Thanks to Jeffrey Dudas for his provocative review of my book, Tea Party Women. I appreciate his acknowledgment that my work largely achieved the goals it set out to achieve: to consider the role of women in the Tea Party and how their rhetoric later shaped GOP discourse. Dudas also is correct in his assertion that my aim was to do so largely without judgment. As a trained social scientist, I try to avoid work that is normative. Moreover, as a scholar who has long studied conservative movements, I am well aware of the skepticism that right-wing activists hold toward the academy. As a result, my approach when dealing with my research subjects is to allow them to explain their orientation toward politics in their own words.
At first blush, the empirical political scientist part of me bristles at the thought of becoming a cultural critic, as Dudas asks me to do in his review. However, rereading my book during the presidency of Donald Trump, whose daily violations of basic norms undermines the health of our democracy, leads me to agree that distilling the more wildly inaccurate claims of some of my subjects now seems more warranted. At the very least, noting how some of their beliefs echo similar themes made by earlier conservative activists would have been enlightening. For example, one respondent’s claim that “in order for government to grow, families have to shrink” begs for more elaboration. Her comments, if not empirically demonstrable, make more sense when considering the long-held notion by some conservatives that social welfare programs essentially usurp the role of families, given that they disincentivize marriage (at least from their perspective). Also, while the majority of my research subjects avoided such inflammatory imagery as the activist who used plantation metaphors to describe women’s “dependence” on government social welfare programs, I agree with Dudas that in a post-Trump era, such imagery takes on new urgency and warrants more “unpacking.”
Although Tea Party Women was published in early 2016, I collected my primary data from 2012 to 2014, well before Donald Trump’s unexpected victory. In my interviews, most subjects explained that their motivation to become involved in politics was due to their concerns about government spending and the debt. On the other hand, my survey data show that Tea Party identification among Americans was also directly linked to opposition to Barack Obama, and so I should have probed deeper into what can now be viewed as the clear racial undertones of those beliefs. Given that many conservatives who back President Trump express little concern about his budget-busting economic policies—the raison d’étre of the entire Tea Party cause—while exerting little pushback on his racist policies and rhetoric, this missed opportunity is glaring to me.
Much like Dudas, I would love the opportunity to gauge these women’s perspectives on the #MeToo movement to decipher whether their heightened involvement as right-wing activists in any way has impacted the Republican Party’s commitment to male supremacy, to use Dudas’s term. I was surprised that a significant number—but certainly not a majority—of Tea Party women considered themselves feminists and recognized that they often faced a hostile “good ole boys” network within the GOP. But I doubt that there are enough such female activists on the right to alter substantially the gender dynamics currently at play on the right. To take Dudas’s example, while the GOP did initially play lip service to Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony, the Kavanaugh outcome was all but predetermined. And it is disheartening that many conservative women, who no doubt would have felt at home in the Tea Party, largely sided with Brett Kavanaugh or continue to resist efforts to call President Trump to task about his own sexist tendencies. Perhaps my conclusion about the potential of Tea Party women to lead the Republican Party to be more inclusive of women as leaders was premature.
