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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

“When I was a kid, you stuck a thumb out by the side of the road, you got a ride. Or if you had a car, you gave a ride. If someone was hungry, you fed him. You had community. You know what’s undercut all that?” He pauses. “Big government.”

I’d first seen Mike Schaff months earlier standing at the microphone at an environmental rally on the steps of the Louisiana state capital in Baton Rouge, his voice cracking with emotion. He had been a victim of one of the strangest, literally earth-shaking environmental disasters in the nation, one that robbed him of his home and community—a sinkhole that devoured hundred-foot-tall trees and turned forty acres of swamp upside down, as I shall describe. That raised a big question in my mind. The disaster had been caused by a lightly regulated drilling company. But as a Tea Party advocate, Mike had hailed government deregulation of all sorts, as well as drastic cuts in government spending—including that for environmental protection. How could he be both near tears to recall his lost home and also call for a world stripped of most government beyond the military and hurricane relief? I was puzzled. I sensed a wall between us.

An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances.

According to a 2014 Pew study of over 10,000 Americans, the most politically engaged on each side see those in the “other party” not just as wrong, but as “so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.”

Ninety percent of Democrats believe in the human role in climate change, surveys find, compared with 59 percent of moderate Republicans, 38 percent of conservative Republicans, and only 29 percent of Tea Party advocates. In fact, politics is the single biggest factor determining views on climate change.

Many livelihoods were at stake. From net to plate—fishermen, grocery stores, trucking companies, and restaurant workers—all were furious at the government officials who had declared the seafood advisory.

As Frankland, a Democrat, noted, “We could say, ‘Hey, there’s a federal law about clean water. You’ve contaminated our water. How’re you going to clean it up?’” But most of Frankland’s activists are now Tea Party Republicans and, like Lee Sherman himself, are averse to an overbearing federal government, and even to much of the EPA. There it was: the Great Paradox through a keyhole.

Lee’s biggest beef was taxes. They went to the wrong people—especially welfare beneficiaries who “lazed around days and partied at night” and government workers in cushy jobs. He knew liberal Democrats wanted him to care more about welfare recipients, but he didn’t want their PC rules telling him who to feel sorry for. He had his own more local—and personal—way of showing sympathy for the poor. Every Christmas, through Beau-Care, a Beauregard Parish nonprofit community agency, he and his wife, “Miss Bobby,” chose seven envelopes off a Christmas tree and provided a present for the child named on the enclosed card.

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.

I ask myself, again, how people in a poor state with the worst health in the nation can look askance at a federal government that provides 44 percent of its state budget, and how such a polluted state can take a dim view of government regulation of polluters.

In all the speeches, between the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning and invitations to gumbo cook-offs at the end, I am again struck by what both candidates avoid saying—that the state ranks 49th out of 50 on an index of human development, that Louisiana is the second poorest state, that 44 percent of its budget comes from the federal government—the Great Paradox.

When I ask him what he saw as being “given away,” it was not public waters given to dumpers, or clean air given to smoke stacks. It was not health or years of life. It was not lost public sector jobs. What he felt was being given away was tax money to non-working, non-deserving people—and not just tax money, but honor too. If that tax money could come back to citizens—as a sort of “raise” in the midst of a three-decade-long national economic lull, why not?

conversations moved toward this rift between deserving taxpayers and undeserving tax money takers, those in a class below them.

in 2010—the BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana. President Obama called it “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.” The blowout killed eleven workers and injured seventeen. It ruptured an oil pipe 10,000 feet below the surface of the water, from which oil gushed into the Gulf continuously for three months. The spill released the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez–sized oil spill every three to four days—for 87 days.

In response, President Obama ordered a six-month moratorium on deep-sea drilling until safeguards could be put in place, reasoning that it was better to have one disaster than two or more. No one knew for sure why the accident had occurred. At that time, the blowout preventer BP had used had never before been used at a depth of 10,000 feet. Even the robots used to explore the site of the blowout had never before been used, so no one knew if they would work. Thirty-two other rigs were still drilling in the Gulf using similar technology at such depths. BP itself did not object to the moratorium. Altogether, it seemed to many a wise step.

