Will the Tea Party outlive Barack Obama’s presidency? Or will it flame out once its chief antagonist retires? The answer should tell us something about whether the movement is driven by issues or intolerance. The issues will keep coming. Tea Partiers vocally oppose budget deficits and government spending; both problems will persist after Obama leaves office in 2017. (Even Paul Ryan does not envision a balanced budget before 2023.) The Internal Revenue Service is not going out of business any time soon, despite recent scandals. And the Constitution will always need defending: so shout the angry men in tri-cornered hats when they are not trying to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment.

On the issues, then, the Tea Party still has much work to do. But it won’t survive if what truly animates its members is antipathy toward Obama. A new empirical study of the Tea Party, Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America by political scientists Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto, finds that the common element of the Tea Party—the issue that unites its supporters as much as any matter of policy—is revulsion for the person of Barack Hussein Obama. He is Valjean to the Tea Party’s Javert. If Obama-bashing sustains the Tea Party, will it go away without him?

Parker and Barreto’s finding implicates more than just race. The problem is not merely that Obama is a black man, but that he symbolizes everything that Tea Partiers dislike about the direction of the country. Thus Obama’s skin color is part of the equation, but so are his international background, his exotic-sounding name, his past work on behalf of the inner-city poor, his urban and openly intellectual affiliations, and the demographic change that he represents. As the authors put it: Tea Partiers believe that Obama is “conspiring with liberals and minorities to subvert the American way, ultimately stealing the United States from them, its rightful heirs.”

71 percent of Tea Party supoprters think Obama will destroy the country.

In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter argued that right-wing movements often harbor a perception of “a conspiracy against a way of life.” Following Hofstadter, Parker and Barreto suggest that Obama’s ascendance threatens the Tea Partiers’ traditional understanding of America. The president does not look like them or reflect their values; he personifies in an unavoidable way the changing face of the country. Thus the Tea Party despises Obama personally, distorting him into a grotesque papier-mâché figure good only for burning in effigy. Cue the Hitler moustaches, Nazi salutes, and dark mutterings of socialism in response to what are in fact very mild center-left policies. The “birther” controversy, which remarkably persists in some quarters, bears all the hallmarks of Hofstadter’s paranoid style: state officials in Hawaii supposedly conspiring to hide Obama’s foreign lineage, thereby defiling the Constitution.

According to Parker and Barreto, 91 percent of Tea Party supporters hold negative opinions of Obama. (This beats the 82 percent who hold negative views of illegal immigrants, and, even more tellingly, the 85 percent who report a preference for limited government.) Sixty-seven percent of Tea Party supporters believe that Obama is a socialist, and 71 percent think he will destroy the country. Destroy the country! In contravention of basic, established facts, solid majorities do not believe that he is a Christian (71 percent) or that he was born in the United States (59 percent). Parker and Barreto take pains to distinguish these views from those of non-Tea Party conservatives, and to ensure—by means of regression analysis—that Tea Party affinity, and not some other factor like support for the Republican Party, accounts for the figures. Most distressingly, fully two-thirds of Tea Party supporters want Obama to fail. It is profoundly dispiriting to confirm that so many on the far right put ideological purity over the common good.