Well, saying to pollsters that the tea party is closer to one's views than Obama is a little different than saying one is supportive of the Tea Party.
Polls are a little contradictory about the Tea Party. One Pew poll from April says that 24 percent of Americans support the Tea Party, 14 oppose it, 31 percent have no opinion about it and 30 percent have never of it. A Gallup poll from late March shows slightly higher support for the movement. It seems the Tea Party does have some working class adherents but I think Chomsky is a bit unclear and simplistic in his description of the Tea Partiers. A significant majority of the Tea Partiers don't appear to fall into Chomsky's description of them as workers with stagnating wages and folks who should be organized by the CIO (if it were around today).
Pew Poll on the Tea Party: _http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=1703_ (http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=1703)
Gallup Poll on Tea Party: _http://www.gallup.com/poll/127181/tea-partiers-fairly-mainstream-demographics.aspx_ (http://www.gallup.com/poll/127181/tea-partiers-fairly-mainstream-demographics.aspx)
In a message dated 5/14/2010 7:19:50 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, galliher at illinois.edu writes:
Chomsky has explicitly denied that he considers the tea partiers as a working class uprising. "Rather, as petty bourgeois with substantial appeal to the working class -- incidentally, as the Nazis were." But they may include 18% 0f the population. He's spoken and written about this, e.g., at the Left forum, posted in various places, including Znet a few weeks ago.
He thinks it much more important that 48% of the population sympathize with the tea party attitudes and beliefs (as compared with 44% for Obama) in the NYT poll. Its the outreach that the left should be reaching out to. He thinks that what the left should be doing is "what it did in the 1930s, when there was also a very dangerous nativist movement, but it was countered by working class organizing."
On 5/14/10 8:12 PM, CGreen7223 at aol.com wrote:
> Chomsky keeps implying that the Tea Partiers are a bunch of working class
> folks victimized by neoliberalism. I wonder if he has seen the numerous
> studies showing that the Tea Partiers are, to a large extent,
privileged middle
> class and upper middle class workers and petit bourgeois who really
don't
> have much in the way of "real grievances" but are a bunch of racist,
> ignorant spoiled people made even more ignorant and racist by talk radio
> demagogues. I can't imagine that somebody hasn't called his attention
to these
> studies about the Tea Party.
>
> And Joe Stack is not typical of the Tea Partiers. Most Tea Party people
> seem to think big business is just fine. They all probably think,
because Rush
> Limbaugh says so, that the financial crises was caused by the
government
> forcing the banks to give mortgages to black and brown people who
couldn't
> afford to pay them back and which required the poor banks to create toxic
> financial instruments to try to make the mortgages profitable, and so
on.
>
>
> In a message dated 5/14/2010 10:58:39 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
> cb31450 at gmail.com writes:
>
> CHOMSKY: HOW THE TEA PARTIERS ARE GETTING SCREWED BY THEIR OWN IDEOLOGY
> By Noam Chomsky, In These Times
> 'We should not underestimate the depth of moral indignation
> that lies behind the furious, often self-destructive
> bitterness about government and business power."
>
http://www.alternet.org/story/146852/chomsky%3A_how_the_tea_partiers_are_get
> ting_screwed_by_their_own_ideology