Talk:Tea Party movement

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 Definition A loose affiliation of various groups and individuals, typically strongly fiscally and often socially conservative, involved in the restructuring of the U.S. political right; especially critical of tax increases and increases in government spending. [d] [e]
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 Workgroup category Politics [Categories OK]
 Subgroup category:  American politics since 1945
 Talk Archive 1, 2, 3, 4  English language variant American English

I've archived the full page to Archive 3 for those interested. I chose to move the entire contents of the page in order to move the history of the discussion intact with the page. If there are discussions that need to return, please feel absolutely free to copy and paste them here. D. Matt Innis 00:30, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Starting discussion for merge

Formation

I have copied Mary's three sections on particular organizations into this article. As I mentioned above, though, we need to figure out the timeline of the very first organization, and probably go back to put precise dates on existing text (e.g., Armey, AFP). We will need, I'm sure, some flow editing in this section. Howard C. Berkowitz 21:55, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Exact dates added to beginning, establishing there were rallies well before the Tax Day protest. Did these, however, use the term "Tea Party" at the time? Howard C. Berkowitz 04:06, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Demographics and positioning

Since it has more recent data, I merged Mary's entire section on demographics, to appear before the Positioning section. From the existing Positioning, I moved the earlier Rasmussen poll.

The Positioning section, then, can be the place for discussions of the TPM working within the Republican Party, running independent candidates, or forming a third party. Howard C. Berkowitz 21:44, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Advancing the article

One way the article can be improved, a little at a time, is to keep filling out the Related Articles entries, even as lemmas, or expanding some of the topics there into full articles. In particular, the background of activists, candidates, and funders are important.

It would be nice, indeed, if the people who were so concerned about the capitalization of the title might join in this effort, which can take as little or as much time as you want to give it. Howard C. Berkowitz 23:20, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

Those working on this article might be interested in a recent column by Chris Good of The Atlantic magazine, "A Guide to Tea Party Infighting," discussing various TP organizations and their differences: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/09/a-guide-to-tea-party-infighting/63389/ Bruce M. Tindall 19:37, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
Thanks. Clearly, that has to be a Good article. Howard C. Berkowitz 20:04, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

The Sunday NTY Public Editor on caps

from the Sunday NYT of October 10, 2010 -- the "Public Editor" is the equivalent of Ombudsman. One of the letters to him today, with the answer from someone at the NYT:

Party With a Capital P

Is there some good reason for capitalizing “tea party?” Is it an officially registered party? Isn’t this giving a small, disaffected group more importance than it deserves? Just as both sides of a debate are often given equal importance in your publication (whether deserved or not), this seems to favor a marginal and uninformed group and gives it much more ink than is justified.

Mardine Davis,Manhattan

Philip B. Corbett, standards editor: Uppercasing “Tea Party” isn’t a political judgment, or really even a substantive one — just a style decision, a question of clarity and appearance. In my view, it looks odd and distracting to refer to a lowercase “tea party.” As a common noun, a “tea party” is a gathering where tea is served, or something Alice would attend. And of course, the intended reference is to the Boston Tea Party, which we uppercase as a specific historical event.

Granted, it’s not a formal organization like the Republican Party. But I would think of “Tea Party” as more akin to, say, a nickname than to a generic, common noun. Or you could compare it to an artistic movement — we uppercase “Impressionism,” though it’s not a legal organization or even a proper noun, strictly speaking.

Some other news organizations put Tea Party in quotes, or use phrases like “so-called,” etc. I think uppercasing is the simplest stylistic solution.

