| This dissertation examines the significance of Local Tea Party Groups (LTPGs) in the success of the wider Tea Party Movement. I challenge a common description of the Tea Party as an elite-driven, pseudo-movement, maintaining it is best conceptualized as a movement network encompassing conservative, elite advocacy organizations, conservative media and hundreds of autonomous groups of "everyday" people (non-professional political actors). Extended ethnographic research reveals that LTPGs are vibrant, independent, local organizations, which, while they do constantly draw on nationally disseminated cultural images and discourses, are far from simple agents of the larger organizations and the media. I argue that the LTPGs create submerged spaces (Melucci 1989) where everyday Tea Party participants fashion powerful, action-oriented collective and personal political identities. These identities are forged in the context of cultural or figured worlds, "socially produced, culturally constituted activities'' (Holland et al 1998) in which people develop new understandings of self and others. As an interpretive frame, the Tea Party movement's figured world allows people to establish meaningful links between their own lives and concerns and the movement's goals and narratives, as well as develop outlooks on a variety of political issues. Collectively, the production and circulation of the figured world within LTPGs provides the basis for subjectivities that often support political activism. As sites of cultural production, LTPG memberships develop varied and innovative tactics and goals, while choosing different settings to engage in political contention. These activists often have dramatic effects upon their local political cultures---an arena frequently overlooked in national media coverage. My research consisted of 18 months of fieldwork among eight county-level Tea Party groups located in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. I conducted 59 semi-structured interviews and observed some 75 meetings and events. I monitored internet social networks and other websites, was a regular audience member of conservative talk radio and Fox News. I conclude that personal and internet-based social networks, media and elite organizations are co-creating new political subjects and demonstrate the importance of local, face-to-face political organizations in cultivating and animating these subjects. I suggest that localized political groups are important for enduring political transformations. |
