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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

We, on both sides, wrongly imagine that empathy with the “other” side brings an end to clearheaded analysis when, in truth, it’s on the other side of that bridge that the most important analysis can begin.

An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances. In a period of political tumult, we grasp for quick certainties. We shoehorn new information into ways we already think. We settle for knowing our opposite numbers from the outside. But is it possible, without changing our beliefs, to know others from the inside, to see reality through their eyes, to understand the links between life, feeling, and politics; that is, to cross the empathy wall? I thought it was.

the more that people confine themselves to like-minded company, the more extreme their views become.

Just 158 rich families contributed nearly half of the $176 million given to candidates in the first phase of the presidential election of 2016—$138 million to Republicans and $20 million to Democrats.

In What’s the Matter With Kansas? Frank argues that people like Mike are being greatly misled. A rich man’s “economic agenda” is paired with the “bait” of social issues. Through appeal to abortion bans, gun rights, and school prayer, Mike and his like-minded friends are persuaded to embrace economic policies that hurt them. As Frank writes, “Vote to stop abortion: receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. . . . Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meat packing. Vote to strike a blow against elitism, receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes.”

what I call a “deep story,” a story that feels as if it were true.

For the Arenos, religious faith has moved into the very cultural space in which politics might have played a vital, independent role. Politics hadn’t helped, they felt, and the Bible surely had.

For both Lee and the Arenos, at issue in politics was trust. It was hard enough to trust people close at hand, and very hard to trust those far away; to locally rooted people, Washington, D.C., felt very far away. Like everyone I was to talk with, both also felt like victims of a frightening loss—or was it theft?—of their cultural home, their place in the world, and their honor.

Many workers in the petrochemical plants were conservative Republicans and avid hunters and fishers who felt caught in a terrible bind. They loved their magnificent wilderness. They remembered it from childhood. They knew it and respected it as sportsmen. But their jobs were in industries that polluted—often legally—this same wilderness. They had children to take care of and felt wary of supporting any environmental movement or federal government action that might jeopardize them. The general talk around town was that the choice was between the environment and jobs.

structural amnesia,” as the British anthropologist Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard called it when studying something utterly different. Evans-Pritchard had been researching a pastoral people of the Sudan called the Nuer, who had a remarkable memory for some things and completely forgot about others. Men and women both remembered eleven generations of male ancestors, for example, but largely forgot their female counterparts. There was, the anthropologist sensed, a structure to what they remembered and forgot that was based on the power of the Nuer’s dominant institution—the kin system. Dominant within that system were men. So memory, Evans-Pritchard reasoned, was an indirect expression of power.

Harold adds an important idea to that of Evans-Pritchard. “The state always seems to come down on the little guy,” he notes. “Take this bayou. If your motorboat leaks a little gas into the water, the warden’ll write you up. But if companies leak thousands of gallons of it and kill all the life here? The state lets them go. If you shoot an endangered brown pelican, they’ll put you in jail. But if a company kills the brown pelican by poisoning the fish he eats? They let it go. I think they overregulate the bottom because it’s harder to regulate the top.” It isn’t just that the power structure rigs collective memory. It rigs the enforcement of rules too. The higher up the ladder of power, the more likely one was to get off; the lower down, the less likely. Environmental regulation was like that.

We’ll probably never see the bayou like God made it in the beginning until He fixes it himself. And that will happen pretty shortly, so it don’t matter how much man destroys.”

“We’re on this earth for a limited amount of time,” he says, leaning on the edge of the window. “But if we get our souls saved, we go to Heaven, and Heaven is for eternity. We’ll never have to worry about the environment from then on. That’s the most important thing. I’m thinking long-term.”

Louisiana has voted Republican in seven out of ten presidential elections. And in such older white crowds, this shift rightward seems bound to continue. As one man explains, “A lot of us have done okay, but we don’t want to lose what we’ve got, see it given away.” When I ask him what he saw as being “given away,” it was not public waters given to dumpers, or clean air given to smoke stacks. It was not health or years of life. It was not lost public sector jobs. What he felt was being given away was tax money to non-working, non-deserving people—and not just tax money, but honor too. If that tax money could come back to citizens—as a sort of “raise” in the midst of a three-decade-long national economic lull, why not? As with Mike Schaff, Lee Sherman, and the Arenos, conversations moved toward this rift between deserving taxpayers and undeserving tax money takers, those in a class below them.

Indeed, a gun vendor in Louisiana can keep no records, perform no background checks, and sell guns to an array of customers forbidden in other states: those with violent and firearms-related misdemeanors, people on terror watch lists or “no fly” lists, abusers of drugs or alcohol, juvenile offenders, and criminals with a history of serious mental illness or domestic violence. In 2010, the governor passed a law that permitted concealed handguns in churches, synagogues, and mosques. The next year, Louisiana had the highest rate of death by gunfire in the country, nearly double the national average.

