Bookstores are filled these days with volumes trying to explain how Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. Most attribute his victory to proximate or idiosyncratic factors like FBI Director James Comey’s waffling on the Hillary Clinton email investigation, Russian meddling in the election, Trump’s questionable truthfulness, and Clinton’s flawed campaign strategy. Few explore the deeper, long-term trends that helped elevate Trump to the White House. Bryan Gervais and Irwin Morris’s Reactionary Republicanism helps fill that gap by examining how Tea Party influence in the House of Representatives helped pave the way for Trump’s victory.
The authors begin by distinguishing two important types of Tea Party influence among Republicans in the 112th and 113th Congresses. One is the degree to which legislators “attached” themselves to the Tea Party movement by joining the Tea Party Caucus (or, after its demise, the Liberty or Freedom Caucuses), attending Tea Party rallies, or being associated with the movement by the media or their own social media posts. The other type is the degree to which legislators received “support” from Tea Party organizations like Freedom Works in the form of endorsements, campaign contributions, or other kinds of assistance. With this in mind, Gervais and Morris identify four types of congressional Republicans: those with both attachment and support; those with one or the other but not both; and those with neither. They use this typology to tackle an array of questions about the Tea Party’s influence in the House and beyond through quantitative analyses based on several well-known data sets plus new data they collected from legislators’ Twitter accounts and conventional media sources.
The authors’ findings are important and sometimes contrary to conventional wisdom. It turns out, for example, that using these criteria, representatives associated with the Tea Party are not a small minority in the House. Furthermore, the degree of either Tea Party attachment or support varied depending on the racial, ethnic, economic, and political profiles of a legislator’s district. It also varied depending on how fiscally, racially and socially conservative the legislator was. Beyond that, there was little statistical evidence that Tea Party Republicans were any less active or effective than non–Tea Party Republicans in sponsoring successful legislation in the House. Finally, legislators attached to the Tea Party were more likely to use angry, sad, antideliberative, and uncivil rhetoric in their social media posts than were non–Tea Party Republicans. The statistical effects in the authors’ models were often small, but as they point out, sometimes small effects can make a big difference between winning or losing.
Along these lines, Gervais and Morris’s most striking argument, which they first broach about two-thirds of the way through the book, is that the Tea Party’s emergence in the House helped pave the way for Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency. Three things were at work.
First, Tea Party rhetoric primed white working-class Republicans for Trump’s inflammatory language during the 2016 presidential campaign. How do we know? Because although Trump’s campaign rhetoric was more extreme and frequent, there were clear stylistic and thematic similarities between his rhetoric and the rhetoric of House Tea Party Republicans in the years just before Trump announced his candidacy in 2015. Technology was crucial here. Voters were more likely to support Trump if their representatives were already expressing high levels of incivility on Twitter. The use of social media like Twitter first became commonplace in politics in the 112th Congress, enabling legislators to engage the public directly and daily, whereas before that they depended on traditional media, which filtered their messaging and reported it less frequently. The authors do not estimate how many voters were exposed to this messaging. But they conclude that incivility in American political rhetoric is now institutionalized and a more serious threat to government dysfunction and gridlock than ever before.
Second, during the Republican primaries, the Tea Party’s support was split, particularly between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, thus affording Trump an opening because Republican Party elites could not coordinate on a single candidate of their choice. Put differently, because the party elites were divided, Donald Trump conquered. Third, during the general election, voters whose representatives were attached to the Tea Party were more likely to go for Trump than for Clinton. Again, these effects were small statistically but mattered a lot in a very close race.
One important take-away is that voters who are engaged with Twitter (and perhaps other social media) seem more susceptible to the influence of the rhetoric of incivility than voters who are not engaged. Another take-away is that Tea Party rhetoric works. Uncivil, uncompromising, and emotional claims about the unfairness and ineptitude of government, as well as racially and ethnically charged rhetoric, have become particularly powerful weapons in American politics. The authors warn that this sort of rhetoric can energize fringe groups, trigger violence, and exacerbate political polarization and divisiveness. We have seen this recently in Europe as well as the United States.
The authors also argue that, ironically, the institutionalization of incivility in rhetoric by the Tea Party has contributed to increasing intransigence, gridlock, and lack of compromise in Congress—precisely the dysfunctional government that Tea Party people complained about to begin with. Thus, Republicans contributed to one of the biggest problems they set out to correct. Party leaders also lost control of the party itself.
What are we to make of all this? This is a book that gets deep into the weeds through detailed statistical analysis of one trend underlying Trump’s victory. Those readers who are averse to detailed methodological discussion and statistical analyses will probably not find it appealing. But those with solid methodological chops and an interest in the minutiae of recent congressional politics will love it. So, too, will scholars interested in the role that ideas, rhetoric, and discourse play in politics, because the book provides evidence that these things can affect elections and the legislative process. Of course, establishing clear connections between rhetoric like this and political outcomes is a very tricky business. And there was a lot more than just Tea Party influence and rhetorical trends that paved the way for Trump’s victory in 2016. So the book necessarily sacrifices breadth for depth. The authors acknowledge this, particularly insofar as racist and anti-immigrant attitudes had significant effects in some of their statistical models. But I cannot imagine a much more detailed analysis of the issues the authors chose to address.
That said, it seems to me that the nasty rhetorical turn in congressional politics dates at least as far back as the 1994 Gingrich revolution, when Republicans regained control of the House for the first time in decades, led by Newt Gingrich and his lieutenants whose language was often unusually blistering for its time. I understand that the 112th Congress was the first whose members took to social media, but that does not mean this was the beginning of a new wave of angry, anxious, or sad rhetoric in modern American politics. An even more cynical view would be that the rise of incivility in modern political rhetoric stretched back even farther among Republicans, at least to the emergence of the racist Southern Strategy and dog-whistle politics of the 1960s and 1970s.
One frustrating aspect of the book is that firm explanations of the causal mechanisms lying behind the statistical associations are often either missing or inconclusive. For instance, why did Tea Party organizations tend to support some legislators but not others, and why did some legislators but not others attach themselves to the Tea Party? It really is not clear. Of course, no method is perfect, and establishing causality is a well-known problem in large-n statistical analyses like this one. Without taking anything away from the authors’ accomplishments here, I hope that others will dig into some of their tentative explanations through interviews, which could better answer questions of causality. The authors’ occasional reference to books like Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land (2016) help, but much more work is still necessary.
I also wondered about the Democratic side of the story. Given that national politics has become so polarized and acrimonious, I wondered if the Democrats had also become more uncivil in their rhetoric, and if so, whether it had become as bad as the Republicans’. The authors occasionally wonder, too (p. 230). And what about the Senate? Given what is known about the Republican leadership’s obstructionist strategies during the Obama years, I could not help but wonder whether there were growing Tea Party effects there as well. Of course, answering these questions would have required a much longer—or a second—book. But I hope others will try to answer some of these questions someday.
Overall, then, Reactionary Republicanism is an excellent treatment of the Tea Party’s rising influence in Congress and the 2016 presidential election—one important trend among many underlying Trump’s victory. It is part of a complex story that social scientists will be unpacking for many years to come.
