors uses surveys and other methods to determine that Tea Party members are far more likely to be reactionary (take may country back) and conspiratorial than other Republicans.
- This focus group report on Tea Party members hits the same point.
Some quotes from the book's author:
- ‘People don’t fully appreciate how committed the tea party is to not compromising'
- The Tea Party Doesn’t Want Compromise; It Wants Surrender
Most highlight a recently published book which tries to detail how Tea Party members are distinct from other Republican Party identifiers. The authors uses surveys and other methods to determine that Tea Party members are far more likely to be reactionary (take may country back) and conspiratorial than other Republicans.
- This focus group report on Tea Party members hits the same point.
Some quotes from the book's author:
So if you look at this postwar discourse in the National Review Online you have some content about limited government, some about social conservatism, and some about national security. That content accounts for 76 percent of that National Review online. Now if you look at the Tea Party Web sites, that only accounts for 30 percent. Then there’s this conspiratorial discourse Hofstadter talks about that says government is really trying to bring about socialism, etc. That’s only about five percent of what you find at the National Review. On tea party Web sites it’s about a third.
So it’s not just that we’re seeing results like 76 percent of tea partiers want to see Obama fail. We also ask if people think Obama is destroying the country. We asked this question of all self-identified conservatives. If you look at all conservatives, 35 percent believe that. If you look at tea party conservatives and non-tea party conservatives, only six percent of non-tea party conservatives believe that vs. 71 percent of tea party conservatives.
So to draw this together, the reason people should believe us is we have disparate data sources that collapse on the same answer. It’s that these people are not the traditional, mainstream conventional conservatives. If you look at tea party conservatives, or as we call them in the book, reactionary conservatives, they don’t want change at all. They want to go back in time.
. . . You’ve got about 52 members of the Republican conference who are affiliated with the tea party in some official way. That’s a bit less than a quarter of all House Republicans. That’s enough in the House. They refuse to compromise because, to them, compromise is capitulation. If you go back to Hofstadter’s work when he’s talking about when the John Birch Society rode high, he talks about how conservatives would see people who disagree as political opponents, but reactionary conservatives saw them as evil. You can’t capitulate to evil.
