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

Hochschild begins this project with a desire to understand the Tea Party, a political movement whose ideas and ideals are in opposition to her own. The Tea Party was an American political movement within the Republican Party that dates to around 2009. It is widely understood as a rejection of Barack Obama’s policies, and its popularity is credited with a surge of support for Republican politicians and the 2010 reclamation of control of the US House of Representatives. The Tea Party sought to address fiscal issues within the US Government through a reduction of the national debt and federal budget through decreased governmental spending, thought by many on the political right to be a key weakness of left-wing governments. Rooted in a preference for small government and fiscal conservatism, the Tea Party sought to reduce both the size and influence of the American government. It opposed tax increases, stimulus programs, environmental regulations, and health care reform. Tea Party proponents supported right-to-work legislation, tighter border security, and stricter controls on immigration. Noticeably absent from Tea Party rhetoric was an interest in traditional conservative social issues. Instead, the Tea Party movement was focused on governmental reform and decreased spending.

One of the Tea Party’s key characteristics was decentralization. It was not comprised of one central governing body with a single, unifying platform of ideas and goals. There was no formal structure, hierarchy, or organization. It was instead made up of numerous regional “chapters,” groups of supporters who came together to determine which of the broader ideas represented by Tea Party ideology were important locally. Tea Party meetings depicted in Strangers in Their Own Land tend to focus on decreasing government size, lowering taxes, and limiting governmental intrusion into business affairs. This represents the interests of (mostly) Republican and Libertarian voters in and around Lake Charles, who were primarily responding to the ways that both state and national government impacted their lives and livelihoods.

The Tea Party movement took its name from the 1773 Boston Tea Party, a protest against the Tea Act. The Tea Act was a piece of legislation that allowed the East India Company to sell Chinese tea in the American colonies without paying taxes, other than those that were stipulated by the Townshend Acts. These acts were a series of laws vehemently opposed by colonists who felt that they privileged British power, interests, and revenue accumulation to the detriment of colonial citizens and their communities. The Sons of Liberty, a political collective that was pro-colonist and anti-monarchic, dumped an entire shipment of East India Tea into the Boston Harbor to voice their opposition to what they argued was British governmental overreach and intrusion into colonial affairs. The British Crown considered the Tea Party an act of treason and sought to reimpose control over the American colonies. The fallout resulted in a series of conflicts that escalated to the American Revolution and the colonists’ successful declaration of independence from Britain.

The Tea Party, although just a faction of the broader Republican Party, became greatly influential during the years in which it was active, and many of its core issues became a key part of Republican policy promises and initiatives. Although it is no longer a force within contemporary American politics, Tea Party ideology was, at least in part, absorbed by other factions of the Republican Party. Conservative candidates still, in many cases, support fiscally conservative policies, oppose healthcare reform and the prospect of socialized medicine, favor strict immigration laws, and argue for smaller government and less governmental intervention into and regulation of businesses, both large and small. As the author notes, many proponents of Tea Party ideology were absorbed into Donald Trump’s broader populist movement, but “Trumpism” should not be understood as the de facto inheritor of Tea Party beliefs, goals, and values. Trumpist ideology places much higher importance on the kind of social issues from which the Tea Party sought to distance itself, and it reflects a new era in American political thought.