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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Janice is stoutly proud that, like her dad, she never “took a dime from the government. . . . For five years at the telephone company and forty-three years here . . . I never one time ever drew an unemployment check or got any government assistance,” she says, adding, “I did get a small student loan when I was going to college—back then the government didn’t just give it to you—and I paid every nickel of it back.” 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. The sharpest “burr under my saddle,” Janice declares, is “people who take government money and don’t work.”

Her feeling about work is part of a larger moral code that shapes her feelings about those ahead and behind her in line for the American Dream. “Hard” is the important idea. More than aptitude, reward, or consequence, hard work confers honor. It comes with clean living and being churched. Those getting ahead of her in line don’t share these beliefs, she feels. Liberals—those associated with the social movements that brought in the line cutters—share a looser, less defined moral code, she feels. Liberals don’t give personal morality itself its full due, probably because they aren’t churched.

many I interviewed estimated that a third to a half of all U.S. workers were employed by the federal government—a common estimate was 40 percent. (Not knowing the figures myself, I looked them up. In 2013, 1.9 percent of American workers were civilian federal employees, and that percentage has declined over the last ten years.

She felt loyal to capitalism as it worked through the petrochemical plants of Sulphur, Louisiana, the system that produced the miracle of her father’s wage and her own. She wanted others to want to feel loyal to it. Wasn’t it obvious? What else, besides family and church, was there worth feeling loyal to? Such devotion wasn’t respected, she felt. Indeed, she had to defend that devotion from a liberal perspective, which she associated with a morally lax, secular, coastal-based culture. It was one thing for certain categories of people to cut in line, but it was another to have false notions of the good and the true gain popularity and edge out her truer ones. Instead of the country agreeing with her community on the natural rightness of heterosexual marriage as the center of family life, she was now obliged to defend herself against the idea that these views were sexist, homophobic, old-fashioned, and backward. She also needed to defend her notion of the line itself. She didn’t want to appear to critics as hard-hearted regarding the poor, immigrants, Syrian refugees. They simply shouldn’t be ahead of her in line.

She was doing yet more emotional work disregarding the downside of life in the buckle of America’s energy belt. She was focused on the upside. Industry was a loyal friend to her, and she to it. As for pollution, “A company has a job to do; it’s making things people want and need. Just like people have to go to the bathroom, plants do too. You can’t just say, ‘don’t do it.’” But while she sided with Citgo, with Sasol, with Monsanto and other companies in the state, Janice felt obliged to set aside problems she knew existed but had decided to accept.

Janice Areno had accommodated environmental pollution through loyalty to job-providing industries and the party she identified with them. Jackie Tabor had accommodated it because it was “the sacrifice we make for capitalism.” Donny accommodated out of respect for bravery. Each expressed a deep story self.

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.

It isn’t the origin of certain ideas in history that I am curious about, as much as the way 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?

After the Civil War, the North replaced Southern state governments with its own hand-picked governors. The profit-seeking carpetbaggers came, it seemed to those I interviewed, as agents of the dominating North. Exploiters from the North, an angry, traumatized black population at home, and moral condemnation from all—this was the scene some described to me. When the 1960s began sending Freedom Riders and civil rights activists, pressing for new federal laws to dismantle Jim Crow, there they came again, it seemed, the moralizing North. And again, Obamacare, global warming, gun control, abortion rights

“We’ve always been a plantation state,” Oliver Houck, a Tulane University law professor, observes. “What oil and gas did is replace the agricultural with an oil ‘plantation culture.’” Like cotton, oil is a single commodity requiring huge investment and has, like cotton and sugar, come to dominate the economy.

On the positive side, oil offers to restore lost honor. For if the plantation system brought shame to the South in the eyes of the nation, oil has brought pride.

So for older white men, the 1960s presented a delicate dilemma. On one hand, they did want to stand up, come forward, and express an identity like so many others had done. Why not us too? On the other hand, as members of the right, they had objected in principle to cutting in line, and disliked the overused word “victim.” Still—and this was unsayable—they were beginning to feel like victims. Others had moved forward; they were the left behind. They disliked the word “suffer,” but they had suffered from wage cuts, the dream trap, and the covert dishonor of being the one group everyone thought stood unfairly ahead of the line. Culturally speaking, the entire North had “cut in” and seemed to move the South to the back of the line,

He was in conflict and responded to it by seeking honor in other ways. First, he would claim pride in work. But work had become less and less secure, and again, wages for the bottom 90 percent remained flat.