Loss of drilling revenue was one thing. But federal government “over-regulation” was another. “It’s not in the company’s own interest to have a spill or an accident. They try hard,” one woman told me. “So if there’s a spill, it’s probably the best the company could do.” Another recalled all the everyday things we use that are made from oil. One man even declared that “what caused the spill was overregulation. If the government hadn’t been looking over BP’s shoulder, it would have regulated itself, and the spill wouldn’t have happened.”

One woman summed it up: “The spill makes us sad, but the moratorium makes us mad.” The governor and senators of the state called for an end to the moratorium. In partial response, President Obama ended it a month early, but that earned him no points with those I spoke with. “What did Obama know up there in Washington?” they asked. In the speeches of the two congressmen a few years later, not a word was said about the spill.

An unlicensed vendor can sell handguns, shotguns, rifles, or assault weapons, and large-capacity magazines. A person can buy any number of guns and, except for handguns, need not register them, or report a theft of one, or hesitate to take them into parking lots and state parks. Louisiana also has a “Stand Your Ground” law, permitting a frightened homeowner to shoot first. A person can walk into a bar on Bourbon Street in New Orleans with a loaded gun.

Indeed, a gun vendor in Louisiana can keep no records, perform no background checks, and sell guns to an array of customers forbidden in other states: those with violent and firearms-related misdemeanors, people on terror watch lists or “no fly” lists, abusers of drugs or alcohol, juvenile offenders, and criminals with a history of serious mental illness or domestic violence. In 2010, the governor passed a law that permitted concealed handguns in churches, synagogues, and mosques. The next year, Louisiana had the highest rate of death by gunfire in the country, nearly double the national average.

Liquor, guns, motorcycle helmets (legislation had gone back and forth on that)—mainly white masculine pursuits—are fairly unregulated. But for women and black men, regulation is greater. Within given parameters, federal law gives women the right to decide whether or not to abort a fetus. But the state of Louisiana has imposed restrictions on clinics offering the procedure, which, if upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court, would prevent all but one clinic, in New Orleans, from offering women access to it. Any adult in the state can also be jailed for transporting a teenager out of state for the purposes of an abortion if the teen has not informed her parents.

Young black males are regulated too. Jefferson Davis Parish passed a bill banning the wearing of pants in public that revealed “skin beneath their waists or their underwear,” and newspaper accounts featured images, taken from the back, of two black teenage boys exposing large portions of their undershorts. The parish imposed a $50 fine for a first offense and $100 for a second. A town ordinance in Ville Platte (in which 54 percent of the population is black) requires residents to wear “something reflective” and visible from all directions on an outer garment when walking after dark.

Next to the death sentence, prisons are the ultimate instrument of regulation. The United States incarcerates a higher proportion of its population than does any nation in the world outside the Seychelles Islands—more than Russia or Cuba. Louisiana incarcerates the highest proportion of its population of all the states in the union, and those inmates are disproportionately black. It also houses Angola, the nation’s largest maximum security prison, in which rules are notoriously harsh. The prison is the site of the longest-standing case of solitary confinement in the nation—a black man, Albert Woodfox, who had been locked up for twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours a day for forty-three years before finally being released on February 19, 2016. So while the state boasts a reputation o...

Yet when people spoke indignantly of regulation, it was not abortion clinics and prisons that came to mind, but rather what the government was telling them to buy in stores. At a meeting of the Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana, across-the-table talk of regulation focused on the promotion of fluorescent or LED light bulbs: “The government has no right to regulate the light bulbs we buy,” one woman declared. “I made my husband change all my light bulbs back to the old ones.” Others complained of all the “forced” salads on the menus in fast food restaurants now. “I don’t need the government telling me what to eat,” one woman complained. “You remember that apron that says ‘If the cook ain’t fat, I ain’t eatin’ it?’” one woman asked to a round of happy laughter. Others were irritated by a local ban on driving on sidewalks, or on having more than one RV in your yard, and still others by child-protection devices. One woman recalled an age without child-proof lids on ...

