Already in the late 1960s, sensing a split in American culture, my husband Adam and I set off to live for a month in Kings Kauai Garden Apartments—complete with jungle bird and beast sound effects piped into a common jungle decorated patio—in Santa Ana, California, to try to get to know members of the John Birch Society, an earlier right-wing precursor to the Tea Party. We attended meetings of the society and talked to as many people as we could. Many members we met had grown up in small towns in the Midwest and felt deeply disoriented in California’s anomic suburbs, an unease they transformed
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