Tea Party Movement

Grassroots Movement or Not

The Tea Party is not a monolithic group. Instead, it consists of many groups that are all loosely organized under the umbrella that is called the Tea Party. Of these, the three largest ones are the Tea Party Express, the Tea Party Patriots, and the Tea Party Nation. However, The Tea Party has received help from groups such as Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, which are national 501 C4 groups often aligned with highly conservative elements of the Republican Party and among whose principal funders are Charles and David Koch, who have given large amounts of money to conservative and libertarian causes. There has also been criticism of the extensive coverage, amounting to promotion, of certain Tea Party events by Fox News. Many Democrats, inside and outside of Congress, have called the Tea Party an arm of the Republican Party and an “Astroturf group,” referring to a trade name for artificial grass.

The Tea Party and Social Deviance

The pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim, writing about the legitimate functions of deviance, argued that social deviance in the form of collective action may be necessary to bring about change in a society. The Tea Party used forms of social deviance by disrupting town hall meetings and created collective action in response to the health care reform fight. Many in the Tea Party vented their frustrations with high government spending and professed a belief that government was attempting to do too much in U.S. society. Many may have been giving voice to frustrations with the economic downturn that occurred in 2007 and 2008. As Robert Merton would argue, one of the primary goals of an individual in our society is to accumulate material wealth; because of the economic downturn, many people could not climb the economic ladder or fell to the bottom. This created a strain within society between people's goals and the legitimate means of attaining those goals. Many in the Tea Party view the use of many governmental services as an illegitimate means of attaining wealth or as a threat to their own wealth through taxation; thus, the desire to counteract these practices was the driving force behind the formation of the party.

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