In all the talk at the gatherings for Congressmen Boustany and Landry and around the table at the Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana, I heard a great deal about freedom in the sense of freedom to—to talk on your cellphone as you drove a car, to pick up a drive-in daiquiri with a straw on the side, to walk about with a loaded gun. But there was almost no talk about freedom from such things as gun violence, car accidents, or toxic pollution.

The logic was this. The more oil, the more jobs. The more jobs, the more prosperity, and the less need for government aid. And the less the people depend on government —local, state, or federal—the better off they will be. So to attract more oil jobs, the state has to offer financial “incentives” to oil companies to get them to come. That incentive money will have to be drawn from the state budget, which may lead to the firing of public sector workers, which, painful as it might seem, reduces reliance on government and lowers taxes. It is a red state logic. But the paradox is that it goes with being a poor state with a lot of problems.

So to begin with, I ask Paul, “How many Louisiana jobs are in oil and petrochemical plants?” “Today, less than 10 percent,” he answers. I am shocked. For all the talk of jobs, this seems below the level that would justify General Honoré’s remark that there was “just enough to” all the talk about jobs, that people felt threatened by the word “environmental” and gave an exasperated sigh at “regulation.” But later when I check his figures I discover that the highest estimate—offered by the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association—was 15 percent of all jobs in the state. The lowest—from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics—was 3.3 percent. (This included all jobs in oil and gas extraction, support activities for mining, petroleum, and coal products manufacturing, and pipeline transportation in 2014.)

After all the talk by Congressmen Boustany and Landry and others, why so few? The industry is highly automated. To build a petrochemical plant, you need many construction workers for a temporary period, and then their job is over. To run a petrochemical plant, you need a small number of highly trained engineers, chemists, and operators to keep watch over panels of gauge...

But a fracking boom was on, and maybe that meant more jobs coming in. According to the 2014 Sasol-sponsored Southwest Louisiana Regional Impact Study, some 18,000 jobs, a small proportion of them permanent, would open up by 2018. But seven out of ten of these jobs would be filled, the report said, by workers from outside southwest Louisiana. Many companies would recruit professionals from around the world. Construction workers building the “man camps”—barracks within enclosed encampments—were Mexican, people said. The man camps would house 5,000 pipef...

Perhaps oil jobs took priority, in official thinking, because oil brought in more state revenue. But severance taxes—fees paid when oil or gas is taken out of the ground—from oil contributed only 14 percent of the state’s budget revenue, down from 42 percent in 1982. It was the largest single source of revenue, though, and this was the rationale behind Governor Bobby Jindal’s plan to lure more oil and petrochemical business to Louisiana. (Oil companies also gave him a million dollars in campaign money, as my Tea Party interviewees were well aware. Critics also argued that the oil companies would come anyway since the oil, the pipe lines, the petrochemical plants, the port, the whole setup was already there.)

To offer an “incentive,” Jindal lowered corporate income taxes so that state revenue from such companies fell from $703 million in 2008 to $290 million in 2012. He lowered oil severance taxes so that the state received over $1 billion in 2008 but less than $886 million in 2012. It also lost another $2.4 billion between 2000 and 2014 because some oil companies were exempted from oil severance taxes altogether. (With approval from the state, new businesses are eligible to avoid paying local property taxes on new building and equipment costs.)

Indeed, according to the Louisiana Economic Development and Tax Foundation, Louisiana offers “the lowest business taxes in the entire country for new manufacturing projects.” And for three years it was impossible to tell whether the oil companies paid anything at all to the state since the job of auditing oil company payments was handed over to the Office of Mineral Resources, which has close ties with the industry and which, between 2010 and 2013, performed no audits at all. So apart from providing 15 percent of jobs in Louisiana, oil was providing less and less financial benefit to the state. Oil was costing more to lure to the state and, once there, gi...

