The most fundamental lie about the Tea Party movement is that it represents some sort of working-class populist base that is heart and soul of the Republican Party, in opposition to which are the wealthy liberal elites of the Democratic Party. Contrary to his reputation for brilliance, Barack Obama has probably done more to make this absurd scenario credible than any other single individual over the past year and a half (if you think Glenn Beck makes anything credible, I challenge you to a duel, Funk and Wagnalls at 50 paces).
Well, I was checking out something else in the American National Election Study archives, when I noticed someone had created an ideology scale, simply combining attitudes on spending with ideological identification, and I thought this would be a useful way to underscore what a lot of hokum this kind of narrative is, since the reality is that conservatives are elitists, always have been, always will be, regardless of the fact some liberals--social liberals, primarily, may be as well.
Just to emphasize my point, I decided to divide things up by decade, so that the persistence of the pattern could be clearly seen. The orange shows values higher than statistically predicted, the blue shows them lower. The darker the color, the greater the divergence from expectations. That means that the orange band from upper left to lower right--low income liberals to upper income conservatives--shows where the greatest deviation above statistical expectations lies.
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