I am writing to you today to talk about the political Tea Party movement, a grassroots organization whose members are known to be highly conservative and strongly Republican. It is my understanding that you are less than fond of this group of people. Thus, the goal herein is to expound on the reasons behind the mentality and character of the Tea Party, and to assist you in understanding (and perhaps even scaling) emotional obstacles known as empathy walls.
Most Tea Party members are white, Christian, lower-middle class Southerners over forty-five years old. Given these statistics, it’s easy to develop a generalized impression of who the Tea Party is. For example, from this demographic you might infer that all advocates for the Tea Party are …show more content…
Given all of this, you might be wondering why you should give any thought or care to what they think or why they think that way, when they clearly don’t deserve to be listened to. To offer an answer, the truth is that most individuals are not nearly as one-dimensional or horrible as we sometimes might think they are. This goes for you, me, as well as for supporters of the Tea Party. The negative perception described above is only applicable to a small percentage of Tea Party members, for most of them don’t fall into the minority of discriminatory extremists. It’s easy to slap a stereotypical label on a group of people that you dislike—that way, you may distance yourself from them and judge them without having to acknowledge them as individuals. This is called an empathy wall, as coined by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her book, Strangers in their Own Land (2016), in which she investigates the emotions of the Tea Party. Hochschild describes an empathy wall as “an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile …show more content…
I don’t expect you to agree, but do you now see where they are coming from in wanting to lower taxes, in opposing central government, and in being so upset? It’s possible that you may see them as selfish or prejudiced for not subscribing to liberal ideologies. You’re probably not doing it consciously, but this is projecting your feeling rules onto someone. Another sociological term created by Hochschild, feeling rules are expectations imposed on us by society, or certain parts of society, telling us how we should feel about certain things. However, at times our true emotions do not align with what feeling rules say we should feel, which is called emotive dissonance. Conservatives often experience emotive dissonance as a result of liberals attempting to force their own feeling rules onto them—an example of this can be seen in the idea of political correctness. To you, being PC might only be common courtesy, so naturally you expect conservatives to extend that same courtesy. But to the people of the Tea Party movement, the concept of political correctness is restrictive and inhibiting, which can lead them to have emotive dissonance because there is a disconnect between their actual feelings and the feelings liberals think they should have. One man from the book, Lee Sherman, vehemently opposed the distribution of his tax dollars to people he perceived as lazy and undeserving. This goes against liberal
Most Tea Party members are white, Christian, lower-middle class Southerners over forty-five years old. Given these statistics, it’s easy to develop a generalized impression of who the Tea Party is. For example, from this demographic you might infer that all advocates for the Tea Party are …show more content…
Given all of this, you might be wondering why you should give any thought or care to what they think or why they think that way, when they clearly don’t deserve to be listened to. To offer an answer, the truth is that most individuals are not nearly as one-dimensional or horrible as we sometimes might think they are. This goes for you, me, as well as for supporters of the Tea Party. The negative perception described above is only applicable to a small percentage of Tea Party members, for most of them don’t fall into the minority of discriminatory extremists. It’s easy to slap a stereotypical label on a group of people that you dislike—that way, you may distance yourself from them and judge them without having to acknowledge them as individuals. This is called an empathy wall, as coined by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her book, Strangers in their Own Land (2016), in which she investigates the emotions of the Tea Party. Hochschild describes an empathy wall as “an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile …show more content…
I don’t expect you to agree, but do you now see where they are coming from in wanting to lower taxes, in opposing central government, and in being so upset? It’s possible that you may see them as selfish or prejudiced for not subscribing to liberal ideologies. You’re probably not doing it consciously, but this is projecting your feeling rules onto someone. Another sociological term created by Hochschild, feeling rules are expectations imposed on us by society, or certain parts of society, telling us how we should feel about certain things. However, at times our true emotions do not align with what feeling rules say we should feel, which is called emotive dissonance. Conservatives often experience emotive dissonance as a result of liberals attempting to force their own feeling rules onto them—an example of this can be seen in the idea of political correctness. To you, being PC might only be common courtesy, so naturally you expect conservatives to extend that same courtesy. But to the people of the Tea Party movement, the concept of political correctness is restrictive and inhibiting, which can lead them to have emotive dissonance because there is a disconnect between their actual feelings and the feelings liberals think they should have. One man from the book, Lee Sherman, vehemently opposed the distribution of his tax dollars to people he perceived as lazy and undeserving. This goes against liberal