we are very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning doug howell and any newcomer doug how and any newcomer are with the sierra club and they are in this morning to talk about the serious club's p s e campaign doug and any thank you very much for both coming and spending time with us this morning q thank you so start out tell us tell us a bit about the sierra club and how you both got involved in the club and this campaign and  let's see i have always been really concerned and connected with the environment and i got a chance to go visit the the wild horse wind farm me about the campaign and i i was really wanting to do something to help with climate change at the time and i wanted something tangible to work on  d i had looked at other other possibilities and this was the first real tangible very meaningful campaign to work on and i just felt like i wanted to be a part of it and of the volunteer driven nature of the campaign and just to clarify when we say coal free p s c that means puget sound energy right that is the target of this campaign and the campaign is about the coal plant that they own in far eastern colstrip montana and one thing i'd like to say about this campaign right away which is what ne was referring to the problem is the coal plant but the solutions are so exciting once we can get rid of this barrier to clean energy called coal the universe of clean energy opportunities that will expand here in washington state are amazing i mean we're talking about thousands maybe tens of thousands of new jobs that can come from transitioning off dirty old coal and so we want the campaign to be about solutions we organize this outing to seize wind farms to show that these very real solutions were there and and i think that that's part of what got any hooked on the campaign and annie and we have a north east west and south and that's why it's so important for young people like any to be be here today because they reflect what this campaign's about seriously exciting movement and since we're on the outings subject there is another and again p s e is for puget sound energy all right so talk more about this campaign why focus on this particular facility aren't there other coal plants within washington state and oregon well taking it from the big picture and working our way down there are over five hundred coal plants across the united states and here in the northwest we have three major ones the the one and only coal plant in oregon in boardman is now slated to retire  the one and only coal plant here in washington state trans ulta is now slated to retire in the last of the major coal plants that services the northwest in washington in particular is coal strip there are six owners for  sound energy is the single largest owner of colstrip which is why we are focused on puget sound energy and this coal plant is a monster if you thought trans alter was big which it was the single largest source of greenhouse gases in washington is fifty percent bigger coal strip has more greenhouse gas emissions or as much as greenhouse gas emissions as three million cars that's that's half of all passenger cars in washington state can you imagine if we were able to take off half of all passenger cars in washington state off the road that's what transitioning this dirty old coal plant into clean energy can do for greenhouse gas emissions that's how big it is and just to give you a sense of scale if i can first will focus on the problem and then we can focus on the solution but just to get a sense of magnitude here this coal plant is so big that it's emissions of nitrogen oxide which cause haze and other health problems it produces more nitrogen oxide that it produces twice as much nitrogen oxide as the next nine largest polluters in montana combined it produces more sulfur dioxide that causes acid rain then all of the next nine largest polluters combined in montana it's huge it has over eight hundred acres of toxic coal ash waste ponds all those bad chemicals they take out of the smoke stacks and all those nasty heavy metals left in the bottom of the boilers they get collected and they get dumped in these waste ponds that are full of water that leak into the groundwater they now have eight hundred acres of toxic coal ponds on site that are leaking into the groundwater that the ranchers out there have been fighting against for forty years so this thing is big bad and dirty and as soon as we transition off this dirty old coal plant the new clean energy jobs for washington state will just be amazing so that's that's really the question for everybody do we want to keep investing in this dirty old coal plant or do we want to redirect that millions and hundreds of millions of dollars here in washington state for clean energy what will become of those responds what's the plan for those that's a very good question there they are required under most laws across the country to remediate  all of the damage that they've done in that they've done and restore restore the health of the ecosystem back to where it was and when you are leaking toxic chemicals like mercury in arsenic into the groundwater from all the camels that are leaking in there and it's not just from the plant but it's from the neighboring mine the mine that feeds the plant is next door it's got over eighty thousand acres of strip mine and that also is leaking into the groundwater so between the plant and the mine the ranchers have just been up in arms about this plant in the toxic waste they deal with for over forty years so eighty thousand acres plus eight hundred acres of earths waste who knows and then the plan itself which is all this how much does it emit into the air i don't have the actual ton figure in front of me we might have it here within some of our facts use that we brought with us but it is clearly one of the