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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 1960, when a survey asked American adults whether it would “disturb” them if their child married a member of the other political party, no more than 5 percent of either party answered “yes.” But in 2010, 33 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Republicans answered “yes.” In fact, partyism, as some call it, now beats race as the source of divisive prejudice.
Ninety percent of Democrats believe in the human role in climate change, surveys find, compared with 59 percent of moderate Republicans, 38 percent of conservative Republicans, and only 29 percent of Tea Party advocates. In fact, politics is the single biggest factor determining views on climate change. This split has widened because the right has moved right, not because the left has moved left.
Conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or liberal today.
During the depression of the 1930s, Americans turned to the federal government for aid in their economic recovery. But in response to the Great Recession of 2008, a majority of Americans turned away from it.
in the end, a healthy democracy depends on a collective capacity to hash things out. And to get there, we need to figure out what’s going on—especially on the more rapidly shifting and ever stronger right.
between 1972 and 2014, the share of whites identifying as Democrats fell from 41 percent to 25 percent, while the share identifying as Republicans grew from 25 percent to 27. (The percent of whites claiming they are independent also grew during this time.)
Purchased political influence is real, powerful, and at play, I think, but as an explanation for why any of us believe what we do, duping—and the presumption of gullibility—is too simple an idea.
while the far right is strongest in the South, most of its members make up a demographic—white, middle to low income, older, married, Christian—that spans the whole nation.
At play are “feeling rules,” left ones and right ones. The right seeks release from liberal notions of what they should feel—happy for the gay newlywed, sad at the plight of the Syrian refugee, unresentful about paying taxes. The left sees prejudice.
Everyone I talked to wanted a clean environment. But in Louisiana, the Great Paradox was staring me in the face—great pollution and great resistance to regulating polluters.
the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals posted warning signs about fishing and swimming, signs promptly riddled with bullets or stolen.
while his central life experience had been betrayal at the hands of industry, he now felt—as his politics reflected—most betrayed by the federal government.
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.
People on the right seemed to be strongly moved by three
concerns—taxes, faith, and honor. Lee Sherman was eager to lower his taxes, the Arenos to protect their Christian faith.
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. The politicians who most won their trust offered no help on cleaning the place up. And those who offered help, well, who were they? What were they pushing? That was the dilemma.
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.
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.”
Many of the Tea Party people I met seemed to me warm, intelligent, generous—not like people out of the frightening pages of Ayn Rand. They have community, and church, and goodwill toward those they know. Many, like Lee Sherman and Harold and Annette Areno, care deeply about the environment. But for each of them, there was something else, I was coming to realize, that was even more important.
When it comes up, they speak of the Democratic Party as a tattered memory from a distant past. One man says that he’d been waiting until his father died before he voted Republican, a comment greeted with knowing laughter around the table.
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?
I heard a great deal about freedom in the sense of freedom to—
But there was almost no talk about freedom from such things as gun violence, car accidents, or toxic pollution.
General Honoré had told me that talk was of jobs, jobs, jobs, and there was “just enough in it” that people believed it. He’d told me that the “psychological program” involved the belief that there was a terrible choice between jobs and clean water or air.
It wasn’t the simple absence of government Mike wanted, it was the feeling of being inside a warm, cooperative group. He thought the government replaced that.
Companies made money and were beholden to stockholders; it was understandable if they tried to “cover their ass,” people told me. But the government was paid to protect people, so one could expect much more of them.
him, the more reason he has to be a yes man to Jindal and oil. To me, a public servant who doesn’t make very much is more likely to be dedicated to what he’s doing.” Mike’s idea of dedication was modeled on the church.
my criticisms were based on a faith in the idea of good government.
our distance from necessity tends to confer honor.
I count all the reasons Mike disdained government. It displaced community. It took away individual freedom. It didn’t protect the citizenry. Its officials didn’t live like nuns. And the federal government was a more powerful, distant, untrustworthy version of the state government. Beyond that, Mike was surrounded by a local culture of endurance and adaptation; if fish have mercury, cut around the dark meat and eat the white. It was this culture of adaptation that Mike himself would later challenge, as we shall see.
over their heads, the federal government was taking money from the workers and giving
it to the idle. It was taking from people of good character and giving to people of bad character.
According to a 2010 Pew Research Center report, 41 percent of all Americans believe the Second Coming “probably” or “definitely” will happen by the year 2050.
None of the people I talked to one-on-one, off-and-on, over five years used the extreme language I heard on Fox.
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.
The deep story of the right, the feels-as-if story, corresponds to a real structural squeeze. People want to achieve the American Dream, but for a mixture of reasons feel they are being held back, and this leads people of the right to feel frustrated, angry, and betrayed by the government. Race is an essential part of this story.
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.
All the women I talked to worked, used to work, or were about to return to work. But their political feelings seemed based on their role as wives and mothers—
even within these conservative groups, women are more likely than men to appreciate the government’s role in helping the disadvantaged, in making contraception available, in equal pay for equal work.
The women I spoke to seemed to sense that if we chop away large parts of the government, women stand to lose far more than men, for women outnumber men as government workers and as beneficiaries.
When I asked one couple what proportion of people on welfare were gaming the system, the woman estimated 30 percent while her husband estimated 80 percent.
If unfairness in Occupy is expressed in the moral vocabulary of a “fair share” of resources and a properly proportioned society, unfairness in the right’s deep story is found in the language of “makers” and “takers.”
Just as various nations back different sides in a foreign war, fighting each other on a “proxy” battlefront, in the same way those I spoke with seemed to talk about the federal government and the free market. The free market was the unwavering ally of the good citizens waiting in line for the American Dream. The federal government was on the side of those unjustly “cutting in.”
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.
But it is very hard to criticize an ally, and the right sees the free market as its ally against the powerful alliance of the federal government and the takers.
In the undeclared class war, expressed through the weary, aggravating, and ultimately enraging wait for the American Dream, those I came to know developed a visceral hate for the ally of the “enemy” cutters in line—the federal government. They hated other people for needing it. They rejected their own need of it—even to help clean up the pollution in their backyard.
In the course of her work life, she had learned to tough things out, to endure. Endurance wasn’t just a moral value; it was a practice. It was work of an emotional sort. Not claiming to be a victim, accommodating the downside of loose regulations out of a loyalty to free enterprise—
three distinct expressions of this endurance self in different people around Lake Charles—the Team Loyalist, the Worshipper, and the Cowboy, as I came to see them. Each kind of person expresses the value of endurance and expresses a capacity for it. Each attaches an aspect of self to this heroism. The Team Loyalist accomplishes a team goal, supporting the Republican Party. The Worshipper sacrifices a strong wish. The Cowboy affirms a fearless self.
Getting little or nothing from the federal government was an oft-expressed source of honor. And taking money from it was—or should be, Janice felt—a source of shame.
