ABSTRACT
The rapid rise of the Tea Party movement in the US from 2008 to 2010 highlights the range of groups that exist between the core of the Republican Party and the militant ultra-right. The latter sector consists of neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and other formations of organized white supremacists, doctrinaire anti-Semites, and aggressive xenophobes. Martin Durham suggests that more attention be paid to the boundaries that separate all these groups on the political right (Durham 2000). In public discussions of mass dissent in the US, however, there is a tendency to picture an idealized political center periodically under attack by radicals and extremists of the left and right. In this model, subtle analysis and the complexity of boundaries are discarded.
