Even though the federal government had been an instrument of racial segregation in the past, it now stood for racial equality. A slow drum roll began: in 1948, President Harry S. Truman integrated the armed services. In 1954, the Supreme Court, through Brown v. Board of Education, integrated schools. In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in federal troops and the National Guard to enforce federal law integrating schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. And that set the stage for more federal action in the decade to follow. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy sent five thousand federal troops to ensure the right of James Meredith to attend the University of Mississippi. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the most sweeping civil rights law since Reconstruction. This was followed by an executive order for government contractors instituting affirmative action for minorities in employment. In 1968, Johnson banned discrimination in housing. And so it went—the federal government aiding a social movement of a people to take their rightful place in line for the American Dream.
The feminist movement followed the civil rights movement, picking up from earlier struggles for the right to vote, hold office, and own property in a one's own name. A series of legal decisions strengthening the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment were now applied in places of work that received any money from the federal government. Later, the movement for gay rights trod the same path through the 1970s.
Over time, new groups were added to older ones, and political and therapeutic cultures merged. Identity politics was born. Identities based on surviving cancer, rape, childhood sexual abuse, addiction to alcohol, drugs, sex work—these and more came to the media's attention. It became a race "for the crown of thorns," the critic Todd Gitlin, a former 1960s activist, lamented in his book, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars. On the heels of these movements for social change, a certain culture of victimization had crept in. And where did that leave the older white male? As an ideal, fairness seemed to stop before it got to him.
Struggle for Honor
My Tea Party friends—and many now did feel like friends—responded to the fire of the 1960s by incorporating some parts of its message, and resisting others. One woman told me she loved Sarah Palin because she was a pro-life "feminist" who embraced "girl power" and "mama grizzlies." Another honored Martin Luther King Jr. as the model of level-headed leadership in contrast to the youthful urban hotheads who break store windows in rage at police brutality.
But they also had strong objections to some outcomes of the movements of the 1960s. If you have one drop of Native American blood, you qualify under some affirmative action guideline to get financial aid for college. But why does that put you ahead in line? they wondered. If a person said he or she was white, as a way of describing themselves in the manner of the Native American or black, they risked being seen as racist soldiers of the Aryan Nation. If they stood up to declare themselves proud to be male—unless they were part of a men's group trying to unlearn traditional ways—they risked being seen as male chauvinists. If they called for recognition for their lifetime of experience, their age, they risked seeming like old fools in a culture focused on youth.
Putting the 1860s and the 1960s together, white men of the South seemed to have lived through one long deep story of being shoved back in line. If in the nineteenth century the big planters had reduced the lot of the poor white farmer, twenty-first-century corporations had gone global, automated, moved plants to cheaper workers or moved cheaper workers in, and deftly remained out of sight over the brow of the hill. Some 280 of the most profitable American companies had dodged taxes on half of their profits, according to a 2011 study, but in the history-soaked deep story, you couldn't see that. You were left to imagine it, to feel you couldn't do anything about it. And to make matters worse, it was your sector, the free market, that was letting you down. Meanwhile, white wages leveled or sank and welfare expenditures rose.
The Honor Squeeze
So for older white men, the 1960s presented a delicate dilemma. On one hand, they did want to stand up, come forward, and express an identity like so many others had done. Why not us too? On the other hand, as members of the right, they had objected in principle to cutting in line, and disliked the overused word "victim." Still—and this was unsayable—they were beginning to feel like victims. Others had moved forward; they were the left behind. They disliked the word "suffer," but they had suffered from wage cuts, the dream trap, and the covert dishonor of being the one group everyone thought stood unfairly ahead of the line. Culturally speaking, the entire North had "cut in" and seemed to move the South to the back of the line, even as—and this was forgotten—federal dollars had steadily moved from North to South.
How, again, could the white male openly want to cut in line himself when he objected in principle to cutting in line? He was in conflict and responded to it by seeking honor in other ways. First, he would claim pride in work. But work had become less and less secure, and again, wages for the bottom 90 percent remained flat. Word was out that some workers at Toys "R" Us and Disneyland were being asked to train other workers destined to replace them for less pay. And the federal government was giving money to people who did no work, undercutting the honor accorded work itself. (But see Appendix C.)
If he couldn't take pride in work, the Tea Party man tried region and state, and there too he ran into difficulty. Most people I talked to loved the South, loved Louisiana, loved their town or bayou. But they were sadly aware of its low status. "Oh we're the flyover state," one Tea Party teacher told me. "We're seen as backward and poor," another complained. Like red-leaning Midwestern farmers who felt insulted to be called "hayseeds" or Appalachian coal miners who were seen as "hillbillies," as residents of their region, Southerners had taken an ill-deserved hit in the eyes of the nation.