largest polluters of nitrogen in the entire northwest in fact just on your show the previous show just now you were had an interview with the national parks conservation association that is one of our partners and they are very active in protecting our national parks they do an awesome job and the reason they are partnering with with us in our in our fight to transition coal strip off of coal is because the massive nitrogen emissions that pollute the national parks including yellowstone and so we have joined with national parks conservation association unfortunately we had to do it in a lawsuit because the standards that they're currently requiring are so insufficient to protect the national parks that we now have to seek enforcement in the court of law to make sure that they reeled back in their massive amount of nitrogen yes so so the integrated resource plan is where they they plan for the next twenty years and how they're going to where they're going to get their power and away their money will be spent they make a lot of amazing charts and things and in their plan they don't really have any more renewables it's and they they're still investing in coal for the next twenty years even though they know that coal is dying out so to me that doesn't make any sense and seems like a bad investments and right now we have have a really amazing opportunity to  give public comments to in transportation commission in washington and that is extremely powerful because they oversee our rates as well as overseeing  how p s e can spend their money so they can tell p s c you can't spend any more money to invest in your coal plants but you can spend money in these are new bills these cleaner knoebels it is it is a threshold moment it's of kind of a funny process the way we regulate electric utilities when it comes to big capital expenses like whether they're going to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars to prop up this dirty old coal plant or they're going to be redirecting that the only chance that you can proactively weigh in is in this integrated resource plan and if people don't express their opinions now the next thing that happens is p f c has to choose to spend money or not and then come back and ask to be reimbursed so what we don't want is we don't want puget sound energy spending fifty million dollars to try to take care of their nitrogen problems and then asked repairs to pay for it and then have to spend another fifty million to clean up their sulfur problems and a hundred million to clean up their dirty coal ash problem and fifty more million because they have increasing mining costs and air quality violations that they're now in court over and they could keep coming back and coming back and go down the slippery slope and keep asking for reimbursement and the only way you head that off is right now yeah and that's actually our money it's rate payers money that they're spending and the bulk of  energy what's their their coverage i know i am currently one of their customers oh right on yeah but i mean in terms of how many people do they you know from both canada down here i mean customers so much probably yeah lot of people who are listening now are the runs from the peninsula over tickets at county into ellensburg part of ellensburg but not the city and down to i think olympia and up past bellingham so it's a really large is most of washington i think but not seattle seattle is all it's like i don't know it in that sense you have it's got really a majority of western washington except for seattle and  public utilities up in everett in tacoma but it really outside of that and if you get really far south you have different entities but it really covers most of western washington and it is by far the largest utility in washington state and it does cover seattle in terms of if you get gas yes yes it's got a million three customers one point three million all told if you include all the gas company all the gas customers like here we are in so you know what our gas customers are sticking with the integrated resource plan so this was a this took them did it take them several years to come up with this i mean it's a twenty year plan and they they redo it every twenty years so every two years they actually do ok so was there a public input process while they were making this plan because i understand they just came out with a finalized version right yeah yeah anybody could go i actually went to one meeting and where do you think in your questions and comments during that yeah we could ask questions and they're very very nice people at p s c it is a two year process and and her husband john also came in other volunteers came to actually quite a few volunteers came to observe and participate we had a core staff that followed they are a good utility with a really bad coal problem and there's a lot of really good people there and part of the evidence of how open they've been in this process is that when we started this process they said keeping the coal plant was going to be worth a benefit of two hundred fifty million dollars a year but we said what about your coal ash what about yourself or what about your nitrogen what about your increasing mining cost what about carbon dioxide greenhouse gases and what happened was in the course of this year plus process that number came down and came lower and lower and lower and lower and now it's down to about one hundred and thirty million dollars a year benefit that sounds like a lot in the utility world it is not it's not a lot of money compared to the hundreds of millions we're sending out of state to create a lot of pollution but what it really means is this is about a very small rate impact that you would see with such a huge utility and so this number was cut down nearly in half but it doesn't include major liabilities still they