Ari Fleischer, press secretary for George W. Bush, used the paradoxical phrase “working vacations” in 2001 to explain the newly inaugurated president's decision to spend 30 days in Texas less than six months after he entered office. Fleischer’s successors stuck to that script, employing the same phrase in 2005, the year that Bush's total vacation days eclipsed Ronald Reagan's total for his entire presidency. (Bush eventually racked up 879, compared to Reagan's 335.)

We argue that the Tea Party is better understood as a reactionary conservative force. It prefers the sorts of dramatic changes that threaten the stability traditional conservatives usually seek to preserve. Reactionary conservatives fear losing their way of life amid social change. To preserve their group’s social prestige, they’re willing to undermine long-established norms and institutions. Furthermore, reactionary conservatives are more likely to subscribe to conspiracy theories as a means of explaining the perceived erosion of their dominance. Reactionary conservatives will, therefore, claim that their “enemies” are destroying their way of life. Compromise is commensurate with defeat, not political expediency. Proper capitalization, punctuation, spelling or sentence structure is identified with effete elitism and never to be publicly observed [emphasis added].