If region and state couldn't serve as a basis for honor, surely strong family values could. Even when they couldn't manage to live up to their moral code—which favored lifelong, heterosexual, monogamous, pro-life marriage—they took pride in the code itself. It was not easy to live by such a code. One woman of the right had a gay brother who had been married, had a child, and abandoned both "just because of sex," and the episode had caused an upheaval in the family. In order to avoid the pain of divorce her own parents had caused her, one woman entered a covenant marriage. (Intended to strengthen the institution, covenant marriage was passed into law in Louisiana in 1997, and later in Arkansas and Arizona. It calls on the couple to sign an affidavit that they have undergone pre-marital counseling, and otherwise heightens the requirements for entry and exit from marriage.) She soon discovered her husband was gay, and while the couple later cooperated in raising their two children, she was glad she had tried to keep the marriage together "the way it should be." The fourteen-year-old daughter of another mother became pregnant and kept the baby. "I'm working full-time and she's got to finish school. Frankly it's been very hard." And it would have been easier for her young daughter, she feels, if she had had an abortion. But there was honor in keeping the baby and "doing the right thing"—an honor they felt to be invisible to liberals.
And church: many like Janice Areno spoke of the value of "being churched" and giving tithes. But some of the beliefs they learned in church—that the earth was made in seven days, that heaven was a giant cube, that Eve was born of Adam's rib, that evolution never occurred—were, if taken literally, seen in the eyes of a wider, more secular world as signs of a poor education.
But being Christian and taking Jesus as your savior was for Janice, Jackie, Madonna, and others a way of saying, "I commit myself to being a moral person. 1 daily try to be good, to help, to forgive, and in fact to work hard at being good." "If I know a person is a Christian, one woman told me, "I know we have a lot in common. I'm more likely to trust that he or she is a moral person than I would a non-Christian."
Underlying all these other bases of honor—in work, region, state, family life, and church—was pride i
n the self of the deep story. The people I came to know had sacrificed a great deal and found honor in sacrifice. It had been hard for Janice Areno's father to drop out of school to help his dad raise a family of ten. Although nearly everyone I spoke to had two children, three at most and some none at all, a few honored their mothers or grandfathers for having raised very large families. It was a hard thing to do. They took pride in giving to local community—Mike Schaff's two-beer sandbagging against flood, Janice's friend's one-touch pillows for American troops, Jackie Tabor's work at Abraham's Tent.
What seemed like a problem to liberals—the fact that conservatives identify "up," with the 1 percent, the planter class—was actually a source of pride to the Tea Party people I came to know. It showed you were optimistic, hopeful, a trier. It wasn't a problem that you seldom looked behind you in line. Why would you want to blame a guy if he got all the way to the top? they wondered. That gaze forward, even when matters seemed hopeless, was a feature of the brave deep story self.
But such a self was less and less a source of honor, it seemed. Rising to the fore was another kind of self, a more upper-middle-class cosmopolitan self, with its more dispersed and looser friendship networks, its preparation to compete for entrance to big-name colleges and tough careers that might take a person far from home. Such cosmopolitan selves were directed to the task of cracking into the global elite. They made do with living farther away from their roots. They were ready to go when opportunity knocked. They took great pride in liberal causes—human rights, racial equality, and the fight against global warming. Many upper-middle-class liberals, white and black, didn't notice what, emotionally speaking, their kind of self was displacing. For along with blue-collar jobs, a blue-collar way of life was going out of fashion, and with it, the honor attached to a rooted self and pride in endurance—the deep story self. The liberal upper-middle class saw community as insularity and closed-mindedness rather than as a source of belonging and honor. And they didn't see that, given trends "behind the brow of the hill," their turn to be displaced might be next.
For the Tea Party around the country, the shifting moral qualifications for the American Dream had turned them into strangers in their own land, afraid, resentful, displaced, and dismissed by the very people who were, they felt, cutting in line. The undeclared class war transpiring on a different stage, with different actors, and evoking a different notion of fairness was leading those engaged in it to blame the "supplier" of the imposters—the federal government.
Syrian Refugees
With the arrival in 2015 of Syrian refugees to the United States, fleeing the flames of war at home, one more set of faces seemed to my Tea Party informants to be pulling ahead in line—and they were dangerous, besides. Lee Sherman saw the Syrians as potential members of ISIS. "Ninety percent of them are men, and I think we ought to put them in Guantanamo," he said. "But they aren't enemy combatants," I reminded him. "I know, but you can take the fences down, make it less like a prison," he replied. "If you let them into the U.S. they will have all our rights to things." Comparing the refugees to Southerners during the Civil War, Mike Schaff, himself a refugee from the Bayou Corne Sinkhole, said, "General Lee led brave Southerners who, though grossly outnumbered and woefully under-armed, refused to flee their country as refugees. They stayed, fought, and many died. Their wives and children, many raped and murdered, also stayed to care for their homes. After their defeat, again, they did not flee. They stayed to eventually reshape our government. The Syrians should stay, take a stand, and fight for what they believe in. If you flee, in my mind, you're a traitor unto yourself. This is harsh, I know, but sometimes we have to make tough choices." Jackie Tabor said, "We are protecting Muslims and persecuting Christians. Have you ever seen a Muslim charity event for people in need, or soup kitchen for the homeless? A Muslim Thanksgiving? Where is the Muslim name on the Declaration of Independence?" If Mike saw the Syrian refugees through the eyes of the 1860s, Jackie saw the official welcome offered them as more 1960s-style diversity, which threatened the core of the religious culture she held sacred.