haven't fully accounted for the coal ash problems they haven't fully accounted for increasing mining costs they certainly haven't caused created accountability for both their sulfur and nitrogen emissions and most notably in their final recommendation they say for the next twenty years they will not have to be accountable for any of their greenhouse gas emissions carbon dioxide creating global warming which is really crazy everybody believes is going to be regulated in the next twenty years especially since that president obama's last speech on climate change he said that there would be for sure a cost on carbon for coal plants and if he couldn't get it passed by congress he  was in his power to make it happen i'm self so it's really phenomenal that you when you see these numbers coming down about the benefit and really they're almost disappearing into the little bit of benefit that they say is still there if you accounted for these remaining problems like carbon dioxide in fact it's not an economic benefit to keep this plant so we we have to speak up now we have to make sure that our rate payers money isn't going to keep being sunk into this dirty old clunker and literally to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars rather than redirecting that money right here for clean energy clean energy jobs with efficiency renewables like solar and wind we can do so helens is blowing up so if close drip gets closed it's like to mt st helens is not blowing up every year that's good i like that video so if puget sound energy pulls out it investments in this facility you believe it would shut down well it is the single largest individual owner there are four units at the plant the two older units puget sound energy owns half of those and then they own twenty five percent of the two younger units i think those older units are going to go relatively soon the other owner of those older two units is a group called pennsylvania power and light on tanna they want to sell they want to get out they could they realize now they can't compete in the market with that dirty old plant and they want to sell so you know we're really seeing some pretty clear directional signals we saw plan coming out of portland general electric another one of the owners that now is anticipating it you know over the next i think it was fifteen twenty years that they think that the colstrip plant is going to retire as well so what we're seeing now is a lot of these coal plant owners believe that their plant is going to go away in fact the vice president of corporate affairs for puget sound energy said in a very large public forum in the limpia that coal is a dead end so you know we we are seeing some pretty powerful statements the governor would like to see washington state free king county executive and five mayors around king county recently submitted their letter to the utilities commission asking puget sound energy to be much more accountable for in particular their greenhouse gas emissions associated with th we're seeing some big powerful voices moving towards the transition of coal including puget sound energy so it's rather kind of perplexing with all including their own staff saying coal is a dead end you know why would we be on the the precipice of maybe investing hundreds of millions of additional dollars into this dirty old coal plant i don't understand the yes so king county the city of is the quad kirkland rent and redmond all signed on to this really amazing comment letter which was submitted to the you tell us and transportation commission which we call the u t c and we're also we have a really great letter a business letter that c customer businesses can sign on to and we would love to get more businesses to sign on to the letter which would be it's a really easy letter to sign on to and then they get this really great little washington businesses for clean energy future poster and they were also signing individual individuals can make comments as well and we have comment and find out ways to get in touch with us to volunteer and and then how else oh and you go directly to the utilities and transportation commission website and comment there you just go two zero seven six seven and so if you want to make it easy you can just the search engine that's right on their home page that takes you right to the comments section but we also would encourage you to to check our website get involved join in any in the huge crew that we have that's doing our work that's really raising the profile of this issue across all of western washington by going to our website in signing on to our other petition that we have to the chairman of the board for puget sound energy and again that is co free p s c dot au argy what's the what's the window for getting comments to you too soon very soon there is a hard and fast deadline which is coming up in about a week  where i shouldn't say hard and fast in fact we're hoping that the utilities commission is going to continue to be willing to accept comments passed this next week so you do want to move quickly and if you happen to go a little more than a week we hope that's ok and we hope the utilities commission will continue to listen to customers that want to speak out but for sure they have weak yes yes they do all right and assuming that puget sound energy pulls out of this investment wouldn't still be somewhat responsible for the waste pools in the pollution there the clean that up yes and you know one of the things that's really critical about this transition is that you not only you have to find you know the replacement energy but you've also got to clean up the mess behind and that means customers we have to pay for that too it's really not fair that we would benefit from an energy source and then leave a mass form of toxic soup behind and so if they pull up and go