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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

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.

What, I wanted to know, do people want to feel, what do they think they should or shouldn’t feel, and what do they feel about a range of issues? When we listen to a political leader, we don’t simply hear words; we listen predisposed to want to feel certain things. Some broad emotional ideals are shared across the political spectrum but others are not. Some feel proud of a “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” Statue of Liberty America, while others yearn to feel proud of a Constitution-abiding, work-your-own-way-up America.

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.

“Less regulated industries have more accidents and more regulated industries have fewer; regulation works.” Then with a wry smile, he continues, “But here we have ‘self-regulation.’ The federal EPA passes the buck to the state Department of Environmental Quality. The state passes the buck to the oil companies. They regulate themselves. It’s like me driving this truck 100 miles an hour down River Road. I call up the Highway Patrol and say, ‘Officer, excuse me. I’m speeding right now.’”

Summing it up, Templet calculates that Louisiana “leaks” about a third of the gross state product, the sum of the value of all goods and services produced by the state.

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 this was the growing consensus among Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) economists, I wondered why my Tea Party friends weren’t hearing about it.

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.

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. But that kind of extraordinary determination takes a certain kind of person—a deep story self.

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. “Oil’s been pretty darned good to us,” she said. “I don’t want a smaller house. I don’t want to drive a smaller car.” An operator job in an oil plant is a passport to houses in Pine Mist. One of those rare engineering job gets you into Autumn Run, and a high management job gets you into Courtland. The Arctic Cat, the SUV, the house: all these, she felt, came indirectly from oil. For its part, the federal government got in the way of both oil and the good life.

What she holds separate from this betrayal and pursuit of self-interest are the Constitution and the American flag.

“Pollution is the sacrifice we make for capitalism.”

“But you need some people who make it their business to know more about very complicated things, so that all available information can be brought to bear on complex issues.”

In the past, Mike had taken risks of a different sort himself. He had heard of a scientist who had testified at a public meeting, pointing out the dangers of a proposed dredging project. Angry workers felt his testimony would lose them work, and after the late-night meeting they ran his car off the road. Mike himself went to the same meeting hall weeks later to warn against the same project in the presence of the same glaring men. In the end, other men offered to escort him home. One could be brave without being a Cowboy.

But I began to wonder whether the white, older conservatives in southwest Louisiana—Team Player, Worshipper, Cowboy—were not themselves victims. They were braving the worst of an industrial system, the fruits of which liberals enjoyed from a distance in their highly regulated and cleaner blue states.

“A lot of people think the environment is a soft, feminine issue,” the General mused. “We need Mikes.” Don’t be a Cowboy in enduring pollution, he seemed to say. Be a Cowboy fighting it.

In his new activism, Mike’s long background in oil became a great asset. He knew the geology. He knew the economics. He knew the local lay of the land. He’d gained firsthand knowledge of dangerous chemicals. As a child he had crouched in the sugarcane field to watch the Piper Cub crop dusters fly low, their wheels nearly leafing through the tops of the cane stalks. After the pilot had sprayed DDT clouds and started to rise at the end of the row, Mike would pop up from the cane into the pesticide cloud to watch the plane turn for another pass. He knew about unawareness. But what was new for Mike was a close-up view of the politics—especially the attitude toward the environment expressed by Republican governor Bobby Jindal.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the state legislature set up the Southeast Flood Control Commission to come up with a plan for protecting Louisiana from floods. They concluded that the best course of action was to fill in the canals and repair the shore. Since this was a task the oil companies had in their contracts agreed to do, and had not done, in 2014 the commission did what had never been done: it sued the ninety-seven responsible oil companies. Governor Jindal quickly squashed the upstart commission. He removed members from it. He challenged its right to sue. In another unprecedented move, the legislature voted to nullify—retroactively—the lawsuit by withdrawing the authority to file it from those who had done so. A measure (SB 553) called for costs of repairs to be paid, not by the oil companies, but by the state’s taxpayers.

But how, I wondered, did that work—putting care for the environment together with the Tea Party call to defund—if not abolish—the EPA, along with other agencies of government? Mike’s answer was the free market. “Follow the money,” he said. “Make it in the financial interest of everyone to do the right thing.

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?

“From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the great sugarcane plantations border both sides of the river all the way . . . standing so close together, for long distances,” Mark Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi, “that the broad river lying between the two rows, becomes a sort of spacious street.” Along the seventy-mile strip, some four hundred graceful mansions, with two- or three-story white Grecian pillars, oak-canopied walkways, manicured gardens and ponds, are the ancient castles of America. They were built with profits from cotton. The new cotton is oil, but the plantation culture continues.

Confederates tried to get out from under the control of the federal government—to secede. But you can’t secede from oil. And you can’t secede from a mentality. You have to think your way into and out of that mentality. But they should get me in a different costume to talk about that.

Whatever their family’s view or their own, however much sympathy they may have personally felt for blacks at the time, the public narrative was that the North had to come to the South, as it had with soldiers in the 1860s and during Reconstruction in the 1870s, to tell Southern whites to change their way of life. History was on the side of the civil rights movement. The nation honored its leaders. Southern whites bore the mark of shame, again, even though, as one man told me, “We didn’t do those bad things.”

If in the nineteenth century the big planters had reduced the lot of the poor white farmer, twenty-first-century corporations had gone global, automated, moved plants to cheaper workers or moved cheaper workers in, and deftly remained out of sight over the brow of the hill. Some 280 of the most profitable American companies had dodged taxes on half of their profits, according to a 2011 study, but in the history-soaked deep story, you couldn’t see that. You were left to imagine it, to feel you couldn’t do anything about it. And to make matters worse, it was your sector, the free market, that was letting you down. Meanwhile, white wages leveled or sank and welfare expenditures rose.

Culturally speaking, the entire North had “cut in” and seemed to move the South to the back of the line, even as—and this was forgotten—federal dollars had steadily moved from North to South.

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. It was not easy to live by such a code. One woman of the right had a gay brother who had been married, had a child, and abandoned both “just because of sex,” and the episode had caused an upheaval in the family. In order to avoid the pain of divorce her own parents had caused her, one woman entered a covenant marriage. (Intended to strengthen the institution, covenant marriage was passed into law in Louisiana in 1997, and later in Arkansas and Arizona. It calls on the couple to sign an affidavit that they have undergone pre-marital counseling, and otherwise heightens the requirements for entry and exit from marriage.) She soon discovered her husband was gay, and while the couple later cooperated in raising their two children, she was glad she had tried to keep the marriage together “the way it should be.” The fourteen-year-old daughter of another mother became pregnant and kept the baby. “I’m working full-time and she’s got to finish school. Frankly it’s been very hard.” And it would have been easier for her young daughter, she feels, if she had had an abortion. But there was honor in keeping the baby and “doing the right thing”—an honor they felt to be invisible to liberals.

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.

As strangers in their own land, Lee, Mike, and Jackie wanted their homeland back, and the pledges of the Tea Party offered them that. It offered them financial freedom from taxes, and emotional freedom from the strictures of liberal philosophy and its rules of feeling. 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.

All this was part of the “deep story.” In that story, strangers step ahead of you in line, making you anxious, resentful, and afraid. A president allies with the line cutters, making you feel distrustful, betrayed. A person ahead of you in line insults you as an ignorant redneck, making you feel humiliated and mad. Economically, culturally, demographically, politically, you are suddenly a stranger in your own land. The whole context of Louisiana—its companies, its government, its church and media—reinforces that deep story. So this—the deep story—was in place before the match was struck.

“Collective effervescence,” as the French sociologist Emile Durkheim called it in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, is a state of emotional excitation felt by those who join with others they take to be fellow members of a moral or biological tribe. They gather to affirm their unity and, united, they feel secure and respected.

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. If the rally itself could speak, it would say, “We are a majority!”

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.

Outsiders can join those standing around the square, since a lot of people who are insiders now were outsiders in the past; incorporation and acceptance of difference feel like American values represented in the Statue of Liberty. But in the liberal deep story, an alarming event occurs; marauders invade the public square, recklessly dismantle it, and selfishly steal away bricks and concrete chunks from the public buildings at its center. Seeing insult added to injury, those guarding the public square watch helplessly as those who’ve dismantled it construct private McMansions with the same bricks and pieces of concrete, privatizing the public realm. That’s the gist of the liberal deep story, and 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.

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. An example is what many describe as the epicenter of a new industrial age: Silicon Valley—with Google, Twitter, Apple, and Facebook—and its environs, as well as the electric car and solar industries. The reds might be the Louisiana model, and to some degree, the blues are the California one.