The United States incarcerates a higher proportion of its population than does any nation in the world outside the Seychelles Islands—more than Russia or Cuba. Louisiana incarcerates the highest proportion of its population of all the states in the union, and those inmates are disproportionately black. It also houses Angola, the nation’s largest maximum security prison, in which rules are notoriously harsh. The prison is the site of the longest-standing case of solitary confinement in the nation—a black man, Albert Woodfox, who had been locked up for twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours a day for forty-three years before finally being released on February 19, 2016. So while the state boasts a reputation of an almost cowboy-style “don’t-fence-me-in” freedom, that is probably not how a female rape victim who wants an abortion, or a young black boy in Jefferson Davis Parish, or Albert Woodfox

I heard a great deal about freedom in the sense of freedom to—to talk on your cellphone as you drove a car, to pick up a drive-in daiquiri with a straw on the side, to walk about with a loaded gun. But there was almost no talk about freedom from such things as gun violence, car accidents, or toxic pollution. General Honoré was no nervous nelly, but he was mindful of the vulnerable communities around the “self-regulated” plants. “Part of the psychological program is that people think they’re free when they’re not,” he said. “A company may be free to pollute, but that means the people aren’t free to swim.”

The logic was this. The more oil, the more jobs. The more jobs, the more prosperity, and the less need for government aid. And the less the people depend on government —local, state, or federal—the better off they will be. So to attract more oil jobs, the state has to offer financial “incentives” to oil companies to get them to come. That incentive money will have to be drawn from the state budget, which may lead to the firing of public sector workers, which, painful as it might seem, reduces reliance on government and lowers taxes. It is a red state logic. But the paradox is that it goes with being a poor state with a lot of problems.

what sociologists Caroline Hanley and Michael T. Douglass call a “low road” strategy. Union bans, lower wages, corporate tax rebates, and loose implementation of environmental regulations are used as lures to get industry that exists somewhere else to move to one’s own state. Fifty years ago, such a strategy brought the New England textile industry to the South, and these days it is bringing Mercedes from New Jersey to Georgia, Toyota from California to Texas, and Nissan from California to Tennessee. Louisiana brought jobs into the state, not by nurturing new business in the state, but by poaching jobs in another state. The “high road” strategy, as the researchers describe it, is to stimulate new jobs by creating an attractive public sector, as California did in Silicon Valley and Washington State did in Seattle.

1992 study by the MIT political scientist Stephen Meyer, who rated the fifty states according to the strictness of their environmental protection. Meyer then matched regulatory strictness to economic growth over a twenty-year period and found that the tougher the regulation, the more jobs were available in the economy. A 2016 survey of the world’s major economies also found that strict environmental policies improved, rather than handicapped, competitiveness in the international market.

If, in 2010, you lived in a county with a higher exposure to toxic pollution, we discovered, you are more likely to believe that Americans “worry too much” about the environment and to believe that the United States is doing “more than enough” about it. You are also more likely to describe yourself as a strong Republican. There it was again, the Great Paradox, only now it applied to my keyhole issue: environmental pollution across the entire nation. Far from being an oddball state, Louisiana told a nationwide story.

do we need all the new plastic the American Chemical Association is promising us? Weren’t we entering into a strange cycle? Many people I was talking to carried around plastic water bottles, partly for convenience, partly out of distrust of local waters. And with cheap natural gas at hand, the American Chemical Association said it could triple the amount of feedstock needed to make plastic. But if we triple our plastics, more petrochemical companies will pollute more public waters, which will lead more people to pay for more plastic bottles filled with ever more scarce clean water. We’ll throw away more plastic bottles, buy more, and further expand the market for plastic, the production of which pollutes water.

Given automation and corporate offshoring, real wages of high school–educated American men have fallen 40 percent since 1970. For the whole bottom 90 percent of workers, average wages have flattened since 1980. Many older white men are in despair. Indeed, such men suffer a higher than average death rate due to alcohol, drugs, and even suicide.

All news programs address our emotional alarm systems, of course. But with talk of a “terror mosque” at Ground Zero, of the “left’s secret immigration plan” to wipe traditional America off the face of the earth, of Obama’s supposed release of the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, of his supposed masterminding the massacre at Fort Hood, Fox News stokes fear. And the fear seems to reflect that of the audience it most serves—white middle- and working-class people.

Moving backward, if one admits a problem, one is obliged to admit to a desire to fix it. But who might fix the problem of pollution? Companies weren’t volunteering. With regard to social support, churches lacked the mission and the money. Surprisingly, everyone agreed that if things were to be fixed, the federal government had to get involved. But if the federal government got involved, right-wing flags went up. It was too big, too incompetent, too mal-intentioned.