away and those ranchers out there that have been there for over one hundred years that they've got this toxic waste pool that they've got to live with that's infecting their groundwater so one of the commitments that's absolutely vital from puget sound energy and the other owners is to commit to fully cleaning up that site and restore it to the to how it was before the plant got there so and how much energy does the plant put out you have a sense for that yes it's roughly two thousand one hundred megawatts and while what's that well that's that's roughly twice the the amount of energy that the entire city of seattle would need now puget has roughly a third of that's that's about seven hundred megawatts that's a lot of power and so the plant itself is really about twice the size of what seattle would need and in the context of large coal plants it's one of the largest in the west in fact in two thousand and eleven was the most recent statistic and we'll get the two thousand and twelve statistics soon e p a rated the colstrip coal plant as the number one greenhouse gas polluter in the entire west so this thing is a monster if you want to know how big it is it's huge it's big and i think that if you want to help with climate change which i know a lot of people do and it's very empowering to get involved with something this are you know you're making a big difference and it makes me feel a lot lighter and happier and this is a really great campaign in my opinion the most important campaign to get involved with right now you know i love that you know i love about that is that for those of us who have been fighting climate change for so long and unfortunately we've some we've seen some pretty big failures at the federal level when we couldn't pass the ca trade we try to similar effort here in washington state and it didn't pass and we need a system solution to this system problem and we don't have it yet but now the obama administration is doing that direction or hopeful that the governor will be able to move that direction in the absence of having a system answer you've got to go after these big bad polluters wanted time and there is no bigger climate polluter than colstrip in the entire northwest so if you want to do something meaningful about climate change get on board with this campaign help us transition this dirty old coal plant to cleaner forms of energy so we can get those good jobs right here in washington state and i would imagine some of the jobs could go to montana that will be losing whatever number of jobs they've got from this plant in fact montana has incredible wind resources and that they the utilities own this utility line that goes from eastern montana colstrip coming all the way into the bonneville power service territory that helps control the electricity grid that utility line that they own is ripe for wind development it's got some of the most robust what we call wind regimes in the entire west and so people actually call that the superhighway of electricity transmission quarter so the hope is in the long run that so much of that wind that is right in montana can in fact be developed and we can use that transmission line to bring in some clean energy so you know can you only get about three minutes left can you talk about what the potential replacements for the school plant would be the biggest concern right now is that it would be dominated by natural gas so now the focus of this campaign is not just about retiring which we're really confident is going to happen this plant will retire we believe fairly soon so now we want to make sure that the replacement isn't dominated by natural gas and we get much more wind and solar and energy efficiency we have unlimited resources on what i should say only on limited but we have about five thousand m of wind that we could develop we have an almost unlimited amount of so that we could develop an energy efficiency we can do so much more with energy efficiency so this solutions abound and it really right now coal is the barrier to those solutions so with the faster we can do this transition the better yeah there's a lot of great studies out there that show that we can get over half the world's power from wind power  then you know as extremely large substantially very large amount from solar i'm not sure what the the number is and then of course we have great hydro electric here yeah and i think the big hurdle right now is being  window and how they can get involved in this issue well you you want to get your comments in as soon as you can if you can get your comments in within this week and a couple of things to say i would i would really focus on this why are we going to double down on coal invest in that for the next twenty years that makes no sense and why in the final recommendation for puget did they not expect that they would have to be accountable for their climate pollution those are two of the biggest agree just gaps in their analysis and that's what everybody should be commenting on so come to our website if you want to know more that's coal free p s c dot o r g and for the utilities commission well when they do you can go  to the washington utilities and transportation commission website and comment there and if you don't remember the docket number you can also give them an e mail and i'm feeling compelled to give my own e mail any amount of work people can do going to do this from home and yeah they could do it from home i could give them some just a few comment cards and they could go out and get their friends and family and there's lots of groups forming and there's many many ways to get engaged in many activities to be done in fact it with a major event we had on may thirtieth we had this inflatable coal plant barge that was really almost entirely driven by the volunteers it was this great event we got some