Pomona College’s Student Union (PSU) hosted a panel discussion entitled American Rage: Race, Revolt, and the Tea Party Movement at Rose Hills Theater Tuesday.

The event, PSU’s second of the year, featured three guest speakers—Gerard Alexander, Rich Benjamin, and Jennet Kirkpatrick—who debated the role of anger in today’s political landscape and discussed the significance of the recent rise of the Tea Party.

An event addressing the Tea Party movement “had been thrown around quite a bit in the PSU last semester,” said Hannah Yung PO ’13, who helped to plan the event. “The recent primary results in Delaware were just timely. The event interested me because of the way some media has treated the Tea Party as if it’s the manifestation of a new type of anger … I wanted to explore whether this was true.”

In his opening statement, Benjamin, author of Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey, described the Tea Party as an undeniably racially charged organization.

He explained that historical “segregation politics” paved the way for “the cultural ethos of the Tea Party Movement.”

“Seemingly non-racial issues, such as health care and taxes, definitely do have a racial undertone,” he added.

Responding to a question about the role of the Tea Party as an American social movement, Alexander, an American Enterprise Institute Scholar, disagreed with Benjamin.

“There is an image that modern conservatism is an identity politics of white America,” he said. “Conservatives have had no problem rallying behind people who don’t fit that profile.”

Kirkpatrick, University of Michigan professor of Political Science, cautioned that we should hesitate before describing the Tea Party phenomenon as a movement.

“It is not clear that this is a cohesive group,” she said. “It’s a loose coalition of interests.”

According to Kirkpatrick, race has been central to the discussion about the Tea Party.

“Is it a racist organization or a patriotic one?” she said. “It embodies both attributes. It is a fusion between a politics of homogeneity and a patriotic nostalgia.”

Yung’s second question for the panel focused on pundit Lee Harris’s claim that the Tea Party is based on “attitude, not ideas.”

“The Tea Party’s analysis of political ideas is pretty slight,” Kirkpatrick said.

She also mentioned that many Tea Party supporters want all American legislation to be shorter than the Constitution.

“The predominant way of referring to the Constitution is as a mechanism of measurement,” she said. “That’s not really an engagement with the document.”

According to Benjamin, “We know what they stand against, but it’s unclear to me what their ideas are and what they stand for.”

“What really pisses people off is the condescension and arrogance with which they are treated,” countered Alexander. “The Tea Party is treated as nave and simplistic. That’s a dominant characteristic of all populist movements, but progressives don’t like to see it that way.”

The second half of the discussion focused on anger and its role in political movements.

Alexander said that the role of anger in the Tea Party is hardly unprecedented.

“[Political] discourse focuses on a mixture of fear and hope,” he said. “Anger seems virtually universal. I don’t think we’re seeing anything unique.”

Kirkpatrick concluded the discussion by agreeing that politics are highly intertwined with emotion.

“Americans think of emotion as something that’s separate from rational thought and often detrimental to it,” Kirkpatrick said. “I disagree. Politics is about people and people are both rational and emotional beings. I’m not too concerned about the Tea Party’s wrath. Silence would be far more worrisome.”

Yung said she was pleased with the outcome of the event.

“I think those who attended were engaged and I think the discussion continued beyond the room, which is what the PSU always aims to encourage,” she said.

“The speakers were all very well-versed in their topics,” said audience member Brennen Byrne PO ’13. He added, though, that the speakers’ heavy preparation for the event resulted in them “building in different directions” more than “debating or disagreeing.”