Tea Parties and the Ethnocentrism of the Left

The recent event to “restore honor” hosted by Glenn Beck before the Washington Monument provides an occasion to ask once more that question that occupied blogs and op-ed pages back in April: Are Tea Partiers or other attendees at these virtually 100% white and conservative events “racist”? My perverse inclination is to answer, “of course – and so are we all.” In the words, of the Avenue Q song, everyone – you, me, and, yes, the Tea Partiers – is all a little bit racist. The Tea Party’s critics are just more adept at making their targets feel self-conscious about their prejudices.

I’d qualify the paragraph above by stipulating that, by “racist,” I mean “ethnocentric” in Kinder’s and Kam’s sense of the term. The Tea Partiers – like everyone else – tend to divide human society into in-groups and out-groups and use those divisions to reinforce their own sense of identity and self-worth. (Donald Kinder & Cindy Kam, Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion at pages 31-41). As Kinder and Kam note, ethnocentrism “is not a sickness”: “Ethnocentrism is normal.” (page 8). Indeed, its ubiquity suggests that it might be hardwired into our brains by natural selection, as a way of giving ourselves a sense of self-esteem and security. Henri Tajfel’s “minimal group experiments” show that people develop group loyalties and biases from the most transient and trivial characteristics – say, their estimates of dots on a computer screen (over-estimators consistently favor their fellow over-estimators and under-estimators favor under-estimators!)

It should not be a surprise that white, middle-class, suburban and rural evangelically Protestant Christian homeowners will develop a bias favoring similar people. Their polled values and beliefs regarding different ethnic groups, – hard-working or lazy, intelligent or unintelligent, etc – seem to reflect these biases. (Incidentally, Tea Partiers do not score exceptionally higher on such measures of ethnocentrism than whites in general).

But you, Gentle Reader, do you harbor any ethnocentric biases towards those Tea Partiers whom you deride as racists?

Maybe you do not use the “r-word” in your speech, but that’s just etiquette (Tea Partiers likewise avoid the “n-word”): Do you secretly -- maybe involuntarily -- think “redneck” (or “hayseed,” “hick,” “babbit,” etc) when you read about the crowds listening to Beck and Palin in front of the Lincoln Memorial? And does this sense of those Tea Partiers’ inferior rural-ness and otherness not re-enforce your own smug sense of self-approval, as a good cosmopolitan urbanite, free from the trammels of paranoia and ignorance to which these hayseeds are prone? If so, then your attitude is squarely ethnocentric, in Kinder’s and Kam’s sense of the term.

I would suggest that the critics of the Tea Party harbor deeply ethnocentric views of Tea Partiers as rural and suburban dimwits whose political views are the result of their ill-education and isolation from cosmopolitan commercial centers. Sometimes the ethnocentricity of anti-Tea Party screeds is unbridled – for instance, when blogs gleefully deploy the “r-word.” Sometimes the anti-rural/suburban bias is subtle – for instance, mockery of misspellings on signs at Tea Party rallies. But the general tenor of the attacks revolves around the ignorance and paranoia of Tea Partiers, stereotypes that are well-calculated to inflate the self-esteem of the resident of the college town or big city who deploys them. By contrast, Tea Partiers and fellow travelers press a different sort of stereotype of their opponents – not that their critics are ignorant or unpolished but that their enemies are grade-grubbing over-achievers whose arrogance disqualifies them from the right to exercise power in a democracy.

In short, everyone seems to be re-enforcing their identity by promulgating stereotypes of each other that actually reinforce their alleged opponents’ stereotypes of themselves. It is ethnocentricity mirroring ethnocentricity all the way down.

Is this mutual, self-re-enforcing ethnocentricity a bad thing? You tell me. I suppose that it is annoying to listen to folksy poor-mouthing by affluent suburbanites railing against the alleged political dominance of eastern elites. But it is also a mite irritating to listen to bloggers sneer at the dumb opinions of Tea Party types but give equally dumb Left views a respectful hearing.

Let us put aside these tedious normative debates for a much more (to me) interesting historical question of intellectual geneology: Whatever their merits, do our contemporary ethnocentricities mirror the ethnocentricities of the 19th century? To my ears, the recriminations of the Tea Party’s critics uncannily parallel the old attacks of Whigs and Republicans on Jacksonian Democrats as comically ignorant and reactionary hayseeds. (For a vintage example, treat yourself to the words of fictional character, the Rev. Petroleum V. Nasby, the Civil War-era creation of the 19th century writer David Ross Locke who apparently left Abraham Lincoln in stitches). Perhaps the ethnocentricities of both Tea Party and Tea Party Poopers have long American pedigrees, stretching back perhaps to 1832 or even before, to the western Anti-Federalists like Matthew Findley and their eastern financial opponents like Robert Morris or congregationalist enemies like Timothy Dwight. On one side, there was the Appalachian diaspora of (often prosperous) hinterland residents spread across the sunbelt -- Jackson territory -- expressing anger at the snobbery of what they take to be a cosmopolitan cabal of New England brahmins and New York financiers. On the other side, there were those Yankees and New Yorkers’ deriding Andrew Jackson’s bad spelling and bigotry. Their great, great, great, great grandchildren may still be at it, aided by the more recent immigrants who lined up on the "populist-periphery" side or "elitist-center" side of the old debate.

In the 19th century, the two sides needed each other for their own self-definitions. Perhaps they still do: Maybe their endless mutual recriminations about their counterparts' various prejudices somehow hold the country together and define what it is to be an American.