“Oil brought in some jobs,” Templet says, “but it causes other jobs to disappear or simply inhibits other sectors—such as the seafood industry and tourism—from growing.” Oil rig explosions such as the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon blowout severely hurt the seafood and tourism industries—oyster fishermen, deep sea fisherman, wholesalers, restaurateurs, and hotel workers were impacted. No one wants to eat oil-tainted shrimp or vacation on beaches strewn with tar balls. Despite the implication of the annual Morgan City Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival, oil and seafood do not go well together. Oil cut jobs in another way too. The “incentive” money Jindal gave oil went hand in hand with the cuts to 30,000 public sector jobs—nurses, medical technicians, teachers.

One defense of oil jobs was that they were highly paid, and that salaries would “trickle down” through consumption that increased jobs and wages of other workers. But did it? “Not much,” Templet says. That’s because oil wages don’t trickle down; they leak out. As he explained, “Most of the plants are owned by foreign companies. Sasol is based in Johannesburg. Royal Dutch Shell is based in The Hague. BP is based in London. Citgo is a wholly owned subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela. Magnolia LNG is based in Perth, Australia. Phillips 66, spun off from ConocoPhillips in 2012, is based in the United States but not in Lake Charles. So most top executives in these companies are not building luxury homes and swimming pools in Lake Charles, Sulphur, or Westlake. Stockholders aren’t spending their dollars there either, but rather where they live, in Greenwich, Connecticut, say, or Mill Valley, California.”

The income of temporary Filipino pipefitters and Mexican green-card holders doesn’t “trickle down” either, since most dutifully send money back to needy families abroad. Indeed, some local citizens complained that imported Filipino workers don’t spend their money in local stores. Summing it up, Templet calculates that Louisiana “leaks” about a third of t...

Thinking again of the Great Paradox, I ask Templet whether the appearance of oil in Louisiana reduces the state’s poverty. “No,” he answers, “Louisiana was poor before oil came, and we’re poor today—the second poorest in the U.S.” In 1979, 19 percent of Louisianans lived below the poverty line; in 2014, it was 18 percent. In addition, ill-schooled poor people of any race find it hard to get the kind of highly skilled permanent jobs oil brings in. And oil hadn’...

Still, 15 percent of the people did get good jobs. Two-thirds of their salaries didn’t leak out. This was good news. But what was the whole picture? Perhaps oil in Louisiana represented a strategy for economic growth conservatives pulled for—what sociologists Caroline Hanley and Michael T. Douglass call a “low road” strategy. Union bans, lower wages, corporate tax rebates, and loose implementation of environ...

Fifty years ago, such a strategy brought the New England textile industry to the South, and these days it is bringing Mercedes from New Jersey to Georgia, Toyota from California to Texas, and Nissan from California to Tennessee. Louisiana brought jobs into the state, not by nurturing new business in the state, but by poaching jobs in another state. The “high road” strategy, as the researchers describe it, is to stimulate new jobs by creating an attractive public sector, as California did in Silicon Valley and Washington State did in Seattle. Perhaps, it occurred to me, the first strategy for e...

Many Louisianans I spoke with told me that, either by intent or in effect, environmental regulations kill jobs. This was the idea behind talk of “environmental wackos.” But Templet refers me to a 1992 study by the MIT political scientist Stephen Meyer, who rated the fifty states according to the strictness of their environmental protection. Meyer then matched regulatory strictness to economic growth over a twenty-year period and found that the tougher the regulation, the more jobs were available in the economy. 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.