wonderful media coverage and so it's you come and play with us and you can create the way that you get engaged on the camp and that's a neat thing about volunteering for the sierra club is they let you into the decision making process so are very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning christopher parker christopher parker is an associate professor and stuart a shining gold professor of social justice and political science in the department of political science at the university of washington he has published in the journal of politics international security political research quarterly and the de bois review he is the principal investigator of the multistate survey on race and politics and the director of the center for survey research at the university of washington and he is author of fighting for democracy black veterans and the struggle against white supremacy in the postwar south and here to talk about his latest book which he coauthored with matt bar titled change they can't believe in the tea party and reactionary politics in america so start out tell us what was your motivation in writing change they can't believe in well initially began as the post in your project  survey research lab and we just put a few questions on there that ask about a great many other things and my colleague persuaded me to put a question on there bob the tea party this was in two thousand and ten and what happened was you know with the with everything that was going on you know the prior year with the tax day tea parties and then after that you know during the debates over the fordable care act you know i started doing a little bit of a data analysis just to see where these guys came down saw on the one hand for example you know i had read in the wall street journal in which juan williams and peggy noonan would say all the tea partiers are just you know they're they're regular americans if if angry in other words that they had justifiable reasons were behaving in the manner in which they did but then i've read something by frank rich in the new york times in which he said that you know these guys were just really way out there they were sort of practicing the sort of paranoid style of politics that richard hofstadter discussed so many years ago and so i said down you know and i just started pouring over the data and it turns out that richard hofstadter was right and that there was a basis for them a basis for them to be perceived practicing a paranoid style of politics and at that point you know i just went whole hog and constructed to design a complete study a multi faceted study can you talk a bit more about the study itself yes so the study consists of two surveys that were conducted one in two thousand and ten initially in seven states then we did another one in two thousand and eleven that covered thirteen states so we have states you know we have arizona  colorado florida north carolina south carolina what's concent missouri pennsylvania so we have various various states you know they cover different policies and so so we have two parts of the survey but we also did these open ended interviews over the summer of two thousand and ten where we just asked these questions that allowed the respondent to say whatever they want to say so we could get an idea what was going on behind the attitudes that we were tapping and then we also did was called a continent houses in which we compared the content of the national review online which most people would agree vin today is the sort of intellectual leader for the more traditional conservative community versus forty two tea party websites in fifteen states just to compare the content and of course the working hypothesis is that you know if the tea party is really just about conservatism or mainstream conservatism then we should see a fairly roughly even distribution of the content between the national review online and tea party websites and of course we did not so what did you actually find after doing all these studies well the first thing we found just in one of the surveys what we did was to sort of tap into this paranoid style of american politics that richard haass ever talked about a few years ago you know in which you know the reactionary right  know really thinks about politics not as not as political differences right so it's not a it's so it's for them it's not a difference between republicans and democrats or conservatives and liberals right like most republicans most traditional conservatives do is this sort of manichean way of looking at the world of good versus evil and souls to try to tap into that sentiment we asked a question a real simple question right we ask whether or not you think president obama is trying to destroy the country now obviously a nice a pretty inflammatory comment or pretty inflammatory question right but we just want to see how far we could push them and so we did was we devise what's called a survey based experiment where we could ask them that question and they can maintain you know some facade of anonymity and so this is what we found thirty six percent of all conservatives believe obama is trying to destroy the country right but when you disaggregated between the reactionary conservatives and what we call tea party conservatives and the more mainstream conservatives what we found is the reactionary conservatives among them seventy one percent believ trying to steer the country versus only six percent of more mainstream conservatives so you know because we thought that they were going to be some differences in the sort of differences maintain themselves throughout the length of the manuscript you talk about some more of the differences that you found between the two yes i can't so think about it like it's ok so on immigration reform for example sixty six percent of reactionary conservatives