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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Speech and Rhetorical Studies

Minnesota State University, Mankato

2017

Founding Fathers

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Recasting The Founding Fathers: The Tea Party Movement, Neoliberalism, And American Myth, Calvin Coker Sep 2017

Recasting The Founding Fathers: The Tea Party Movement, Neoliberalism, And American Myth, Calvin Coker

Speaker & Gavel

This article analyzes representative texts from the Tea Party Movement (TPM), a conservative American political movement, to demonstrate the TPM uses the myth of the Founding Fathers as an argumentative strategy to craft and justify a sanitary neoliberal political project. The necessity of such of a project lies in the underlying democratic crisis of neoliberalism, a crisis navigated by the TPM through strategic use of political myth. Neoliberal policies require, in many instances, democratic consent, though those policies often serve to disenfranchise many of the groups supporting them. This essay argues the TPM uses myth for the purpose of creating …