Listen to Vanessa Williamson’s latest interview, with Chris Lydon at Radio Open Source, on the Tea Party’s origins and future, and their role in the Republican presidential campaign of Mitt Romney.

The Tea Party was cited in today’s New York Times, as a part of an article about the study of the Occupy movement:

“Academics are used to taking forever, but we don’t have to,” said Theda Skocpol, a sociologist at Harvard and author, with Vanessa Williamson, of “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” a study of Occupy’s right-wing counterpart published in January.

That book, which combines in-depth interviews with quantitative analysis of the Tea Party movement, is a model for the kind of ambitious work that could emerge in studies of the Occupy movement, some social scientists say. But getting a handle on Occupy, with its amorphous structure and aims, could be more challenging, Ms. Skocpol said.

“The Tea Party from the beginning saw themselves as leveraging and changing the Republican Party, while the Occupy people are much more ambivalent,” she said. “That makes them harder to pin down.”

In today’s Guardian, Michael Cohen uses The Tea Party to explain Mitt Romney’s “anti-change agenda.”

Read between the lines and what Romney is really preaching is an ideology of preservatism and restoration – of nostalgia for “the way things used to be.”

The fears of progress and the fetishization of an ideal past that Romney is playing upon here go far beyond economic concerns, but to larger societal and cultural ones. In their recent book on the rise of the Tea Party movement, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, note that when interviewing Tea Party members, they rarely, if ever, heard about economic worries, but rather the “nightmare of societal decline”. According to Skocpol and Williamson, those they spoke with “worried that their children do not grow up fishing in local streams or know what it was like to feel safe walking home late at night.” Others “talked about swings being taken out of playgrounds to meet persnickety safety standards, and schoolchildren suspended for carrying pocketknives.” For them, a message of nostalgia is political catnip.

In Politico yesterday, Mike Males cited The Tea Party in his article on the political leanings of senior citizens:

Commentators like The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki, The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, The Nation’s Christopher Hayes and Harvard sociologists Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson (“The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism”) variously note an alarming trend: Today’s elderly regard themselves as uniquely entitled to government support and resent younger generations getting public benefits.

Skocpol and Williamson find the senior-dominated tea party (surveys peg the average age at around 60) is concerned less with “detailed policy logic” than with “societal oppositions.” True, “deserving” Americans, they find, are vowing to “take our country back” from the “undeserving” young, immigrant and poor. Older whites view “changing societal norms, greater ethnic diversity, international cosmopolitanism, and new redistributions aimed at younger citizens” as “a frightful threat,” Skocpol and Williamson write.

In his latest column, David Frum calls The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism “the best academic work on the Tea Party.”

A talk given by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson at Duke University will be aired this weekend on CSPAN’s Book TV. Tune in Sunday, April 8th at 7:45pm (ET)!

Van Jones’s new book, Rebuild the Dream, cites the New York Times article by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson:

Another racially tinged issue animates Tea Party members. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, authors of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, wrote in a December 2011 opinion piece for the New York Times:

Immigration was always a central, and sometimes the central, concern expressed by Tea Party activists, usually as a symbol of a broader national decline. Asked why she was a member of the movement, a woman from Virginia asked rhetorically, “What is going on in this country? What is going on with immigration?” A Tea Party leader in Massachusetts expressed her desire to stand on the border “with a gun” while an activist in Arizona jokingly referred to an immigration plan in the form of a “12 million passenger bus” to send unauthorized immigrants out of the United States.

In a survey of Tea Party members in Massachusetts we conducted, immigration was second only to deficits on the list of issues the party should address. Another man, after we interviewed him in the afternoon, took us aside at a meeting that evening to say specifically that he wished he had said more about immigration because that was really his top issue.

For those who worry that antipathy for immigration is fueled by racial animus against Latinos, such obsessions are very disturbing.

The book was released today.

In the new Washington Monthly, political scientist Steven Teles reviews The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, calling the book “a fascinating and clear-eyed analysis that lays out the decidedly imperfect understanding of the movement on both the right and the left.”