The Tea Party and the Republican Base

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The Tea Party is the Republican base.  So what does that mean?  We like to talk about racism but is there more to it?  I think so and I think that the nature of that more can be found in Bob Altmeyer's online book The Authoritarians.

The studies explain so much about these people. Yes, the research shows they are very aggressive, but why are they so hostile? Yes, experiments show they are almost totally uninfluenced by reasoning and evidence, but why are they so dogmatic? Yes, studies show the Religious Right has more than its fair share of hypocrites, from top to bottom; but why are they two-faced, and how come one face never notices the other? Yes, their leaders can give the flimsiest of excuses and even outright lies about things they�ve done wrong, but why do the rank and file believe them? What happens when authoritarian followers find the authoritarian leaders they crave and start marching together?

I think the entire book is a must read for those who want to understand what's going on in the United States today.  Warning; it's a PDF and very long.  Bob Altmeyer has added a section on the Tea party and as you might guess there is not much that is really new.   Here is a portion:

Authoritarian Followers
If you read the book presented at this website, you?ll find lots of evidence that, as a group, social conservatives share the psychological trait of being authoritarian followers.1 And you can hardly miss the authoritarian follower tendencies in the behavior of the Tea Partiers. Here are a dozen that seem pretty obvious.
1. Authoritarian submission. Authoritarian followers submit to the people they consider authorities much more than non-authoritarians do. In this context, Tea Partiers seem to believe without question whatever their chosen authorities say. Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, various religious groups, the House and Senate GOP leaders, Sen. Grassley from Iowa, Rep. Bachmann from Minnesota, and of course Sarah Palin can say whatever they want about the Democrats, and the Tea Partiers will accept it and repeat it. The followers don?t find out for themselves what the Democratic leader truly said, what is really in a bill, what a treaty actually specifies, or whether taxes have really gone up. They are happy to let Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin do their thinking for them. It has gotten so bad that their leaders casually say preposterous things that are easily refuted, because they know their audience will never believe the truth, or even hear about it.
2. Fear. Fear constantly pulses through authoritarian followers, and Tea Partiers are mightily frightened. They believe President Obama is a dictator. They also think the country will be destroyed by its mounting debt. They readily believed the health care proposals provided for �death panels� that will euthanize Down?s syndrome babies, �put Grandma in the grave,� and place microchips in each American so the government can track us. When Rep. Paul Brown (R-GA) said that Obama?s plan to expand such things as the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps was really intended to create a Gestapo-like, brown-shirt military force in the United States, his followers accepted this. Conservative leaders especially vilify Barack Obama, recently calling him in the space of two days (April 7 and 8) the �most radical president ever� (Gingrich) who is �inflicting untold damage on this great country� (Limbaugh) and is inviting a nuclear attack on the United States by indicating we won?t hit back (Palin). The people who orchestrate the Tea Party movement know well what button to push first and hardest among social conservatives, and they work it overtime. And they know spreading fear �works� with others as well. Sometimes it seems they are all trying to out-boogie-man each other.

The rest can be found at the link above.  The bottom line is the Tea Party is made up of people who seek out and follow authoritarian leaders/tyrants.  Bottom line - the Republican base.