Ironically, companies often privately give back to the community in gestures of goodwill. To do this they use the incentive money the cash-strapped state government has given them to lure them into the state in the first place. Dow Chemical gives to the Audubon Nature Institute. Shell Oil Company supports the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Pittsburgh Plate Glass pays for a “Naturelab–Classroom in the Woods” near Lake Charles. Sasol funds a project to record the history of Mossville, a black community its expansion displaced. The Louisiana Chemical Association gives to the Louisiana Tumor Registry. The people of Louisiana are now grateful—here Templet pauses for a moment of sad irony—“not just for jobs, but for gifts.”

a startling 2012 study by sociologist Arthur O’Connor that showed that residents of red states suffer higher rates of industrial pollution than do residents of blue states. Voters in the twenty-two states that voted Republican in the five presidential elections between 1992 and 2008—and who generally call for less government regulation of business—lived in more polluted environments. Residents in the twenty-two Democratic states that generally favor stricter regulation, he found, live in cleaner environments.

The California Waste Management Board paid Cerrell Associates $500,000 to define communities that would not resist “locally undesirable land use” (LULU).

The plant that the Waste Management Board wanted to set up would be hard to live near. The facility being considered would smell and sometimes be noisy. “Waste-to-Energy facilities also pose a potential health risk in terms of air pollution,” Powell wrote. “Emissions from a plant may include varying amounts of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrocarbons, and particulate matter and other matter for which health standards have not yet been established.” Company trucks could cause traffic congestion. The plant would reduce property values and provide relatively few jobs, he also pointed out.

So how can such a company get a community to accept it? The plant manager’s best course of action, Powell concluded, would not be to try to change the minds of residents predisposed to resist. It would be to find a citizenry unlikely to resist. Based on interviews and questionnaires, Powell drew up a list of characteristics of the “least resistant personality profile”: • Longtime residents of small towns in the South or Midwest • High school educated only • Catholic • Uninvolved in social issues, and without a culture of activism • Involved in mining, farming, ranching (what Cerrell called “nature exploitative occupations”) • Conservative • Republican • Advocates of the free market

Sasol also sought and received permission to use public water—thirteen million gallons a day of relatively clean water from the Sabine River. This it would use, pollute, and dump back in the Calcasieu River. In addition, the state granted Sasol permission to emit an estimated 10,000,000 tons of new greenhouse gases every year. No effort at carbon capture was proposed, and now that the door was open, more companies were submitting similar proposals, anticipating similar approval.

The disaster drew public attention to a vast underground world—previously unknown to me—and raised important questions about how a free-market economy in a highly regulation-averse culture was handling toxic chemicals in some 126 salt domes in Louisiana—plus more offshore—stored from 3,000 to 18,000 feet beneath the surface of the earth.

In the Napoleonville salt dome, a lively commerce was going on. Petrochemical companies own fifty-three caverns and some seven more companies rent space in them. These are valuable, large storage depots for the many chemicals used in oil drilling, fracking, and plastic manufacturing. Texas Brine rents six caverns. Dow and Union Carbide owns others into which they have pumped fifty million gallons of ethylene dichloride (EDC). While it surprised me to learn how far down into the earth free enterprise went, such underground storage systems have long been accepted practice in the Gulf region; the National Petroleum Reserves have themselves long been stored in a similar way.

Still, I wondered, if one company could drill one hole in one cavern and cause a sinkhole that made methane gas bubble in rain puddles, what else could happen, with earthquakes now in motion, and other EDC-filled caverns nearby—all in a culture in ...

My keyhole issue had taken me 4,000 feet down into the earth. And following it down the hole was the Great Paradox: the Tea Party feared, disdained, and wanted to diminish the federal government. But they also wanted a clean and safe environment—one without earthquakes sending toxins into aquifers or worse. But here was the rub: didn’t America need a culture of respect for the safeguarding o...

the secretary of the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources from 2004 to 2014, Scott Angelle, had known of the weak cavern wall but had given Texas Brine a permit to drill anyway. He had been transferred soon after the event to a different job

the caverns had been casually regulated. Similar accidents had occurred in the past and been forgotten—or remembered but discounted—like the structural amnesia the Arenos had encountered. Energy companies had understated the value of these caverns and their contents and had been undertaxed, it was discovered. The problem was not that the state government was too big, too intrusive, too controlling; it seemed to me that the state government had barely been present at all.