Strangers in Their Own Land: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis

Hochschild wonders about the historical influences that have led to the Tea Party’s rise. Clearly, it takes from a long tradition of American populism, but it is unique in advocating “reversing progressive reform and dismantling the federal government.” Hochschild sees these unique threads in the Tea Party’s political program as a distinct response to the conservative deep story and argues that understanding them requires examining the South in the 1860s and the 1960s. She is interested in how these periods left “emotional grooves, as we might call them, carved into the minds and hearts” of middle-class Southerners. In particular, the class distinctions formed during these periods of conflict continue to influence contemporary Southern whites’ class identities.

By the early 1860s, the South was defined by the plantation system, which left whites who ran small farms—in the words of seminal Southern historian W.J. Cash—“locked into a marginal life.” They were caught economically and psychologically between the ostentatiously rich plantation owners they could theoretically become, who conceived themselves “not as wicked oppressors but as generous benefactors” of poor whites, and the violently oppressed slaves whose trauma they were lucky not to suffer. This gave poor whites “a picture of the best and worst fates in life” and “suggested its own metaphoric line waiting for the American Dream,” which was equated with getting one’s own plantation.

As the plantation system expanded, poorer farmers were crowded out of the best farmland and forced into what Cash called “all the marginal lands of the South.” Cash argued that, by destroying the forest ecosystems that supported diverse wildlife and plants, plantation owners destroyed “the old abundant variety” poor white farmers were used to living on.  This class had a long way to go toward the American Dream and faced little interference by government of any sort—until the Civil War.

The Civil War devastated the region’s economy, black Southerners suddenly started competing with poor whites economically, and the moralizing North condemned poor whites at the same time as its “carpetbaggers” moved South to profit from Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Movement and Obama’s presidency seemed like new iterations of the same pattern of domination by the North.

Hochschild sees oil as “the new cotton.” Oil barons have even bought old cotton plantations, and they also crowd out other industries and require enormous investment to bring their business to scale. Oil also promises to restore the wealth that the South lost after the plantation system collapsed. In fact, while the plantation system left 19th-century working whites poor, oil now promises their descendants honorable jobs that pay decent wages.

Hochschild meets a period actor who plays a Confederate soldier at the Oak Alley Plantation, which has been restored as a tourist attraction; he agrees with her characterization of oil as “the new cotton” and explains that an oil company built a huge storage facility a few hundred yards from his house, which he can no longer sell because the property value has declined so severely ever since. He explains that, while Confederates like the soldier he portrays wanted to secede from federal control, “you can’t secede from oil. And you can’t secede from a mentality.”

Hochschild next argues that, amid the cultural changes in the 1960s and 1970s, “a long parade of the underprivileged came forward to talk of their mistreatment”—including minorities, immigrants, women seeking equal work, LGBT Americans, and environmentalists. As personal identity increasingly became an important rallying cry for politics, old white men felt left out and blamed. Indeed, they felt like victims, but their complaint was precisely that everyone else was claiming to victimhood and the special status it accorded.

“The defining moment” of this period was the 1964 Freedom Summer, when students and civil rights workers—including Hochschild and her husband—traveled South to register voters, teach informal classes, and otherwise help advance black Americans’ struggle for civil rights. This was a dangerous mission—three voter registration workers were murdered by the KKK, and various black churches, businesses, and homes were bombed. This made the “white, blue-collar Southern men” who were “the most visible resisters to civil rights” dramatically lose their sense of honor in the national eye. Many Tea Party members were teenagers at the time and felt that the moralizing North was intervening again and making “Southern whites [bear] the mark of shame,” even when they did not directly participate in violence.

From 1948 through the 1960s, the federal government gradually passed a series of protections for African-Americans, most notably President Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964. The feminist and gay rights movements took a similar course in the 1960s and 1970s, and other groups continued to join suit through the present day. Ultimately, the 1960s and 1970s saw the birth of the “culture of victimization” that Tea Partiers continue to decry as getting in the way of fairness.

Hochschild’s friends in the Tea Party adopted parts of this 1960s and 1970s culture while rejecting others. One appreciated “feminist” Sarah Palin and another admired Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership style, but others thought people should not benefit from affirmative action if, say, they have one Native American ancestor. Pride in their whiteness, maleness, or age would have made them seem chauvinistic. But they felt they had “lived through one long deep story of being shoved back in line,” even as their economic opportunities dwindle. They “were beginning to feel like victims,” even as they hated when people flaunted their victimhood.

Hochschild asks where this population of Southern whites could find another source of pride. Their work was insecure as wages fell; they felt like the rest of the country saw their region as backwards. Family values became one consistent source of pride, and so a commitment to heterosexual monogamous marriages became a cornerstone of Southern politics. This led Southern conservatives to oppose same-sex marriage, favor practices like covenant marriages that carry extra legal requirements, and reject abortion as dishonorable. Church and the moral codes that accompanied faith were another source of honor; even though much of liberal America saw religious doctrines like the idea that the earth was created in seven days as “signs of a poor education,” Christians could trust that other Christians would be morally upstanding people.

The core of this newfound honor “was pride in the self of the deep story,” the self that had made enormous sacrifices to survive and care for large Southern families and local communities. Southerners idolize rather than demonize the rich through a “gaze forward” that liberals see as a denial of their own class status. But this kind of endurance self is threatened by the less rooted, more liberal “upper-middle-class cosmopolitan self” that is “directed to the task of cracking into the global elite.” People with cosmopolitan selves are more willing to move far away and fight for liberal causes like human rights, but think of emphasis on local community as signifying “insularity and closed-mindedness rather than as a source of belonging and honor.” The cosmopolitan self’s threat to the endurance self led many Southerners to blame the federal government that was increasingly rewarding the former.

Many of Hochschild’s friends in Louisiana worried about Syrian refugees coming to the United States after 2015. Lee Sherman suggested incarcerating them in Guantánamo Bay, Mike Schaff thinks they should have stayed and fought in their own country (as he says the South did during the Civil War), and Jackie Tabor felt that Islam was a threat to American culture. The Tea Party allowed its members to forget the pleas of other downtrodden groups, shed liberal feeling rules and instead focus on “aspiring high.” Hochschild sees this attitude as continuing the legacy of Southern secession, and specifically hoping to become the rich who would secede from the poor by eliminating taxation and social services. Now, even Northern conservatives are following suit, hoping that “the richer around the nation will become free of the poorer.”