or tea party conservatives want to repeal citizenship but only forty six percent of more mainstream conservatives want to do so that's not a tiny figure there's a twenty percent difference right so people want to say that tea partiers are just conservatives right that's not true they're reactionary conservatives right let me explain for it for second what a reactionary conservative is the civvy the more traditional conservative so reactionary conservative doesn't embrace change at all in fact they want to go backwards in time where as a sort of more mainstream conventional conservative they don't necessarily like change but they understand that they have to have some incremental or at least organic change in order to stave off or avoid revolutionary change so this is sort of edmund burke critique you know of the of the french revolution he saw this revolutionary change happening and when all it really took was more organic more incremental slower change over time to accommodate  the changing society so more mainstream conservative you know would welcome change if it's about conserving in the long run what's good about in this case american society and american social and political institutions a more mainstream conservative is always going to observe the rule of law right no matter what right they may disagree you know with the decisions of the supreme court but they're going to go along with their right or reactionary conservative is not going to honor the rule of law necessarily a reactionary conservatives going to do whatever they need to do to keep their group on top right to to maintain the social prestige of their group to maintain their way of  twenty s right same demographic group and here we are here we have it right here this is the constitution of the tea party sixty six percent tea party supporters and i say people who you know who really like the tea party are a lot of identify with that sixty six percent or forty five years old or older twenty six percent have at least a college degree eighty four percent are white twenty four percent make an income or have an income of one hundred thousand dollars a year or  more fifty nine percent are men and fifty three percent or evangelical christians that is the group to which we're referring we're talking about these reactionary conservative people who highly identify with the tea party let me make another distinction here we're not really examining tea party members right because other people have done that where we see our intervention taking place is examining tea party supporters because you have a whole lot more tea party supporters that is to say people who identify with the tea party than actual tea party members and there's there are a myriad of reasons for this one is because you know some people just don't have the wherewithal to be tea party members to say you know they can't go to any of the meetings right they can't attend any of the functions they don't have the money to donate right so there are many reasons you know for which they are not party members per se but that doesn't mean that they don't identify with the tea party agenda  so if we look at tea party membership tea party membership is hovering about at last check about four hundred fifty thousand right now if we look at tea party supporters tea party supporters as far as our calculations  calculations can can estimate about forty five million so we derive that figure is about twenty two percent of the population according to our polls strongly support the tea party when we multiply that times the voting age population in the united states death how we come up with forty five million so it's a much wider audience right it's a much wider group that we seek to examine right and it  has and just the political impact that it's had and i don't really think it bears really mentioning but if you think about the debt ceiling debate of a few years back you think about was recently happened in immigration even if you think about was recently happened in guns right when it comes to gun reform the tea party was not silent on that because they think that so let me give you do share you know the difference between a tea party conservative or reactionary conservative and a more traditional conservative so when it comes to guns a more traditional conservative would make the argument that they want to retain their guns based on the second amendment you know whatever we think of that right you know because that was about you know a well regulated militia you know when the country was under threat of you know from from britain ok whatever you might think of that that's kind of one thing right but that's that's still a good argument i mean one can make that one can make that case but that would motivate their their resistance to gun control now a tea party or would resist gun control for different reasons the tea party will resist gun control because they think the black president is going to come take their guns  and so they'll be re defenseless so the president can redistribute their property to the black and brown hordes right that's what would that's what motivates their resistance to gun control right so we're talking about real differences here between tea party conservatives and the tea party conservatives so now having said that let me get back to some more of these results so when we think about the dream act for example fifty percent non tea party conservatives and more mainstream conservatives support the dream act verses only thirty percent of reactionary conservatives when we think about obama right seventy eight percent of reactionary conservatives or tea party conservatives want to see obama's policies fail versus thirty six percent of conservatives let me repeat that seventy eight percent of reactionary conservative wants the president's policies to