Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
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“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.”
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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.”
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“My kids were watching a program called Victorious on the Disney Channel, which I thought would be fine,” but the commentator started to talk about global warming. “We don’t believe in global warming.” That belief, too, seemed like an excuse for government expansion, part of the betrayal. “The commentator said that people that watch Fox News are idiots. It was a good thing I was watching TV with the kids and caught that. I thought, ‘How long are my kids going to believe me over them?’ A year? Six months?”
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Meanwhile, as we drive past the American flag draped over a stone at the edge of her neighbor’s yard, into the carport beside the Arctic Cat, with a small, sad shake of her head, Jackie says, “Pollution is the sacrifice we make for capitalism.”
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But, presented with the idea, the Tea Party faces went blank. The environment? That was a liberal cause. One man confused the Green Army with the Green Party. To Mike’s astonishment, another member suggested moving the burden from the Louisiana taxpayer to the nation’s taxpayers.
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Looking back at my previous research, I see that the scene had been set for Trump’s rise, like kindling before a match is lit. Three elements had come together. Since 1980, virtually all those I talked with felt on shaky economic ground, a fact that made them brace at the very idea of “redistribution.” They also felt culturally marginalized: their views about abortion, gay marriage, gender roles, race, guns, and the Confederate flag all were held up to ridicule in the national media as backward. And they felt part of a demographic decline; “there are fewer and fewer white Christians like us,” ...more
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“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.
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The costumes, hats, signs, and symbols reaffirm this new sense of unity. To those who attend his rallies, the event itself symbolizes a larger rising tide. As the crowd exited the hangar, fans were saying to one another, “See how many of us there are.” It felt to them that Trump had captured the flag.
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Around the world in the early twenty-first century, as the multinational companies that roam the globe become more powerful than the political states vying for their favor, it is the right wing that is on the move. Rightwing regimes—focused on national sentiment, strong central rule, and intolerance for minorities or dissent—have come to power in Russia, where President Putin has declared dissident voices as a sign of weakness and “Western influence”; in India, where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has declared India a “Hindu” nation; in Hungary, where anti-Soviet monuments are being replaced ...more
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Nearly every Tea Party advocate I talked to had voted for Jindal twice, because he promised to enact their values. But after eight years of his governance, they hated the result. He had done what he promised—reduced taxes and cut the public sector—but he left the state in shambles. Still, Jindal already seemed forgotten. Speaking of Edwards trying to pick up the pieces, many echoed a comment by Mike Schaff: “Now we have a Democratic governor, and the first thing he does is raise taxes.”
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