Christopher S. Parker

The Tea Party in the Age of Obama: Mainstream Conservatism or Out-Group Anxiety?

With its preference for small government and fiscal responsibility, the Tea Party movement claims to be conservative. Yet, their tactics and rhetoric belie this claim. The shrill attacks against Blacks, illegal immigrants, and gay rights are all consistent with conservatism, but suggesting that the president is a socialist bent on ruining the country, is beyond politics. This chapter shows that Richard Hofstadters thesis about the “paranoid style” of American politics helps characterize the Tea Partys pseudo-conservatism. Through a comprehensive analysis of qualitative interviews, content analysis and public opinion data, we find that Tea Party sympathizers are not mainstream conservatives, but rather, they hold a strong sense of out-group anxiety and a concern over the social and demographic changes in America.

Symbolic versus Blind Patriotism Distinction without Difference

Patriotism is an important predictor of political attitudes and preferences. Nevertheless, the complexity of patriotism remains unresolved, especially as it pertains to blind and symbolic patriotism. Symbolic patriotism represents a relatively abstract, affective attachment to the nation and its core values. Blind patriotism, in contrast, is more concrete, indexing uncritical support for national policies and practices. While the concepts appear analytically distinct, their political consequences are often similar, leading one to question whether the distinction is real. The results offer some support for maintaining conceptual differences between blind and symbolic patriotism.

Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South

Fighting for Democracy shows how the experiences of African American soldiers during World War II and the Korean War influenced many of them to challenge white supremacy in the South when they returned home. Focusing on the motivations of individual black veterans, this groundbreaking book explores the relationship between military service and political activism. Christopher Parker draws on unique sources of evidence, including interviews and survey data, to illustrate how and why black servicemen who fought for their country in wartime returned to America prepared to fight for their own equality.

When Politics Becomes Protest: Black Veterans and Political Activism in the Postwar South

Recent narratives of the civil rights movement document black veterans’ contributions to the movements success, often attributing their efforts to their military experience. While this attribution makes sense intuitively, alternative explanations for black veterans’ mobilization are not fully explored in existing work. For instance, black veterans were often among the most active members in many of the civil rights organizations from which insurgency was launched. Therefore, we cannot rule out the possibility that black civic institutions, not military service per se, drove black veterans’ activism. Furthermore, if military service did lead to political activism, we lack a microlevel mechanism to explain the means by which it did so. In this article, I show that military service did motivate black veterans’ activism independent of their membership in black civic institutions or feelings of group solidarity and theorize a mechanism by which it did so.

A BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE

Race and patriotism were recurring themes during the 2008 presidential campaign that were used to highlight differences between Barack Obama and his opponents. Yet we know little about how racism and patriotism ultimately affected support for Obama among Whites. Appeals to working-class Whites, a lot of which were thinly veiled allusions to Obamas race and perceived lack of patriotism, also figured prominently in the campaign. Accordingly, this paper explores how racism and patriotism shaped support for Obama, as well as the extent to which the effect of each is moderated by class. We find that rising symbolic racism dampened his support among Whites, as did patriotism. Moreover, we find the effects of patriotism on support for Obama were contingent upon class.

New Weapons for Old Problems: Conventional Proliferation and Military Effectiveness in Developing States

I T h e relative amity that characterizes relations among industrialized states suggests that the prospects for conflict among them are becoming increasingly remote. While perhaps a valid claim in describing the nature of relationships among Western democracies and other states in the core, it is not an accurate account of interstate relations in the developing world.’ No longer tethered to their superpower patrons, developing states are now free to seek redress from regional rivals over long-simmering disputes once frozen by the ideological battle between East and West. For this reason, competition-both for security and for regional hegemony-has again become a salient issue, reifying the realist paradigm in regional security systems.’ Hastening the resuscitation of realism within regional security systems, and increasing the potential for instability in developing regions, is the ease with which state-of-the-art conventional weapons may now be acq~i red .~ With market forces having been unleashed on the interna-