Is the Tea Party Libertarian, Authoritarian, or Something Else?

Jonathan Havercroft and Justin Murphy

Social Science Quarterly, 2018, vol. 99, issue 3, 1021-1037

Abstract: Objective Research on the Tea Party finds that both libertarian and authoritarian attitudes drive support for this movement, but political scientists lack a satisfactory explanation of this contradiction. Methods Factor analysis of nine attitudes from the 2012 American National Election Study is used to explore whether statism and moral traditionalism are intercorrelated on a dimension distinct from attitudes toward government; regression analysis is used to test if these distinct dimensions help to explain support for the Tea Party. Results Controlling for several competing explanations, the multiplicative interaction of anti‐government and morally statist ideological factors is shown to be a predictor of Tea Party support, especially among conservatives. Conclusion Our results suggest the Tea Party movement is in part driven by what Nietzsche called “misarchism,” an ideological mixture of moralism, statism, and libertarianism he first observed in Herbert Spencer.

Date: 2018
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