Melissa Deckman’s book is an interesting exploration of the central role played by women in the contemporary Tea Party movement. It focuses on how “Tea Party women” have organized some of the most prominent movement groups, such as “Smart Girl Politics” and “Tea Party Patriots,” around explicitly gendered frames and rhetoric. Especially important in this regard has been the use of a “motherhood” frame that depicts women’s participation in American politics as necessary for the protection—both physical and, especially, economic—of their children from an apparently overbearing, voracious national government. Alarmed by “big” government’s alleged fantasies of total control of the American citizenry, Tea Party women imagine themselves to be “Mama Grizzlies” protecting their cubs from all manner of predator.
This book pursues two major objectives. The first is to present in substantial detail, and without judgment, the beliefs of both Tea Party women leaders and ordinary citizen activists across a variety of policy areas—including reproductive health policy, gun policy, health-care policy broadly, and fiscal policy. Taking the political beliefs of Mama Grizzlies as given, the author presents ample evidence (typically in the form of long quotations that are derived from her interviews and other primary source material) of Tea Party women’s hostility toward governmental action and “liberal” politics. Deckman’s evidence demonstrates, as have other fine-grained studies of the Tea Party movement, that Mama Grizzlies were especially exercised by then–President Barack Obama, in whose figure was embodied their sinister fantasies of omnipotent governmental control (see, for example, Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto, Change They Can’t Believe In, 2013).
Deckman is similarly successful in pursuing her second major objective: documenting the strong and meaningful presence of women in the Tea Party and, increasingly, in mainstream Republican Party politics. Indeed, readers should take away from the book that women have been a vital force in the development and trajectory of the Tea Party movement and that their particular, gendered take on contemporary American politics has spilled over into mainstream conservative discourse and helped to set the contemporary Republican governing agenda. The author’s robust survey data, for example, make clear that there was, by Obama’s second term in office, a vanishingly small distance between Tea Party and mainstream conservative renditions of the opportunities and threats facing the American nation. And now, in the time of Donald Trump’s dominance of American conservatism, this late Obama-era convergence reads as prologue; for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda mimics in both form and substance the desires expressed by Deckman’s Mama Grizzly subjects to “take their country back.” All of this is to say that the book is a welcome, frequently insightful account of contemporary American conservatism – one that is, on its own terms, very successful.
If, however, the reader seeks to push deeper into the meanings of Tea Party women’s activism—into the cultural roots from which their celebrated Mama Grizzly identities emerge—matters are less clear. It is ironic in this regard that one of the great strengths of the book, that it presents the convictions of its subjects without judgment, emerges also as an outer limit on its intellectual reach. Let me be clear: While I do not wish to criticize Deckman for not writing an analysis that she did not intend to write, I do think it fair to lament some potential missed opportunities and connections.
Indeed, not interrogating the deep meanings that are transmitted in Mama Grizzly beliefs leaves Tea Party Women unfortunately silent when confronted with either charged emotional claims (of which Deckman’s subjects offer many) or, on occasion, with Mama Grizzly claims that are wildly inaccurate or at least unverifiable. Consider, for example, the disturbing claim made by Tami Nantz (a prominent Tea Party leader) that Obama-era policies that were intended to promote equal pay for women and protect women’s reproductive health were actually efforts to “make women a slave to the almighty government plantation” (p. 133). Nantz’s formulation inverts American history by converting the first black American president into a plantation owner and slaveholder. It draws emotional power from deep-seated, widely shared white nightmares of black sexual domination of white women (as emerged, for example, in the noxious black rapist fantasies of post–Civil War “redemption” narratives) and thus embeds Tea Party politics within a retrograde, countersubversive vision of American race relations that is itself an artifact of centuries of white male supremacy (see, for example, Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, 1987).
No wonder, then, that other analyses of the Tea Party have located the movement’s propulsive thrust in the sort of paranoid reactions to an increasingly multicultural America that Nantz’s claims exemplify (e.g., Meghan A. Burke, Race, Gender, and Class in the Tea Party, 2016). But Tea Party Women leaves Nantz’s claim (as it does many other dubious and objectionable claims offered by Mama Grizzlies) unproblematized. Its cultural resonance and political impact unexplored, Nantz’s statement is presented as simply an expression of given beliefs—as rhetoric unconnected to the ongoing asymmetrical power relations that it at once evokes and justifies. But given the basic correspondence between Tea Party renditions of the American nation and the form and content of Trump-era conservatism, a great deal of which revolves around containing the alleged threats presented by people of color, allowing such claims to go unscrutinized feels like a lost opportunity.
Similarly, the reader frequently comes across claims of fact made by Tea Party women leaders, such as Colleen Holcomb, that are either puzzling (“[I]n order for government to grow, families have to shrink [p. 123]” or both puzzling and unverifiable (marriage “limits the need for things like special education [p. 124]”). None of these claims are verified, or even complicated. They are, again, simply treated as given beliefs. But one could instead see them as the exact sorts of wild conjectures that regularly appear as social media memes, or on Facebook or radio programs such as Infowars, and which fuel our contemporary “post-truth” political world—a world that turns out to be especially congenial to the “Make America Great Again” program of a president whose endorsement of Tea Party politics provided the kindling for his improbable runs, first to the Republican Party’s presidential nomination and then to the White House itself. The book, so good at tracing the tightening gap between Tea Party and mainstream Republican politics, tends to miss these potential moments of illumination.
In this regard, it is worth considering how Mama Grizzlies might be transforming contemporary Republican politics at a subterranean, semiconscious level— at a level, I have argued, that is mostly unexplored by the author. Take, for example, the evolving Republican position on the #MeToo movement’s exposition of how sexual harassment and assault impact the life chances of American women. To be clear, this book was published in 2016, well before #MeToo emerged. Tea Party Women obviously could not have anticipated either the movement’s prominence or its reverberating impacts on the conduct of American politics. But it is intriguing to wonder if the presence of Mama Grizzlies might be altering at a granular level the conventional Republican position on sexual harassment and assault.
Indeed, while most prominent Republicans (including Trump) have responded to #MeToo revelations in the customary way (by transforming the perpetrator into an [allegedly] wrongly accused victim and the actual victim into an unjust persecutor), there are signs of dissonance. Arguably the highest-profile recent instance of #MeToo politics—the battle over the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination—also featured a growing number of prominent Republicans proclaiming the truthfulness of the accounts of both the nominee and his accuser. Are these professed beliefs in the veracity of victim accounts (even if the professions are accompanied by implausible beliefs in the continued innocence of the accused) somehow related to the prominence of Tea Party women in contemporary Republican politics? Might there be a link between Mama Grizzly critiques of the cloistered, “old boys network” of establishment Republican politics and a newly-sincere acknowledgment among at least some prominent Republicans of the ubiquity of sexual harassment and assault and its impacts on the life chances of American women? If so, could there be a role for Mama Grizzlies to play in the unsettling of American gender hierarchies after all? Or is such support for female victims simply expedient rhetorical cover for a compromised nominee, rather than indicative of weakening conservative commitments to male supremacy? These (and many others) are the sorts of questions that might be fruitfully pursued by an analysis that interrogates the deep cultural commitments that are embedded in Mama Grizzly beliefs.
I raise these issues not so much to criticize Tea Party Women but rather to convey just how intellectually provocative it is. For, as I have indicated, the book realizes its stated objectives admirably, even as it stirs in readers a desire to explore even further. Deckman has written an important book that spotlights activists whose influence, both on the Republican Party and on American politics writ large, has been, if anything, understated. Her work should be read and engaged by all serious students and scholars of contemporary American politics.