fail versus a conservative brother in it thirty six percent right yes and that's founding gap if you ask me whether or not they believe you believe obama is a practicing christian forty two percent of more mainstream conservatives believe he's a practicing christian versus twenty five percent of tea party conservative as a seventeen percent difference right and the final one i think that bears mentioning is whether or not you think the president was born in the united states between two percent more traditional conservatives believe he was born  united states versus thirty eight percent of tea party conservative right and fourteen percent difference so low so if they're talking about that they're just that they're just conservatives like the more mainstream conservatives we know that's not true we can see that you know when bob dole a few weeks back saying said the neither he nor president reagan the conservative icon would have a place in today's republican party so there are these differences but nobody has tried to explain these differences in the ways in which matt and i have from a theoretical and historical perspective so obama is then the key here triggering all this obama is the key so when you think about it like this so you think about go back to the know nothing party the eight hundred fifty s you know they were concerned with being overrun by irish catholics right you go to the klan of the one nine hundred twenty one we're talking about you know these large sort of national reactionary movement we're not talking about little you know like i'm not saying that they're insignificant but smaller mov regional level like the klan of the nineteenth century right those that was a regional level extreme right wing movement we're talking about you talking about the the white citizens council once again in the night of the  fifty s that that that was a reaction to brown v board of education once again that was mainly in the south right we're talking about more national broad base right wing reactionary movements in a book right so you think about the know nothing party reaction started having the rise you know the the civil rights movement really started taking off in the mid one nine hundred fifty s through the early one nine hundred sixty s robert b well retire candy manufacturer is the one who had it up and founded the john birch society named after a baptist priest who was killed in china during the second war war well what happened was you know he and his board of trustees one of whom was the coach brother the koch brothers father  and so what they saw was they saw the civil rights movement since it required a strong central state to make to ensure that african americans got equal rights well what they did was they said that you know eisenhower and warr what do all these things have in common well what they have in common mike is this perception that rapid social change is happening right and it's going to displace their way of life and when i say they were their way of life is mainly a waspy way of life white anglo saxon protestant mainly male straight right is going to displace their way of life they feel threatened so they react hence reactionary conservatism so have we always here in the u s had about the same percentage wise number of people who are reactionary conservatives or do you think it's increased you know that's a really hard one that's a really hard question to ask because i don't have the data on that  what i do think though i do think reactionary conservatism was what's called a political predisposition at least that's what we call it political science is political predispositions and that these things are socialized from the time you're a kid right and so and they stay with you but they are triggered by something in the current political environment so just let me give you one example so my colleague at harvard state they just got to pull wrote a book on the tea party on tea party members a while ago she found in her in her work that people birchers in the one nine hundred sixty s tended to be tea party supporters now so that gives credence to my theoretical argument that this never goes away right it's just triggered by events in a current political environment so it's really hard to say whether or not you know what the what the percentage is that could vary but these people are always present these people always present and it's not just confined to the united states let me just give you an example so the tea party we argue  proxy for this reactionary conservatism stuff right but we also think that if we extend this thing logically and if you look at the british defense league the nasa proxy for reactionary conservatism in the u k if you look at the national front in france that is a proxy for reactionary conservatism in france you know if i mean any of these extreme right wing parties we we can make the claim that those are proxies for reactionary conservatism and in these respective countries right so and are they in the other countries as well as here being fed i mean you mentioned the koch brothers being fed by very rich people like that and or media supporting them for instance you know fox news let's say yeah i don't i can't really speak into greater detail on that that's a project that i want to undertake here very soon but they are yeah but they are funded they wouldn't be able to do anything without some support right now is whether or not they receive the same level of media support that the tea party did through fox that's an open question because i just don't know enough about that what i will say is that fox did not play a small role when it came to forming the tea party right it  really didn't fox empirically it shows that you know people who support the tea party really strongly sixty percent of them get all their news from fox all their