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Tea Party
Refers to the various groups that, according to the conservative deep story, seem to be cutting working-class whites in line for the American dream. This includes government workers, as well as minority groups that gained a cultural voice starting in the 1960s and 1970s, including Americans of color, women, immigrants, refugees, LGBT Americans, and arguably even endangered species like the brown pelican.
Line Cutters Quotes in Strangers in Their Own Land
The Strangers in Their Own Land quotes below are all either spoken by Line Cutters or refer to Line Cutters. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 9
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You are a stranger in your own land. You do not recognize yourself in how others see you. It is a struggle to feel seen and honored. And to feel honored you have to feel—and feel seen as—moving forward. But through no fault of your own, and in ways that are hidden, you are moving backward.
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Missing from the image of blacks in most of the minds of those I came to know was a man or woman standing patiently in line next to them waiting for a well-deserved reward.
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Chapter 10
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“I don't mind somebody being gay if they want to be gay. Just be a regular person, go to work, mow the lawn, fish. You don't have to be shouting it from the mountaintops. Don't make me change and don't call me a bigot if I don't.”
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Chapter 14
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How do you join the identity politics parade and also bring it to a halt?
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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 impostors—the federal government.
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Afterword
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Disaggregated, such smaller narratives hung free, maybe to gather in some new way downstream. And to all this was the background presence of a powerful truth—life had been hard for them and it could get a lot worse.
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The history of the United States has been the history of whites cutting ahead of blacks, first of all through slavery, and later through Jim Crow laws and then through New Deal legislation and the post-World War II GI Bill, which offered help to millions of Americans with the exception of those in farm and domestic work, occupations in which blacks were overrepresented. And racial discrimination continues today.
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For the most part, the real line cutters are not people one can blame or politicians [one] can thunder against. That’s because they’re not people. They’re robots. Nothing is changing the face of American industry faster than automation, and nowhere is that change more stark than in the cornerstone of Louisiana’s industrial wealth, oil.
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Line Cutters Term Timeline in Strangers in Their Own Land
The timeline below shows where the term Line Cutters appears in Strangers in Their Own Land. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 9 – The Deep Story
...it feels like “it’s people like you who have made this country great.” Despite the line cutters ’ complaints of discrimination and oppression, white Christian men resent them and eventually “close the...
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...are these groups getting ahead? It appears that “President Barack Hussein Obama” is on the line cutters ’ side, waving to them and “telling you that these line cutters deserve special treatment,”...
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...is also in short supply for older white Louisiana men: “cultural doors” started opening for line-cutting minorities during the 1960s and 1970s, even while those minorities seemed to be taking whites’...
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Chapter 15 – Strangers No Longer: The Power of Promise
...for Trump’s rising popularity: Louisiana conservatives felt like “a besieged minority,” united against the “ line cutters ” and their patron, President Obama.
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Afterword to the Paperback Edition
...“the staunchest of Trump fans,” alongside Lee Sherman, and she applauds his antagonism toward “ line cutters .” She jokes that the Mexico border wall should extend to cut off California, too.
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Louisiana conservatives also see women as “ line cutters ”—men tend to place them in the “separate mental categories” of daughters, wives, or competitors...
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Who, Hochschild asks, are “the real line cutters ”? She concludes that they are robots. Automation disproportionately threatens the unskilled oil jobs on...
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