A deep story is a feels-as-if story—it’s the story feelings tell, in the language of symbols. It removes judgment. It removes fact. It tells us how things feel. Such a story permits those on both sides of the political spectrum to stand back and explore the subjective prism through which the party on the other side sees the world. And I don’t believe we understand anyone’s politics, right or left, without it. For we all have a deep story.

And President Obama: how did he rise so high? The biracial son of a low-income single mother becomes president of the most powerful country in the world; you didn’t see that coming. And if he’s there, what kind of a slouch does his rise make you feel like, you who are supposed to be so much more privileged? Or did Obama get there fairly?

As an ideal, the American Dream proposed a right way of feeling. You should feel hopeful, energetic, focused, mobilized. Progress—its core idea—didn’t go with feeling confused or mournful. And as an ideal, the American Dream did not seem to guide people in what to feel when they had attained some of their goals but not others—a state inspiring a more cautious impulse to protect what you already have.

The year when the Dream stopped working for the 90 percent was 1950. If you were born before 1950, on average, the older you got, the more your income rose. If you were born after 1950, it did not. In fact, as economist Phillip Longman argues, they are the first generation in American history to experience the kind of lifetime downward mobility “in which at every stage of adult life, they have less income and less net wealth than people their age ten years before.” Some become so discouraged they stop looking for work; since the 1960s, the share of men ages twenty-five to fifty-four no longer in the workforce has tripled. This stalled American Dream hits many on the right at a particularly vulnerable season of life—in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. It is a time during which people often check their bucket list, take stock, and are sometimes forced to give up certain dreams of youth. It’s a season of life in which a person says to him- or herself, “So this is it.”

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 slipping backward.

When the topic of blacks did arise, many explained that they felt accused by “the North” of being racist—which, by their own definition, they clearly were not. They defined as racist a person who used the “N” word or who “hates” blacks.

As I and others use the term, however, racism refers to the belief in a natural hierarchy that places blacks at the bottom, and the tendency of whites to judge their own worth by distance from that bottom. By that definition, many Americans, north and south, are racist. And racism appears not simply in personal attitudes but in structural arrangements—as when polluting industries move closer to black neighborhoods than to white.

The choice is not, Reich argues, between a governed and an ungoverned market, but between a market governed by laws favoring monopolistic companies and one governed by those favoring small business.

“They weren’t convinced. Why would they believe these ‘experts’? Just because some expert tells you X is true, doesn’t mean X is true. You know, if you’re making $1,000,000 a day on something and somebody wants you to stop it, you don’t say that’s the truth until you’re really convinced it’s the truth. I wouldn’t have believed it.”

Before the sinkhole, Mike had worked all his life for oil, an ardent, conservative Republican and, since 2009, an unconflicted Tea Party loyalist. He was a “free-market man,” he told me. But how free were people when companies were free to make methane gas bubble in your front yard? What was the Tea Party answer to that? This was the question before him.

The “federal government” filled a mental space in Mike’s mind—and the minds of all those on the right I came to know—associated with a financial sinkhole. In fact, after the 2009 government bailout of failing banks, companies, and home owners, the federal government seemed to side with yet more line cutters. Now debtors, too, were cutting ahead of people and the federal government was inviting them to do so.

And on the personal side there was one more thing—the federal government wasn’t on the side of men being manly. Liberals were certainly on the wrong side of that one. It wasn’t easy being a man. It was an era of numerous subtle challenges to masculinity, it seemed. These days a woman didn’t need a man for financial support, for procreation, even for the status of being married. And now with talk of transgender people, what, really, was a man? It was unsettling, wrong. At the core, to be a man you had to be willing to lose your life in battle, willing to use your strength to protect the weak. Who today was remembering all that? Marriage was truly between a man and a woman, Mike felt. Clarity about one’s identity was a good thing, and the military had offered that clarity, he felt, even as it offered gifted men of modest backgrounds a pathway to honor. Meanwhile, the nearly all-male areas of life—the police, the fire department, parts of the U.S. military, and the oil rigs—needed defending against this cultural erosion of manhood. The federal government, the EPA, stood up for the biological environment, but it was allowing—and it seemed at times it was causing—a cultural erosion. What seemed to my Tea Party friends to be dangerously polluted, unclean, and harmful was American culture. And against that pollution, the Tea Party stood firm.

the Tea Party movement is one in a long line of periodic heightened expressions “of a popular impulse endemic in American political culture,” as the historian Richard Hofstadter has noted. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, movements rose up against secularism, modernity, racial integration, and a culture of experts.

It's so unfortunate that secularism is put alongside these other three...

the past fixes patterns of class identification in our minds that we impose on the present. What might people be asked to want to feel? To believe they should feel? To actually feel? In broad, sketching strokes, what might be the impact of stories from grandparents, teachers, and history books on the ideas of those I’ve come to know?