Hayford Peirce 04:58, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

I concur with the NYT. 'Tea Party' is a proper name. In Britain, we referred to the previous government as 'New Labour' even though they had not officially changed their name from being 'the Labour Party'. Technically, perhaps we should have said 'new Labour'. Although not officially recognised as such, there was a pretty significant difference between New Labour and old Labour. A similar situation holds here I think: the Tea Party is a thing, although compared to an actual political party like the Republican or Democratic parties, it is a loose network or movement. Naming movements will always be a tough thing to do: think of 'the green movement', 'the animal rights movement', 'the civil rights movement' - all lower case. The difference is that with the Tea Partiers, there actually is some kind of loose coalition of brands which people within the label are policing the borders of. –Tom Morris 14:03, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Leftover extra definition page

Although "Tea Party Movement" with a capital M is now a redirect to the same phrase with a lower-case m, there is an orphaned "Tea Party Movement/Definition" (capital M) file that contains a different definition from the one with a lower-case m. The old, ungrammatical one (which begins "A loose affiliations" [sic]) shows up, for example, in the "tea party (disambiguation)" page because that page contains an r-template mention of upper-case M "Tea Party Movement." I'm not about to start poking at this hornets' nest, but those of you who've been working on the article may want to take some action to get rid of the old definition, or do something else with it. Bruce M. Tindall 16:07, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Deleted. D. Matt Innis 14:29, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Racism and Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights report

Allegations of racism are complex, and there really do seem to be competing views, some research-based. My personal feeling is that the movement contains racists, perhaps a higher proportion than other groups, but is not inherently racists. Speaking anecdotally, I have been shocked to find friends, whom I considered fair people, adopting unprecedentedly racist language, not from the Tea Party specifically but from the related Fox News, etc., barrage. The cited essay by Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Tendency in American Politics", should be prerequisite reading here.

On my initial reading of this highly publicized report, I find most significant not so much specific allegations of racism, but little-known or new information of personal and organizational relationships in a broad political spectrum that contains the Tea Party movement. Some -- ResistNet especially -- probably need graphics to be understandable, and my initial thought was their organizational diagram would need to be written on a Moebius strip. Many of these organizational topics, of course, deserve their own articles. At least lemmas on key individuals, which will help show relationships, also are useful.

I will be putting in some current political reporting, such as what I regard as an insightful one from Dana Milbank of the Washington Post -- often a humor writer but also occasionally a decent analyst -- that the report itself is reasonably objective, the way the NAACP introduced it, in his words, may be a politically motivated tactic to bring out some of their voters to the upcoming election.

If we can have multiple eyes on this, both for objectivity and to understand the complexity, it would be much appreciated. Please -- the content issues deserve attention without diversions to naming, structure, etc. I'd much rather have collaboration about "how should this citation be regarded" rather than how it should be capitalized.

I'll probably do some initial drawings in PowerPoint, editable source documents rather than slide shows. Unless anyone has a better place to put them -- they aren't "presentations" but simply things generated in PPT -- I'll have to do a little work on my FTP server. SlideShare doesn't seem the place for individual graphics, or even sets when they are not intended to be presentations. Suggestions? Howard C. Berkowitz 15:41, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Compliments to Howard

Thanks to Howard's tremendous and prolific edits this article has moved along nicely. He's done some outstanding work.Mary Ash 00:57, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Lots of help still needed. I changed the flow from strict chronological to have the 2010 elections come first, but it probably is approaching the time to spin off some material into a History article, and possiby 2010 campaign details. Howard C. Berkowitz 01:05, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Some left-wing criticism

How credible are claims like this that the whole thing is deliberate right-wing manipulation of media, rather than any sort of grassroots surge? Sandy Harris 05:13, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Both extremes, I believe, do this, although it's more notable on the right. Moveon.org had tried to present itself as grassroots. A good deal of its funding came from George Soros. J Street denied Soros contributions for some time, until tax records revealed them.
In this article and links from it, though, I think there are demonstrations of how true grassroots organizers, such as Keli Carender, were influenced or coopted by national interests. She speaks of support and training from Dick Armey's organization Freedomworks, which has received significant Koch support. In addition, Michelle Malkin was an early guide, and I'm not convinced that the "conservative" opinion broadcasters are necessarily as ideological as they like to suggest, but rather people who have better ratings through demagoguery.
Of course, in the view of some, I'm not qualified to have such opinions, since I was only a political party and campaign research director, but neither have a doctorate in political science nor was paid for my services. Howard C. Berkowitz 05:50, 29 March 2011 (UTC)