As strangers in their own land, Lee, Mike, and Jackie wanted their homeland back, and the pledges of the Tea Party offered them that. It offered them financial freedom from taxes, and emotional freedom from the strictures of liberal philosophy and its rules of feeling. Liberals were asking them to feel compassion for the downtrodden in the back of the line, the "slaves" of society. They didn't want to; they felt downtrodden themselves and wanted only to look "up" to the elite. What was wrong with aspiring high? That was the bigger virtue, they thought. Liberals were asking them to direct their indignation at the ill-gotten gains of the overly rich, the "planters"; the right wanted to aim their indignation down at the poor slackers, some of whom were jumping the line.
One cultural contribution the South has made to the modern national right may be its persistent legacy of secession. In the nineteenth century, the secession was geographic: the South seceded from the North. Between 1860 and 1865, the eleven Confederate states established themselves as a separate territory and nation. The modern-day Tea Party enthusiasts I met sought a different separation—one between rich and poor. In their ideal world, government would not take from the rich to give to the poor. It would fund the military and the national guard, build interstate freeways, dredge harbors, and otherwise pretty much disappear.
So in the Tea Party idea, North and South would unite, but a new cleavage would open wide; the rich would divorce the poor—for so many of them were "cutting in line." In the 1970s, there was much talk of President Richard Nixon's "Southern strategy," which appealed to white fear of black rise, and drove whites from the Democratic Party to the Republican. But in the twenty-first century, a "Northern strategy" has unfolded, one in which conservatives of the North are following those of the South—in a movement of the rich and those identified with them, to lift off the burden of help for the underprivileged. Across the whole land, the idea is, handouts should stop. The richer around the nation will become free of the poorer. They will secede.
15
Strangers No Longer:
The Power of Promise
Normally when doing field research, a sociologist comes to a scene, then leaves it, and the scene itself remains unchanged. By my tenth visit with my core of white, middle-aged and older, Christian, married, blue- and white-collar Louisianans, I had discovered that virtually everyone I talked to embraced the same "feels-as-if" deep story. But by the end of my research there had been a profound change. With a Tea Party enthusiast, I drove to the rally at the Lakefront Airport in New Orleans of a rising Republican presidential candidate. Once back home, I checked in with my new friends and acquaintances to see how they felt about Donald J. Trump.
Looking back at my previous research, I see that the scene had been set for Trump's rise, like kindling before a match is lit. Three elements had come together. Since 1980, virtually all those 1 talked with felt on shaky economic ground, a fact that made them brace at the very idea of "redistribution." They also felt culturally marginalized: their views about abortion, gay marriage, gender roles, race, guns, and the Confederate flag all were held up to ridicule in the national media as backward. And they felt part of a demographic decline; "there are fewer and fewer white Christians like us," Madonna had told me. They'd begun to feel like a besieged minority. And to these feelings they added the cultural tendency—described by W.J. Cash in The Mind of the South, though shared in milder form outside the South—to identify "up" the social ladder with the planter, the oil magnate, and to feel detached from those further down the ladder.
All this was part of the "deep story." In that story, strangers step ahead of you in line, making you anxious, resentful, and afraid. A president allies with the line cutters, making you feel distrustful, betrayed. A person ahead of you in line insults you as an ignorant redneck, making you feel humiliated and mad. Economically, culturally, demographically, politically, you are suddenly a stranger in your own land. The whole
context of Louisiana— its companies, its government, its church and media—reinforces that deep story. So this—the deep story—was in place before the match was struck.
The doors to the Lakefront Airport hangar in New Orleans open at 3:00 P.M. and the former reality television star and Republican candidate for president, Donald J. Trump, is scheduled for 6:00 P.M. and arrives some half an hour later. It is the day before the Louisiana presidential primary vote. Enthusiastic fans descend from buses that have carried them from far-flung parking lots to join those walking on foot to pass through security.
Red, white, and blue strobe lights slowly glide sideways and up, sideways and up, around the enormous space, as if to encircle the enchanted crowd with a feeling of ascendance. Milling about inside the hangar are two or three thousand fans in Trump hats, or wearing Trump shirts, holding and waving signs, "TRUMP; MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN," or "SILENT MAJORITY STANDS WITH TRUMP." In front, an enormous American flag is draped against the wall.
Nearly everyone is white; apart from protestors, the only blacks I see are security guards or vendors hawking Trump T-shirts—$20 for one, $35 for two—on the lawn outside the hangar. People wear red, white, and blue caps. Men in beards and ponytails wave signs. A large, grizzled man in blue jeans and a checked shirt with long gray hair flowing down his back wanders about, an enormous American flag draped over one arm. Parents hold children on their shoulders. Another man in red and white striped pants stalks about in a tall hat. A young man wraps himself in an enormous American flag. Two men are wearing green shirts with the image of a $100 bill printed on them. Is this ironic or earnest? Or both? It is hard to tell. Throngs of two or three thousand mill about looking to the stage. Loud music is playing: the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want."
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right Page 23