If he couldn’t take pride in work, the Tea Party man tried region and state, and there too he ran into difficulty. Most people I talked to loved the South, loved Louisiana, loved their town or bayou. But they were sadly aware of its low status. “Oh we’re the flyover state,” one Tea Party teacher told me. “We’re seen as backward and poor,” another complained.

If region and state couldn’t serve as a basis for honor, surely strong family values could. Even when they couldn’t manage to live up to their moral code—which favored lifelong, heterosexual, monogamous, pro-life marriage—they took pride in the code itself.

But being Christian and taking Jesus as your savior was for Janice, Jackie, Madonna, and others a way of saying, “I commit myself to being a moral person. I daily try to be good, to help, to forgive, and in fact to work hard at being good.” “If I know a person is a Christian,” one woman told me, “I know we have a lot in common. I’m more likely to trust that he or she is a moral person than I would a non-Christian.” Underlying all these other bases of honor—in work, region, state, family life, and church—was pride in the self of the deep story. The people I came to know had sacrificed a great deal and found honor in sacrifice.

What seemed like a problem to liberals—the fact that conservatives identify “up,” with the 1 percent, the planter class—was actually a source of pride to the Tea Party people I came to know. It showed you were optimistic, hopeful, a trier. It wasn’t a problem that you seldom looked behind you in line. Why would you want to blame a guy if he got all the way to the top? they wondered. That gaze forward, even when matters seemed hopeless, was a feature of the brave deep story self.

Many upper-middle-class liberals, white and black, didn’t notice what, emotionally speaking, their kind of self was displacing. 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.

Trump is an “emotions candidate.” More than any other presidential candidate in decades, Trump focuses on eliciting and praising emotional responses from his fans rather than on detailed policy prescriptions. His speeches—evoking dominance, bravado, clarity, national pride, and personal uplift—inspire an emotional transformation. Then he points to that transformation.

As if magically lifted, they are no longer strangers in their own land.

People gather around what Durkheim calls a “totem”—a symbol such as a cross or a flag. Leaders associate themselves with the totem and charismatic leaders can become totems themselves. The function of the totem is to unify worshippers. Seen through Durkheim’s eyes, the real function of the excited gathering around Donald Trump is to unify all the white, evangelical enthusiasts who fear that those “cutting ahead in line” are about to become a terrible, strange, new America. The source of the awe and excitement isn’t simply Trump himself; it is the unity of the great crowd of strangers gathered around him.

One way of reinforcing this “high” of a united brother- and sisterhood of believers is to revile and expel members of out groups. In his speeches, Trump has spoken of “something within Islam which hates Christians,” and of his intention to ban all Muslims from entering the country. He has spoken of expelling all undocumented people of Mexican origin.

In other words, the far right felt that the deep story was their real story and that there was a false PC cover-up of that story. They felt scorned. “People think we’re not good people if we don’t feel sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees,” one man told me. “But I am a good person and I don’t feel sorry for them.”

So it was with joyous relief that many heard a Donald Trump who seemed to be wildly, omnipotently, magically free of all PC constraint. He generalized about all Muslims, all Mexicans, all women

Trump jovially imitated a disabled journalist by physically shaking his arm in imitation of palsy—all deeply derogatory actions in the eyes of Trump’s detractors but liberating to those who had felt constrained to pretend sympathy. Trump allowed them both to feel like a good moral American and to feel superior to those they considered “other” or beneath them.

Madonna Massey, the lively gospel singer who took Rush Limbaugh as her “brave heart,” was shocked to discover that her teenage daughter, Chapel, had downloaded “Anaconda” on her iPad—a video of the highly popular, black, scantily clad diva, Nicki Minaj doing buttock-mobilizing “twerking.” When Chapel returned from school, Madonna spanked her, banished her iPad, unhinged her bedroom door, and stored it in the garage for a month. “Minaj is at the top of Billboard Top 100. Look at the culture we’ve got to protect our kids from,” Madonna told me the last time I saw her.

Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Over the next year I made three trips back to Louisiana to see how the people I’d come to know over the previous half decade were feeling. They were ecstatic. All those I profiled in the book and most of their kin, friends, and fellow parishioners had voted for Trump. “Mornings I have to pinch myself,” Mike Schaff wrote in an e-mail a few months after the election, “to make sure it really happened.”

But in Louisiana, his joyous supporters were asking: how could liberals worry about Trump’s sexual wandering and not remember Bill Clinton’s? Why had the mainstream press turned against a man who promises to improve the national trade balance, halt illegal immigration, and restore good jobs and national pride?

At first I thought he was a joke. But when he talked about bringing good jobs back, building the wall against illegal immigrants, taking a businessman’s eye to government, I changed to a ‘yes.’” Trump spoke to Sharon’s sense that she was a stranger in her own land, a feeling echoed across the country by millions who voted for him. Those who told postelection pollsters that “things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country” and that the “U.S. needs protecting against foreign influence” were three and a half times more likely to favor Trump than those who did not.

“Look, David, if you want to sell solar panels to guys like me, tell them you can make them energy independent. Feeding clean energy back into the grid, you can make them free entrepreneurs. Just don’t mention climate change.”

Ray held two opinions that to him seamlessly cohered. On one hand, he condemned the Charlottesville KKK in no uncertain terms: “Those idiots with the flags—the American, Confederate, and Nazi flags all together—their whole white supremacist thing . . . How stupid can you get?” On the other hand, he also felt the white supremacists were giving the American and the Confederate flag “a bad rep,” since the latter represented the honor he felt should be properly accorded young men who defended a Southern “homeland” against a Northern “invader.” The homeland he imagined was very like that in which his own ancestors—poor white Kentucky farmers and horsemen—had grown up, and in which there were no slaves.

smaller stories kept appearing, each suggesting an emotional tagline. There was the story of the Confederate flag as a matter of regional pride (“Don’t shame us”). There was the story of “my ancestors were too poor to own slaves” (“Don’t guilt-trip us”). There was the story of affirmative action whereby whites are victims (“Understand our resentment, desires, and needs”), and there was the story of moral strengths (“Black athletes who won’t stand for the Pledge of Allegiance aren’t as grateful to be American as we are. We are the real patriots; respect us for that”).

What these subnarratives shared, I felt, was the absence of historical context. It was as if the people I came to know strongly disavowed any unitary premise that fit my initial definition of racism. But given that, they adopted smaller narratives that hung free, the one from the other: one man was incensed by black athletes who knelt for the pledge but had no special feelings for the Confederate flag.

So race, class, national identity, religion, region, views of gender and sexual orientation—all these joined to reinforce a sense that, outside of Louisiana, too, a precious way of life, like the nation itself, was being left behind.

So if, relatively speaking, black wages have not risen, and if despite educational gains women’s wages have yet to reach parity, and if between 2009 and 2014 more Mexicans left the United States than entered it, and if in a state like Louisiana there are relatively few anyway—just who is cutting in line? For the most part, the real line cutters are not people one can blame or politicians can thunder against. That’s because they’re not people. They’re robots. Nothing is changing the face of American industry faster than automation, and nowhere is that change more stark than in the cornerstone of Louisiana’s industrial wealth, oil. According to a 2017 Bloomberg report, “Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs,” Nabors Industries, the world’s largest onshore driller, expects to cut the average number of workers at each oil well site from twenty to five.

According to a McKinsey Global Institute study of two thousand work activities across eight hundred occupations, “half of today’s work activities could be automated by 2055.”

In manufacturing, studies show, the main cause of job loss is automation. But job loss isn’t the whole story. If a male worker is displaced from a well-paid job as a factory technician, he may find a new job, but it may be in the service sector—working as a home health aide or stocking shelves. Robots aren’t simply displacing white men; they are bumping them down into lower-paid jobs that women and blacks have traditionally done.

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.

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.

According to a Fox News poll, a quarter of Trump voters held a positive view of Bernie Sanders, and from 6 to 12 percent of Sanders fans later voted for President Trump.

The most interesting findings are these: as the relative riskiness of the county a person lived in increased, the more likely that person was to agree with the statement “People worry too much about human progress harming the environment.” So the higher the exposure to environmental pollution, the less worried the individual was about it—and the more likely that person was to define him- or herself as a “strong Republican.”