The right has always believed that Democratic victories are illegitimate not because of vote fraud, but because Democratic/liberal politicians and figures are illegitimate due to their very existence. This is a good article giving a rundown of how this evolved during Obama's term and eventually led to Jan. 6
Two particular themes of the Tea Partys politics struck Williamson at the time and loomed larger to her after the 2020 election. One was the conspiracism that characterized the views of many grass-roots Tea Partyers, despite the best efforts of the more mainstream-oriented leaders. It drew from a wide range of sources: vintage ones like the John Birch Society and Barry Goldwaters 1964 presidential campaign alumni of both often turned up in Tea Party meetings and newer strains like Alex Joness Infowars media empire and the wild-eyed quest for Obamas long-form birth certificate. Where those sources met was in a narrative of dispossession in which true Americans were losing their country to actors from outside the proper bounds of public life. This was the other big theme: the idea, Williamson told me, that a substantial part of the American public were not legitimate actors in American politics.
This idea reached its purest expression in the conspiracy theories about Obama, whose presidency was so unsquarable with what the Tea Partyers believed to be the true nature of America that to some it seemed, ipso facto, to represent a crime. Even those who in interviews did not espouse conspiracy theories like the birth-certificate claim confided to Skocpol and Williamson an uneasiness about the new president that went beyond normal partisanship. I think that hes actually not what he seems to be, one Virginia Tea Partyer told them. Several interviewees told them that Obama planned to give amnesty to illegal immigrants in order to secure 10 million extra votes for his re-election enough to allow him to continue to ignore the interests of real Americans, Skocpol and Williamson wrote.
Not all Tea Partyers claimed that Obama had actively defrauded the electoral system. But even those who distanced themselves from the most overtly conspiratorial claims often argued that he had revealed the systems vulnerability. The nation was imperiled by the cult of multiculturalism, aided by leftist liberals all over, who dont have the same ideas about America as we do, Tom Tancredo, a former Republican congressman from Colorado and a star of the new movement, declared at the first Tea Party convention in Nashville in early 2010. People who couldnt even spell the word vote, or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. He went on: This is our country. Lets take it back.
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