Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
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Ironically, the economic sector that stands to suffer most from big monopolies is small business, many of which are run by those who favor the Tea Party.
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Under the same banner of the “free market,” the big are free to dominate the small.
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Janice opposes abortion except under certain circumstances, but imagines there are “fifty million abortions a year, probably all Democrats.”
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Don’t make me change and don’t call me a bigot if I don’t.
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how, I wonder, did someone who so deeply appreciated nature, who did not avoid knowledge of injuries done to it, end up celebrating industry and the unrestrained consumption of all it produced?
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Presidents? You can’t see them and they don’t see you.
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it isn’t wise to wish for something too hard.
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Liberals seemed a problem for Jackie, because they believed different things and might get her children to believe them too.
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“Pollution is the sacrifice we make for capitalism.”
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“To live in civilization, you’ve got to take risks. There will be mistakes. You can’t succeed by just always being perfect. People have to learn from their mistakes.
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Why let that happen if there’s a known way to prevent it?”
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“The real strength we need is to stand up to industry and the almighty dollar.”
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One could be brave without being a Cowboy.
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“I pray one day I’ll be able to speak with no tears, just anger,”
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But how free were people when companies were free to make methane gas bubble in your front yard?
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A measure (SB 553) called for costs of repairs to be paid, not by the oil companies, but by the state’s taxpayers.
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A free market didn’t make us a free people,
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women renewed their claim to a place in line for the American Dream.
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And so it went—the federal government aiding a social movement of a people to take their rightful place in line for the American Dream.
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They made do with living farther away from their roots. They were ready to go when opportunity knocked.
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The liberal upper-middle class saw community as insularity and closed-mindedness rather than as a source of belonging and honor. And they didn’t see that, given trends “behind the brow of the hill,” their turn to be displaced might be next.
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“If you let them into the U.S. they will have all our rights to things.”
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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.
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A wiry older man in a black suit with a red tie holds up a sign, “KKK FOR TRUMP,”
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Trump tells his fans what he offers them. “I’ve been greedy. I’m a businessman . . . take, take, take.
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In other speeches Trump said, in reference to a protestor, “I’d like to punch him in the face” (February 23, 2016). “In the good old days they’d have ripped him out of that seat so fast” (February 27, 2016). “Knock the crap out of him, would you? Seriously . . . I promise you I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise”
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Trump focuses on eliciting and praising emotional responses from his fans rather than on detailed policy prescriptions.
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The act of casting out the “bad one” helps fans unite in a shared sense of being the “good ones,” the majority, no longer strangers in their own land.
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“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.”
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To white, native-born, heterosexual men, he offered a solution to the dilemma they had long faced as the “left-behinds” of the 1960s and 1970s celebration of other identities.
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Trump was the identity politics candidate for white men.
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He had done what he promised—reduced taxes and cut the public sector—but he left the state in shambles.
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The state itself was a “poor me” who had to “cut in line” in front of other states—
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Louisianans are sacrificial lambs to the entire American industrial system.
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politicians on the right appeal to this sense of victimhood, even when policies such as those of former governor Jindal exacerbate the problem.
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And issue by issue, there is possibility for practical cooperation.
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over the last eighty years, on eleven of twelve indicators, the economy has fared better under Democratic presidents than under Republicans.
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They enjoy the very high scores in health, education, and overall well-being that come with such affluence—they enjoy freedom from need.
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the right can’t understand the deep pride liberals take in their creatively designed, hard-won public sphere as a powerful integrative force in American life.
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many on the left feel like strangers in their own land too.
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The line will divide those who “see the game as rigged and those who don’t.”
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How, folks in Berkeley asked, could the patriotic right overlook Russian meddling in an American election? How could the Christian right vote for a man who boasts of groping women?
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Meanwhile Trump had chosen Scott Angelle—a Louisiana official Mike Schaff blamed for the lax oversight that caused the Bayou Corne sinkhole and devastated his home and community—as the new director of the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.
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But after the election, I woke up and cried for an hour and a half.
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“My Texas relatives are just like the people you wrote about. They voted for Trump and we can’t talk about it. I can’t even go home. You sound more hopeful than I feel.”
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“The New York Times tells lies,” although he admitted that he didn’t read it.
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A dark current of racism that has long run underneath the surface of American life was suddenly, nakedly, on view.
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if the New York–born Trump seemed to hesitate to condemn the KKK, most of the Louisianans I spoke to did not hesitate a minute.
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