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Late one night in June 1978, there was a boisterous party in the Hotel Biltmore, an aging establishment in downtown Los Angeles. Howard Jarvis, Paul Gann, and a devoted band of tax protesters downed Biltmore-label generic Scotch and celebrated a landslide victory, the two-to-one vote in favor of Proposition 13 in California. Television reporters stood in the middle of the bustling festivities, straining as they made the short, proper commentaries on the significance of Jarvis's stunning victory. Property taxes in California would be reduced by about seven billion dollars and would henceforth be limited to 1 percent of assessed value. As correspondents telephoned their stories, one could hear above the murmurs the repeated words, "populist," "mad as hell," and "tax revolt."

In the Spring of 2009, the Tea Party emerged onto the American political scene. In the wake of Obama's election, as commentators proclaimed the "death of conservatism," Tax Day rallies and Tea Party showdowns at congressional town hall meetings marked a new and unexpected chapter in American conservatism. Accessible to students and general readers, Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party brings together leading scholars and experts on the American Right to examine a political movement that electrified American society. Topics addressed by the volume's contributors include the Tea Party's roots in earlier mass movements of the Right and in distinctive forms of American populism and conservatism, the significance of class, race and gender to the rise and successes of the Tea Party, the effect of the Tea Party on the Republican Party, the relationship between the Tea Party and the Religious Right, and the contradiction between the grass-roots nature of the Tea Party and the established political financing behind it. Throughout the volume, authors provide detailed and often surprising accounts of the movement's development at local and national levels. In an Epilogue, the Editors address the relationship between the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement