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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

“I am so for capitalism and free enterprise,” Madonna tells me as we sip our sweet teas at a cafeteria. “I hate the word ‘regulate.’ I don’t want the size of my Coke bottle or type of lightbulb regulated. The American Dream is not due to socialism or the EPA. Sure, I want clean air and water,” Madonna adds, “but I trust our system to assure it.” Government workers do that, the thought streaks through my head. Still, in Madonna’s worldview, it seems that one has the police to protect one’s property, Rush Limbaugh to protect one’s pride, and God to take care of the rest.

In a startling 2006 PBS television show called Is God Green? Bill Moyers tried to interview top leaders of the evangelical churches—including the Reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and the Christian activist Ralph Reed. All of them referred Moyers to their shared spokesman, Dr. Calvin Beisner, an adjunct fellow at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Beisner, in turn, cited Genesis chapter 1, verse 28: “Then God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”

Word from the Lake Charles pulpits seemed to focus more on a person’s moral strength to endure than on the will to change the circumstances that called on that strength. The service offered a collective, supportive arena, it seemed, within which it was safe to feel helpless, sad, or lost.

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.

“How can you tell straight news from opinion?” I ask. “By their tone of voice,” she explains. “Take Christiane Amanpour. She’ll be kneeling by a sick African child, or a bedraggled Indian, looking into the camera, and her voice is saying, ‘Something’s wrong. We have to fix it.’ Or worse, we caused the problem. She’s using that child to say, ‘Do something, America.’ But that child’s problems aren’t our fault.” The Tea Party listener felt Christiane Amanpour was implicitly scolding her. She was imposing liberal feeling rules about whom to feel sorry for. The woman didn’t want to be told she should feel sorry for, or responsible for, the fate of the child. Amanpour was overstepping her role as commentator by suggesting how to feel. The woman had her feeling guard up. “No,” she told herself in so many words, “That’s PC. That’s what liberals want listeners like me to feel. I don’t like it. And what’s more, I don’t want to be told I’m a bad person if I don’t feel sorry for that child.” The social terrain around her—industry, government, church, media—lifted focus away from such a child’s needs and from her own detachment from them. Again, I was backing into her deep story by exploring what it shut out. But all deep stories do that, and we all have deep stories.

To some degree, the community had become the site of local production without being the site of local producers. They were victims without a language of victimhood.

I started with problems (which was one side of the paradox). Many locals resisted this focus. Didn’t I see how beautiful Louisiana was? Had I attended the Lake Charles Mardi Gras? Why such a gloomy focus? But I wasn’t making these problems up. They were there—pollution, health, schooling, poverty.

So maybe it was back to structural amnesia: Why the big fuss? What was the big problem? Didn’t other things matter more—ISIS, immigration, undeserving government beneficiaries?

Sure, some people cheat the government, I thought, and that’s wrong. But it is a very long leap between annoyance at cheaters and hatred of nearly all federal government. Why that leap? The best path to the root answer, I thought, was through their deep story.

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.

For the right today, the main theater of conflict is neither the factory floor nor an Occupy protest. The theater of conflict—at the heart of the deep story—is the local welfare office and the mailbox where undeserved disability checks and SNAP stamps arrive. Government checks for the listless and idle—this seems most unfair. 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.”

Feeling betrayed by the federal government and turning wholeheartedly to the free market, the right is faced with realities the deep story makes it hard to see or focus on. Giant companies have grown vastly larger, more automated, more global, and more powerful. For them, productivity is increasingly based on cheap labor in offshore plants abroad, imported cheap foreign labor, and automation, and less on American labor. The more powerful they’ve become, the less resistance they have encountered from unions and government. Thus, they have felt more free to allocate more profits to top executives and stockholders, and less to workers. But this is the “wrong” theater to look in for the conflict that absorbs the right—except when a company like Texas Brine causes a sinkhole like the one in Bayou Corne. And this may explain why much of the right isn’t bothered by something else—the unaligned interests between big and small business.

I was discovering 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.

Work had been a passport out of fear, poverty, and humiliation for her father and others a generation back. But Janice doesn’t base her own sense of honor or that of others just on money. She doesn’t base it on how gifted she is in her work, or whether her job makes for a better world—at least, none of this comes up. If people work as hard as she does, it is a better world. 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.

With my questions about the Great Paradox, I am myself another burr under Janice’s saddle, but I ask her my ultimate question: what about children born poor? Is she so indignant about idle parents that she won’t reach out to the child? Does she oppose Head Start or subsidized lunch? “I would hope that the child would say, ‘I’m going to work hard and get me an education and good job and get myself out of this environment,’” Janice answers. Beyond that, her solution is to get children “churched” and to limit the fertility of poor women.

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.

Not only her values, but even the kind of self she proudly exhibited—an endurance self—seemed to need defending, because it too seemed to be going out of fashion along with all the blue-collar jobs.

A newer cosmopolitan self, one that seemed uprooted, loosely attached to an immediate community, prepared to know a lot of people just a little bit, a mobile, even migratory self—this seemed to be coming into vogue. Such a self took pride in exposure to a diverse set of moral codes, but did a person with that kind of self end up thinking “anything goes”? It was frightening. It was wrong.

On the campaign trail, in the media, from the pulpit, and from industry I had observed a silence about pollution. It seemed like the kind of amnesia E.E. Evans-Pritchard had spoken of, the kind that had led the Areno family to remember the events on Bayou d’Inde in a spirit of defiance. This silence extends to Jackie’s personal world as well. “Pollution? I don’t talk about it much with friends,” Jackie muses. “This whole town operates off of oil. So I could be talking to two moms whose husbands work in the plants. They think government regulation will hurt jobs, or stop new plants from coming in. You don’t want to remind them of dangers. Or make them think you’re blaming them for the work they do. It’s too close to home.”

Jackie was a Worshipper. She had developed a worshipful attitude and a capacity for meaningful renunciation. Instead of overcoming her aversion to regulation, Jackie spoke of learning to live without it. In this way, she echoed Team Loyalists like Janice Areno. You accommodate. Clean air and water; those were good. She wanted them, just as she wanted a beautiful home. But sometimes you had to do without what you wanted. You couldn’t have both the oil industry and clean lakes, she thought, and if you had to choose, you had to choose oil.

As a Team Loyalist, Janice Areno had not allowed herself to feel too badly about pollution. Bayou d’Inde, the rubberized horse. As a loyalist to industry and the Republican Party, she defended herself against “too much” anxiety about pollution, the brown pelican, and human health. For her part, Jackie Tabor allowed herself to feel sad about these things. It was a terrible shame this had happened, she felt. But having permitted herself to feel sad about environmental damage, she renounced the desire to remediate it, because that would call for more dreaded government. Each had a different moment of emotional pause—Janice’s was on the act of admitting to loss and grieving it. Jackie’s important moment of emotional pause was upon the act of renouncing an important desire. A clean environment? Sadly, we can’t have it.

Exposed to danger in some of his jobs, Donny tended to stand brave against it and to honor bravery. Less exposed to danger, Tritico wanted to reduce the need for bravery. Donny said, in essence, “I’m strong. You’re strong. Mother Nature is strong. We can take it.” In this way, he resembled the Cowboy. Tritico valued the precautionary principle and said, in essence, “The real strength we need is to stand up to industry and the almighty dollar.”

A free market didn’t make us a free people, I thought. But I had slipped way over to my side of the empathy wall again.

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. This was a strange new expression of social conflict, undeclared, appearing on a new stage, with various groups undefined by class per se—blacks, immigrants, refugees—mixed in. And by proxy, the federal government was the enemy.

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.

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. But none before the Tea Party have so forcefully taken up the twin causes of reversing progressive reform and dismantling the federal government—a movement in response to the deep story. So within the long line of such movements, why this one? To answer that, we must look to two pivotal moments in history, I believe. One is the era of the 1860s, which has special meaning for the South. The second is the era of the 1960s, which resonates for the right wing across the nation.

In his classic The Mind of the South, W.J. Cash says that the plantation system “threw up walls [which] . . . enclosed the white man, walls he did not see.” The poor white did not see himself “locked into a marginal life” but as “a potential planter or mill baron himself.” Within those walls, the cultural imagination focused intently on two groups—the dominant and dominated, very rich and very poor, free and bound, envied and pitied, with very little in between. Rich planters sipped foreign wine under crystal chandeliers, seated on European chairs, in white-pillared mansions. They saw themselves not as wicked oppressors but as generous benefactors, and poor whites took them as such. At the other extreme, poor whites saw the terrifying misery of the traumatized, short-lived slave. This set in their minds a picture of the best and worst fates in life. Compared to life in New England farming villages, there was much more wealth to envy above, and far more misery to gasp at below. Such a system suggested its own metaphoric line waiting for the American Dream—one with little room for the lucky ahead, and much room for the forgotten behind.

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.

But such a self was less and less a source of honor, it seemed. Rising to the fore was another kind of self, a more upper-middle-class cosmopolitan self, with its more dispersed and looser friendship networks, its preparation to compete for entrance to big-name colleges and tough careers that might take a person far from home. Such cosmopolitan selves were directed to the task of cracking into the global elite. They made do with living farther away from their roots. They were ready to go when opportunity knocked. They took great pride in liberal causes—human rights, racial equality, and the fight against global warming. 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. And they didn’t see that, given trends “behind the brow of the hill,” their turn to be displaced might be next. For the Tea Party around the country, the shifting moral qualifications for the American Dream had turned them into strangers in their own land, afraid, resentful, displaced, and dismissed by the very people who were, they felt, cutting in line. The undeclared class war transpiring on a different stage, with different ac...

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.

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. Having once experienced the elation—the “high”—of being part of a powerful, like-minded majority, released from politically correct rules of feeling, many wanted to hold on to that elation. To do this, they fended off challenge. They sought affirmation. One woman with whom I spent six hours talked about Trump continually, countering possible criticisms, leaving no interstitial moments when skepticism might emerge. It occurred to me that the reason for this shield of talk was to protect her elation.

