Not Another Tea Party

Welcome to Hilary’s tea party—but be careful: this rude little girl has lots of rules to follow. Maybe that’s why no one except her stuffed animals, Mr. Big Arms and Stuffy Bear, stays very long. She’s just no fun. Enter a giant yet timid chameleon, all ready for tea and cookies. But when he finds out how bossy Hilary can be, will he run out the door, too?

Kikko sets out after her father with a forgotten pie for Grandma. When she arrives at a strange house in the wintry woods, a peek in the window reveals that the footprints Kikko had been following did not belong to her father at all, but to a bear in a long coat and hat! Alice in Wonderland meets Little Red Riding Hood in this charmed tale.

Why on earth would two history nerds use their own free time to write another US history textbook? Well, that, intelligent human, is the right question. This work breaks from the traditional memorization of who, what, when, where, and focuses on why and how. The former is popular in schools due to its efficiency in quantification for testing. You're either right or wrong about remembering facts. But it's so boring that most students turn off their brains once they set foot in the class, and that habit continues well into old age, if not recognized and corrected. Why and how are more subjective, therefore harder to grade. But with their asking, people become re-centered in our collective story, where they belong. Only then can proper context be understood, and criticism and perspective be applied. We believe this approach to be the missing link in our education and understanding of current issues, norms, and discussion points. Hopefully, after reading this work, each reader's critical thinking will activate around all history permanently. That will certainly aid humanity's evolution and communication. Wait, does that mean this book can be categorized as self-help? Argue away!

Examines the significant role of women in the conservative movement Notable for its radical conservative views, the Tea Party is progressive in one way that much of mainstream US politics is not: it has among its most vocal members not spokesmen but spokeswomen. Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Governor Nikki Haley, US Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, and many others are all prominent figureheads for the fiery and prominent political movement. Many major Tea Party organizations, such as the Tea Party Patriots, are led by women and women have been instrumental in founding new right wing organizations for women, such as Smart Girl Politics, with ties to the movement. In Tea Party Women, Melissa Deckman explores the role of women in creating and leading the movement and the greater significance of women’s involvement in the Tea Party for our understanding of female political leadership and the future of women in the American Right. Through national-level public opinion data, observation at Tea Party rallies, and interviews with female Tea Party leaders, Deckman demonstrates that many Tea Party women find the grassroots, decentralized nature of the movement to be more inclusive for them than mainstream Republican politics. She lays out the ways in which these women gain traction by recasting conservative political issues such as the deficit and gun control as issues affecting families, and how they rely on traditional gender roles as mothers and homemakers to underscore their particular expertise in understanding these issues. Furthermore, she examines how many Tea Party women claim to write off traditional feminist issues like reproductive rights and gender discrimination as distracting from the real issues affecting women, such as economic policies, and how some even reclaim the mantel of ‘feminism’ as signifying freedom and independence from government overreach—tactics that have over time been adopted by mainstream Republicans. Whether the Tea Party terrifies or fascinates you, Tea Party Women provides a behind-the-scenes look at the women behind an enduring and influential faction in American politics.

In this penetrating new study, Skocpol of Harvard University, one of today's leading political scientists, and co-author Williamson go beyond the inevitable photos of protesters in tricorn hats and knee breeches to provide a nuanced portrait of the Tea Party. What they find is sometimes surprising.

In June 2010, Greg Fettig began a battle that would ultimately change the course of his life. Already involved in the Tea Party movement in Indiana, he started a campaign to target an icon of Washington elitism, six-term US Senator Richard Lugar, and ultimately oust him from power. He had no idea that the eighteen-month journey ahead would be fraught with twists and turns, bribes, threats, attacks, deception, and betrayal. An inside look into the dark underbelly of politics, Tea Party on Safari takes you behind the scenes of one battle in an all-out war for the heart and soul of the Republican Party. Fettig, along with fellow Tea Party patriot Monica Boyer, united under the banner of constitutional conservatism and set out to reclaim the Republican Party by purging it of RINOs and they started with Senator Lugar. Voting Lugar out of office remained their goal, and they pursued it with steady resolve. With Fettig and Boyer at the helm, the unified Tea Party waged the largest grass roots political campaign ever conducted in the young movement's history, seeking to send shockwaves of fear to the Washington, DC, establishment of both national political parties.

The Tea Party showed its strength in the 2010 mid-terms. Despite the opposition of leading Republicans like Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Lindsey Graham, 140 Tea Party candidates ran for Congress. Of the sixty House seats which moved from Democratic to Republican control, twenty-eight were won by Tea Party candidates. At the movement’s height, 29 percent of Americans had “some ties” to the Tea Party, while 2 percent identified themselves as active members. The Tea Party first attracted the media spotlight with Rick Santelli’s televised rant against the government’s bailout of mortgage borrowers on February 19, 2009, which instantly went viral as a video. As the authors document, however, “tea parties” associated with the Ron Paul movement had already been gathering momentum for more than a year. Beginning as a protest against government spending sprees and ballooning deficits, the Tea Party’s sudden fame forced it to define itself on many issues where the membership was seriously divided. The Tea Party is a coalition of different outlooks, united only by belief in small, debt-free government and low taxes. Fiscal conservatives, who were usually liberal on social issues and against American military interventions, battled social conservatives, in an uneasy series of maneuvers which continues unresolved and is described in the book. The Tea Party Explained, written by two Tea Party activists who know the movement inside and out, is aimed at the intrigued and curious reader who wants to find out more about this unique phenomenon. The book gives a well-documented account of the Tea Party, its origins, its evolution, the bitter squabbles over its direction, its amazing successes in 2010, and its electoral rebuff in 2012. Maltsev and Skaskiw analyze the demographics of the Tea Party, the many organizations which have tried to represent, appropriate, or infiltrate the movement, and the ideological divisions in its ranks. The authors evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the Tea Party and its likely future impact. A movement with strong local roots in many cities, firmly supported by a quarter of the US population, will not evaporate after one big defeat, and can be counted on to influence events for decades to come.

What to make of the Tea Party? To some, it is a grassroots movement aiming to reclaim an out-of-touch government for the people. To others, it is a proto-fascist organization of the misinformed and manipulated lower middle class. Either way, it is surely one of the most significant forms of reaction in the age of Obama. In this definitive socio-political analysis of the Tea Party, Anthony DiMaggio examines the Tea Party phenomenon, using a vast array of primary and secondary sources as well as first-hand observation. He traces the history of the Tea Party and analyzes its organizational structure, membership, ideological coherence, and relationship to the mass media. And, perhaps most importantly, he asks: is it really a movement or just a form of “manufactured dissent” engineered by capital? DiMaggio’s conclusions are thoroughly documented, surprising, and bring much needed clarity to a highly controversial subject.