On the heels of these movements for social change, a certain culture of victimization had crept in. And where did that leave the older white male?

Some 280 of the most profitable American companies had dodged taxes on half of their profits, according to a 2011 study,

For along with blue-collar jobs, a blue-collar way of life was going out of fashion, and with it, the honor attached to a rooted self and pride in endurance—the deep story self. The liberal upper-middle class saw community as insularity and closed-mindedness rather than as a source of belonging and honor.

Liberals were asking them to feel compassion for the downtrodden in the back of the line, the “slaves” of society. They didn’t want to; they felt downtrodden themselves and wanted only to look “up” to the elite. What was wrong with aspiring high? That was the bigger virtue, they thought. Liberals were asking them to direct their indignation at the ill-gotten gains of the overly rich, the “planters”; the right wanted to aim their indignation down at the poor slackers, some of whom were jumping the line.

His supporters have been in mourning for a lost way of life. Many have become discouraged, others depressed. They yearn to feel pride but instead have felt shame. Their land no longer feels their own. Joined together with others like themselves, they now feel hopeful, joyous, elated. The man who expressed amazement, arms upheld—“to be in the presence of such a man!”—seemed in a state of rapture. As if magically lifted, they are no longer strangers in their own land.

My friends on the right felt obliged to try to modify their feelings, and they didn’t like having to do that; they felt under the watchful eye of the “PC police.” In the realm of emotions, the right felt like they were being treated as the criminals, and the liberals had the guns.

while economic self-interest is never entirely absent, what I discovered was the profound importance of emotional self-interest—a giddy release from the feeling of being a stranger in one’s own land.

By 2016, Louisiana’s financial sinkhole had exacerbated the Great Paradox. Their beloved Louisiana still ranked 49th out of 50 on general well-being and 44 percent of its state budget still came from the dreaded federal government. The state itself was a “poor me” who had to “cut in line” in front of other states—a situation worsened by Jindal’s policies. But people weren’t talking about Jindal or the unmoving Great Paradox. They knew it was there. They disliked it. But it wasn’t on their minds. The deep story was. “Victim” is the last word my Louisiana Tea Party friends would apply to themselves. They didn’t want to be “poor me’s.” As Team Loyalists, Worshippers, and Cowboys, they are proud to endure the difficulties they face. But in the loss of their homes, their drinking water, and even their jobs in non-oil sectors of the economy, there is no other word for it: they are victims. Indeed, Louisianans are sacrificial lambs to the entire American industrial system.

Given our different deep stories, left and right are focused on different conflicts and the respective ideas of unfairness linked to them. The left looks to the private sector, the 1 percent who are in the over-class, and the 99 percent among whom are an emerging under-class. This is the flashpoint for liberals. The right looks to the public sector as a service desk for a growing class of idle “takers.” Robert Reich has argued that a more essential point of conflict is in yet a third location—between main street capitalism and global capitalism, between competitive and monopoly capitalism. “The major fault line in American politics,” Reich predicts, “will shift from Democrat versus Republican to anti-establishment versus establishment.” The line will divide those who “see the game as rigged and those who don’t.”

In an age of extreme automation and globalization, how can the 90 percent for whom income is stagnant or falling respond? For the Tea Party, the answer is to circle the wagons around family and church, and to get on bended knee to multinational companies to lure them to you from wherever they are. This is the strategy Southern governors have used to lure textile firms from New England or car manufacturers from New Jersey and California, offering lower wages, anti-union legislation, low corporate taxes, and big financial incentives. For the liberal left, the best approach is to nurture new business through a world-class public infrastructure and excellent schools.

I suggest we address our present-day political impasse through four pillars of activism. The first is to affirm in every possible way our precious and potentially fragile system of democracy: its checks and balances, its independent judiciary, its free press. The second is to recognize that if the Democratic Party is to pose a real, viable, attractive alternative to Donald Trump, it must address the grievances, the life experiences, the sense of losing ground, of people like those in this book. A third pillar of activism is the vote. We’re a democracy, but in the 2016 presidential election, voter turnout was at a twenty-year low. Four out of every ten eligible voters did not vote. Nearly six out of ten young people aged eighteen to twenty-four did not vote. We need to challenge unjust gerrymandering, needless long lines, and other voter restrictions, assure the reliability of voting machines, and above all encourage fellow citizens to exercise their priceless right to vote. Finally, to build the fourth pillar of activism I would reach across our painful partisan divide to initiate talks about race, robots, government, and more. Democrats might be surprised to discover that they are more isolated in their own political bubbles than Republicans are in theirs. According to a 2017 Pew poll, nearly half—47 percent—of Clinton supporters had no close friends who were Trump supporters, while only 31 percent of Trump supporters had no close friends who backed Clinton.