About three-quarters of the e-mails and letters I received after the book appeared came from Trump opponents who were in various states of shock. Some despaired of developing empathy for the right; still others distrusted it—didn’t I know this was a war?—a

Yet as if an anticoagulant had been introduced into the American cultural bloodstream, 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”). To this was often added the more familiar premise that most blacks were not as hardworking or law-abiding as whites. 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. Another complained about a friend’s son who was passed over for a place in college due to affirmative action but didn’t embrace the “slavery isn’t my responsibility” narrative. Disaggregated, such smaller narratives hung free, maybe to gather in some new way downstream. And to all this was the background presenc...

If automation is the big, hidden line cutter, why is it missing from our understanding of middle- and working-class resentment and from the deep story into which that resentment crystalizes? For one thing, we are invited to celebrate robots as a sign of progress, growth, greatness. They are technological marvels. They cut errors. They improve production. But whatever our politics, this leaves us at an emotional dead-end, for how can we get mad at wordless, raceless, genderless, home-made American robots cutting in line, one by one by one?

A national service program could place young Americans of every race, region, and religion in a yearlong service project somewhere far from home. We could set up a nationwide high school domestic exchange program—high school seniors from the South could spend a month with families of students in the North, and the North could, in this way, go South. Coasts could go inland, the inland head to the coasts. In Gretna, Virginia; Fairview, Kansas; and Ragley, Louisiana, students could prepare by learning active listening and epistemology—how we know what we know—as well as history and civics. Students could lay solar panels on school roofs, build parks, plant gardens. Maybe I’m just dreaming. But in this dream, as students wash dishes, hammer nails, and plant seeds, they also take on the questions that so bitterly divide us.

Appendix A: The Research This book is based on a kind of research sociologists describe as “exploratory” and “hypothesis generating.” The goal of it is not to see how common or rare something is, or where one does and doesn’t find it, or to study how the something comes and goes through time—although I draw on the research of others who address such questions. My goal has been to discover what that something actually is. I’ve long been fascinated by the emotional draw of right-wing politics; that’s my “something.” It took getting close and that determined my choice of method.

Altogether, I talked with sixty people and accumulated over four thousand pages of transcribed interviews. Forty of these were people who embraced the principles of the Tea Party. An additional twenty helped me understand the core group; they included scientists, academics, two former members of the Louisiana legislature, ministers, a newspaper reporter, a librarian and volunteer River Watcher, two professors, a former director of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, a former assistant attorney general of Louisiana, an environmental chemist, a marine biologist, and a mayor. Eight of this latter group were black.

Of the core group, roughly half were women and half were men. All were white and between the ages of forty and eighty-five. Their occupations placed them in the middle, lower-middle, and working class. Roughly one-third worked or had worked for oil directly (e.g., as pipefitters) or indirectly (e.g., as suppliers) and two-thirds were in lines of work unrelated to oil—teachers, secretaries, a flight attendant, and a trailer park owner, for example. Interestingly, attitudes across these groups varied very little.

What was the link, I became curious to know, between an American’s description of him or herself as a “strong Republican” or “strong Democrat,” attitudes about regulating pollution, and actual exposure to it. For that research and finding, see Appendix B.

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.”

This is a paradox, but not one born of ignorance. For the greater the risk of exposure to pollution, the more individuals are likely to answer “agree” to the statement “Industrial air pollution is dangerous to the environment.” The better off and more educated among them also expressed the idea that humankind can improve the environment. They disagreed that “it is too difficult to do anything about the environment.”

The Louisiana story is an extreme example of the politics-and-environment paradox seen across the nation.

Appendix C: Fact-Checking Common Impressions Often I felt that my new friends and I lived not only in different regions but in different truths. I would leave an interview wondering myself what the facts really were. So below I offer statements that I frequently heard, as well as the facts, as researched by Rebecca Elliott, based on the most recently available data, the sources of which are found in the endnotes.

“The government spends a lot of money on safety net programs.” About 10 percent of the federal budget in 2015 was aimed at keeping some 38 million low- and moderate-income working families out of poverty. Such funding includes unemployment insurance and Supplemental Security Income for the elderly or disabled poor. It also includes SNAP (food stamps), school meals, low-income housing assistance, child care assistance, help paying home energy bills, and aid for abused and neglected children. In 2014, the poverty rate was 15 percent; without safety net programs, experts estimate the rate would have risen to 27 percent.

“People on welfare depend entirely on money from us taxpayers to live.” For the poorest 20 percent of Americans, only 37 percent of their total income in 2011 came from the government; the rest was payment for work.

284 Actually, it does not See the review of environmental regulation by Eban Goodstein, Jobs and the Environment: The Myth of a National Trade-Off (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 1994). Also see Michael Porter and C. Van der Linde, “Toward a New Conception of the Environment-Competitiveness Relationship,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 9, no. 4 (1995): 97–118. Porter and Van der Linde argue that properly designed environmental regulations could lead to so much innovation they could completely offset costs of compliance. For a recent review of the literature, see John Irons and Isaac Shapiro, Regulation, Employment, and the Economy: Fears of Job Loss Are Overblown (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 2011).