This is the first in a series of articles on the question, raised most publicly by Patrick Buchanan, whether the Tea Party movement nurtures white consciousness and unity and will become the political basis for whites as a people.
Unlike Pat Buchanan, I do not think the Tea Party movement marks the emergence of a new, white ethnonationalism. At the end of his recent article on the subject, Buchanan himself backs away from this prediction, conceding that the conflict that gave rise to the movement “is not so much racial as it is cultural, political and tribal.” The politicians Tea Partiers admire most are Sarah Palin, who has the racial consciousness of a fried egg, and Ron Paul, who flirted with heterodoxy years ago, but now claims to have put all that behind him.
The racial significance of attending a Tea Party is not much different from going to the opera or a Renaissance festival: Virtually everyone there is white, and most like it that way but would never admit it -- not even to themselves. Tea parties, just like opera companies, fret over their whiteness and claim to want to cure it.
Other more promising movements have come and gone without giving rise to ethno-nationalism. The militias and the Minuteman border patrols were far more likely than Tea Parties to attract racial free thinkers, but they never talked about race. Their leaders threw out anyone who did.
