Introduction

MOURNING THE AMERICAN DREAM

"I went to college," said Javier, who sat to my right, his arms wrapped around his squirmy one-year-old son. "But I am still having trouble finding a good job, one where I can buy a house and take care of my family." He was especially frustrated by the "myth," as he called it, that if you followed a certain "linear path" that included college, then you would succeed. He repeated the word linear, as if this were the most frustrating part. He, like many other people in that room, had found that path to be anything but straight or predictable. And in recent years, it had felt more like a trap — leading them in circles and tightening around them all the time.

Javier was one of approximately one hundred men and women who had gathered that afternoon in the auditorium of a Lutheran church in the northeastern city where they lived. This Lutheran congregation was a core member of Interfaith, a progressive, faith-based community-organizing coalition that I had been studying for over a year. Interfaith was affiliated with the PICO National Network — short for "People Improving Communities through Organizing" — one of a handful of faith-based community-organizing (FBCO) networks operating throughout the United States. Like other FBCO coalitions nationwide, Interfaith was a coalition of multiple member organizations — in their case a diverse set of religious congregations — that came together to address local quality-of-life issues like public safety, health care, education, and housing in their communities. In so doing, they aspired to develop leaders capable of exerting power at all levels of public life.

Interfaith drew its members primarily from two neighborhoods located on opposite sides of the city where it operated. One neighborhood was predominantly white and middle class; the other was racially and ethnically diverse and lower income, having welcomed successive waves of immigrants over the past several decades. By organizing in a diverse set of religious congregations across these neighborhoods, the group sought to build a coalition that reflected the diversity of their city as a whole. This, they believed, provided them with the political legitimacy they needed to fight for programs and policies that promoted social justice, economic inclusion, human dignity, and the common good.

As I looked around the room that afternoon, the diversity of the coalition was on display. The men and women crowded around round tables and standing along the edges of the room were black, white, Latino, and Arab; Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim; middle-class and low-income. It was a Sunday afternoon, but most of the people present were not members of this Lutheran congregation; they worshipped in churches, synagogues, and mosques all over the city. They had traveled here not to worship together but rather to discuss how they could work together to confront the economic challenges that Americans around the country still faced in the wake of the Great Recession. Or as the pastor of the church put it before leading an opening prayer: "How do we live together as a nation under these circumstances?"

Before we broke off into the small group where Javier shared his story, Gabriel, one of the organizers running the event, polled the group. "How many of you — raise your hand — know somebody that has lost their job in the last couple of years?" Despite the fact that people came from a wide range of backgrounds, nearly every hand in the room went up. "Look around the room, everybody. Turn around, those of you in front." People nodded knowingly as they saw the sea of hands.

"All right, put your hands down," he told them. "How many of you know somebody who is underwater in their mortgage or is having trouble paying their bills?" Again, almost everybody raised a hand. "All right," Gabriel responded, on a roll now. "How many of you know somebody-raise your hand again — that doesn't have health insurance or lacks adequate resources for health care? Almost everybody." He paused for effect. "Folks, it didn't always used to be this way in our country."

Looking around the room that day, I could not help but think of another group of men and women I had met during the previous year. I had concurrently been conducting fieldwork with the Patriots, a group of Tea Party activists who had mobilized in the suburban and rural communities that lay approximately one to two hours north of this urban church. The Patriots' membership was primarily white and middle class, with an active base of small business owners, veterans, religious conservatives, and libertarian-leaning independents. As a group, they sought to empower ordinary citizens to hold government accountable and advance what they viewed as the core principles of the United States Constitution-limited federal government, personal responsibility, and individual liberty. They had mobilized in the wake of President Barack Obama's election and debates about "Obamacare," a policy that they felt represented everything wrong with American politics today.

On the surface, the groups could not have been more different. But during my first year of fieldwork, as I shuttled back and forth between them, I became increasingly struck by their similarities. It would take another year of intensive fieldwork and several more years of analysis and observation from afar to understand more precisely what these similarities meant and how they could be reconciled with the ways in which the groups' cultures and practices also diverged significantly. But on that Sunday afternoon with Interfaith, as I heard Javier's distressed admission, as I saw the crowd's hands go up in a signal of shared anxiety, as I heard Gabriel's sober commentary about the current state of the country, I felt a flutter of familiarity. I flashed back to an event I had attended with the Patriots about a year earlier.

I had arrived late at a Comfort Inn in a rural hamlet north of the city and was directed down a back stairwell to a basement conference room. It was early in my fieldwork, and I was not sure what to expect from this "candidate meet and greet" that local Tea Party groups had organized. The room was packed with between seventy-five and one hundred people, and the hotel staff was setting up additional chairs as I arrived. Someone motioned for me to sit in one of the new chairs, and I tried to quietly settle in as one of the candidates addressed the lively crowd.

After a few minutes, he handed the microphone to the main attraction, a feisty candidate for governor who had parlayed a successful career in business into a freewheeling campaign on behalf of overburdened "taxpayers." He had also become a lightning rod for controversy, even among Tea Partiers.

He had been stuck in traffic and looked exhausted after a long day of campaigning. But his weariness lent...