What was the original intent? The Tea Party movement, the Founding Fathers, and the American welfare state

Abstract

ABSTRACT Many scholars have cautioned against over-emphasizing the role of culture and values in the unique structure of the American welfare state. In this article, I argue that the Tea Party movement is an exceptional example of how values attributed to the founding of the American nation are used as a cultural schema to legitimize arguments and to mobilize political actors to constrain the perception of available welfare policy options. Using the Wayback Machine, I have built a bespoke archive of rhetoric from Tea Party chapter websites in 2009 to 2011, outlining the values the Tea Party attributes to the Founding Fathers. I provide a more nuanced history of the Founding Era in order to expose the selective scope of Tea Party history, exaggerating certain ideas while neglecting others. Adapting a pragmatic historiographical method, I argue that this historical narrative illuminates the less socially desirable motivations of both the elite and everyday actors in the Tea Party: free market ideology and latent racial animus. As such, I conclude that cultural values ought to remain an important area of research, particularly identifying how modern political actors co-opt history and national identity to legitimize partisan ideological claims, particularly in the arena of welfare policy.