Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

To better understand Tea Party ideology, the author turns to history, examining various movements that have risen up to counter “progress.” She argues that the recent rightward political turn and the Tea Party movement both originate in the South. She wonders about the role that emotion plays in Tea Party ideology and wants to figure out how such emotion shapes belief. She looks back to the days prior to the Civil War and notes the disenfranchisement of “poor white” farmers by wealthy white plantation owners and explains that the best, most arable tracts of land in the South were bought up by affluent individuals looking to use enslaved labor to farm large parcels. The “poor white” subsistence farmers were left with land from which they struggled to eke out a meager living. After the Civil War, the South was economically devastated and the new state governments were installed by northerners. There was a feeling amongst the disenfranchised white southern population that the North was profiting, unfairly, off Southern labor. As the decades passed, a series of other changes, billed as “progress” would originate in the North and then be exported southwards, and the author argues that this series of externally imposed changes not only bred resentment amongst working-class white southerners but that it also became a key part of their deep story.

The author identifies parallels between the pre-emancipation cotton industry and contemporary Big Oil. Both are monocultures that require large financial investments and disenfranchise the poor. She talks to one man who tells her that an oil company applied for a permit to use a portion of their land. They were powerless in the face of such a large enemy, and the permit was granted. They are now unable to sell their home because their property value plummeted. This man’s story, the author realizes, is all too common, and there are countless other southerners who have had similar experiences.

Jumping forward in time to the 1960s and 1970s, the author discusses the way that civil rights movements and identity politics impacted the South’s deep story and the ideology that gave rise to the Tea Party movement. There was a perception, she notes, amongst white southerners that the civil rights movement was yet another example of Northerners coming down to the South to tell southerners how to live their lives. Suddenly, white men were perceived as villains, and a host of new identity groups sprang up and threatened the status quo: African Americans, women, gay people, and even the rights of endangered species became seemingly more important than those of working-class white people. To a group of people with a long history of disenfranchisement at the hands of the wealthy and the government, this felt like another blow. Many white, working-class southerners felt like they had never had advantages, and they resented the fact that they were suddenly being told that they were oppressors just because they were white. These men, the author notes, were loath to point any of this out within broader public conversations about race, class, and opportunity in America because they resented identity politics and identifying as a “victim” class was revolting to them. They observed the way that liberal values and liberal ideologies had risen to “the top” in society and realized that their very identities had become undesirable. Values such as Christianity, monogamous, heterosexual marriage, and hard work seemed, to them, to have fallen out of fashion. They felt distinctly left behind by a society in which they had never truly been allowed to flourish.