Rebranding Political Conservatism through Race, Gender, and Class

The news media focused on race, gender, and class in contentious narratives that pushed people to tune their “headphones” into stories about the Tea Party brand. Branding shapes consumers’ tastes, desires, and loyalties and creates profit through the invocation of these types of immaterial qualities. This chapter examines the ways in which the Tea Party news stories emphasized class, race, and gender as key “intangible values” that helped to produce and reify the Tea Party brand identity. It also theorizes the Tea Party’s brand logic* through an analysis of what the news stories tell us about modern conceptions of race, gender, and class identities in the media and politics.