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.