news from fox not just some of it all of it as a sole source of the news fox fact fox was a really key factor in solidifying not only bringing together right but also with solidify the sense of tea party identification so what is the tea party supporters or what are they then hoping for i mean what are their goals beyond removing obama as president beyond remote ok so let me let me let me let me give you let me let me give you a quick example this is the one instance where i have to have to refer to something on my phone here so so let me let's think about like this and i'll come back to your question so when the tea party storm on the national scene in two  two thousand and nine with the tax day tea parties right they claim to reject big government that is to say spending taxes regulation and all that stuff and there they really were about deficit reduction right so but think about what happened on bush's watch right on his first term the deficit expanded more than any other time in history on his war on his watch it was discretionary spending increased by forty nine percent adjusting for inflation the federal budget increased by one hundred four percent on bush's watch and you compared that to only eleven percent on clinton's watch bush entered office with a seven hundred billion dollars surplus he departed with a one point three trillion watch seven hundred billion dollars bailout to g m a i g and citi group some conservatives were upset but the tea party was nowhere to be found and some conservatives were upset at the cato institute heritage foundation you know it was even said that bush was a biggest spender since l b j right where was the tea party we didn't see him right in our obama this man's not even in office for a solid month and boom right we start having these tea party rallies april two thousand and nine these tax day tea parties right where were they when bush was in office run up these deficits where was he where would they when he was prosecuting these unfunded wars right nowhere to be found so i'm not saying it's all about obama but if you believe what the tea party claims that they're really all about small government you know responsible spending and these other things fiscal responsibility we should have seen them on bush's watch but we did not so could be coincidence as we saw him on obama's watch but empirically as we show in his book it's not mere coincidence so do you anticipate this will die down once a bomb is through in his presence or just drop below the surface yeah it will go it will go below the surface you know it will go into hiding i think we'll see if if hillary runs we'll see some of that because there is a fair amount of sexism in the tea party right and people say well how can you have sexism you know sarah pa right so just because you have you know sarah palin you know that that is a part or was a part of this leadership or michele bachmann right so that doesn't mean that they don't believe a woman's place is in the home because they do right and if that's not sexism i'm not saying it that that that that's that's massage any benefits but it's at least sexism so just in the last week there was an incident at the missouri state fair and you talk about that yeah so the missouri ok so when people want to say that you know where it's and we're in a post racial society well exhibit a among many the most recent exhibit is an incident that happened at the missouri state fair last weekend in which  there was a rodeo and there was a rodeo clown with an obama mask on and the clown actually had a broomstick extending from his backside now i don't know what that meant that could be you know a double entendre tipple entendre could mean that people thought he was a which could have meant that the president you know had a stick up as butter or you know could have met a tail right we don't know but we do know that that's disrespect now you have critics of people who are angry at that who want to say that you know there be no this is about free speech was only real free speech or the right to free speech is the gun if the government is trying to stop you right from doing things like that or from expressing yourself freely in public that's not a free speech issue it's an etiquette issue you don't respect you don't disrespect the present a united states like that on a public way like that and then you had some people in the background talking about well this b gone run over you obama you better get out of the way obama football tramples you this is the president of united states that people are talking about and finally there was this one of the guys that had been commenting about what the boy was going to do to obama he also made some reference to  obama and monkeys so for people to say that you know when a post racial society that is patently untrue you can look at the data it actually shows that since president obama has been in office race relations has actually gotten worse well just a minute left in you can you touch on that a little bit more how things got worse and yet one minute yeah i think things have definitely got gotten worse since obama's been in office and i think it has to do with it's like a microcosm of what happened in some of my classes you know in which some of the white students you know and bless their hearts some of the whites didn't say will you know we got a black president now so think should be better and the black students will often say just because we had a black president i mean things have gotten any better right because it's not affecting my life in any real tangible way right so i guess the bottom line is is that ok you got a black president i think should be better and so quit complaining about us of racism is no longer an issue that's not true racism remains an issue as a president  oh it's my pleasure mike thank you