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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Victims were mad that Texas Brine “didn’t have a heart,” but not contemptuous.

state officials were seen as tepid followers of corrupt higher-ups, whose envied new SUVs were seen as “paid for by my taxes.”

Overall, just how well did Louisiana state officials do in protecting its citizens? An eye-opening 2003 report from the inspector general of the EPA offered an answer. Charged with evaluating implementation of federal policies by each state within the nation’s six regions, the report ranked Louisiana lowest of all in Region 6. Companies had not been required to submit reports. Louisiana’s database on hazardous waste facilities was filled with errors. The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (a title missing the word “protection”) did not know if many companies were or were not “in compliance.” Delays allowed sixteen facilities to discharge material into Louisiana waters without permits. The agency had failed to inspect many plants. Even when it found companies out of compliance, it had neglected to levy penalties or, if they ...

Why such low marks? Three reasons, the inspector general concluded: natural disasters, low funds, and “a culture in which the state agency is expected to protect industry.” As for lack of resources, funding for environmental protection had been cut in 2012 from a previous 3.5 percent of total yearly state funds to 2.2 percent. An alert auditor had also discovered that the state had accidentally “given back” about $13 million to oil and gas companies that it should have retained in taxes. As for the pro-industry “culture,” permitting was indeed relatively easy. According to the state’s own website, 89,787 per...

Sometimes the state simply lowered standards of protection. In an astonishing example of this, the Louisiana State Department of Health and Human Science offered advice to officials in other state agencies on what to tell the public about which fish are safe to eat. Issued in February 2012, and still online as of May 5, 2016, the report was written by one set of state officials for another. After a chilling description of a “cancer slope factor,” the report continues, in a matter-of-fact tone, to advise the recreational fisherman on how to prepare a contaminated fish to eat: “Trimming the fat and skin on finfish, and removing the hepatopancreas from crabs, will reduce the amount of contaminants in the fish and shellfish,” the document reads. Baking, broiling, and grilling are good, it said, because “the fat drains away from the fish and shellfish.” Discard “juices which contain the fat . . . to further reduce exposure,” it says. “Some contamination, like mercury and other heavy metals, however, are pervasive in the edible fish tissue,” the report continues, in scientific deadpan prose, “and remain in the fish and shellfish even after cooking.”

The report was shocking but it also made a certain grim sense. If the companies won’t pay to clean up the waters they pollute, and if the state won’t make them, and if poverty is ever with us—some people need to fish for their dinner—well then, trim, grill, and eat mercury-soaked fish. At least the authors of the protocol were honest in what was a terrible answer to the Great Paradox. “You got a problem? Get used to it.”

Mike Schaff and other Tea Party advocates seemed to be saying, “I’m above the government and all its services” to show the world their higher ideals, even though they used a host of them. For everything else it is, the government also functions as a curious status-marking machine. The less you depend on it, the higher your status. As the sociologist Thorstein Veblen long ago observed, our distance from necessity tends to confer honor.

A man from the Red Cross came asking for food for Sunday dinner for the homeless. I gave it to him because it’s food. But I don’t even want to go over there to see. Maybe they’re not trying to be independent. I don’t want to change my mind about giving the food. I want to give.” But he wanted to do it on the understanding his recipients were trying to better themselves, a requirement he worried liberals left out.

As I and others use the term, however, racism refers to the belief in a natural hierarchy that places blacks at the bottom, and the tendency of whites to judge their own worth by distance from that bottom. By that definition, many Americans, north and south, are racist. And racism appears not simply in personal attitudes but in structural arrangements—as when polluting industries move closer to black neighborhoods than to white.

Getting little or nothing from the federal government was an oft-expressed source of honor. And taking money from it was—or should be, Janice felt—a source of shame. The sharpest “burr under my saddle,” Janice declares, is “people who take government money and don’t work.”

“I know guys who work construction who quit so they can draw unemployment to hunt in season.” It was the same with disability payments, she said: “A friend’s daughter has a husband who works long enough to get hurt and puts in for disability. My own cousins, uncles, and brothers have done it. Sometimes there weren’t jobs; then it’s great to have welfare,” she allows. “But when there are jobs, why couldn’t they mow a church yard, or fold clothes at a care center, or clean out the school bathrooms? We pay them to do nothing—first through TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] and now through SSI [Supplementary Security Income, for elderly or disabled]. That’s not right. They should do something to help.”

Janice had even cooked up an imaginative scheme to bring jobs back to America: “America needs to dig up every rock and every headstone” of American veterans of World War II buried in France—which “hasn’t been a good friend to us”—she declares, and “bring them back to American land, and let American workers mow the lawns around them with American lawnmowers.”

As for government ownership of public lands, “We should hold on to the Grand Canyon, part of Yellowstone, a few others, but sell the rest of the national parks for development and jobs.” The government also controls too much—guns, for example. Without imagining her view would surprise me, Janice argues that handing out guns is the best way to create democracy in the Middle East. “If everybody had a gun and ammunition, they could solve their own differences. There are dictators because the dictators have all the guns and people have none. So they can’t stand up for themselves. If the government takes our guns away, the same thing will happen here,” she predicts darkly. Others echoed her sentiment.

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.”

“I’m not against stopping pollution, of course. I’m for regulating polluters,” Jackie says, but she quickly amends what she said: “I would be all for it if the government didn’t use pollution as an excuse to expand.” And environmentalists are not to be trusted either. “They push the government to expand and have their own financial interest in solar and wind too.”

In 1980, an even more disastrous drilling accident occurred in Lake Peigneur, about fifty miles west of Bayou Corne Sinkhole. Texaco had drilled a hole in the bottom of the lake and punctured an underlying salt dome. The resulting whirlpool had sucked down two drilling platforms, eleven barges, four flatbed trucks, a tugboat, acres of soil, trees, trucks, a parking lot, and an entire sixty-five-acre botanical garden. Miraculously, no one died. Days later, nine barges popped back up; two were never found. One man fishing in the lake that fateful day had tied his motorboat to a tree. But the tree itself began to move toward the vortex. Noticing it, the man quickly untied his boat from the moving tree and roared away at top speed.

One evening Mike looked across Crawfish Stew Street and saw Nick standing on his lawn alone. He was smoking a cigarette, spirals of smoke drifting upward into the empty night. “He’d lost his house to the sinkhole. His wife was ill. Their dog was dying. But I sensed he was feeling bad about something new,” Mike said. “So I walked across the street over to him. He’s just gotten word that his son had pancreatic cancer.” Mike put his hand on Nick’s shoulder, and the two men wept together for a long time.

Then came the Civil War, and the North devastated the South. Cities were burned, fields laid waste—some by the Confederate troops as they retreated. After the Civil War, the North replaced Southern state governments with its own hand-picked governors. The profit-seeking carpetbaggers came, it seemed to those I interviewed, as agents of the dominating North. Exploiters from the North, an angry, traumatized black population at home, and moral condemnation from all—this was the scene some described to me. When the 1960s began sending Freedom Riders and civil rights activists, pressing for new federal laws to dismantle Jim Crow, there they came again, it seemed, the moralizing North.

During this era a long parade of the underprivileged came forward to talk of their mistreatment—blacks who had fled a Jim Crow South, underpaid Latino field workers, Japanese internment camp victims, ill-treated Native Americans, immigrants from all over. Then came the women’s movement. Overburdened at home, restricted to clerical or teaching jobs in the workplace, unsafe from harassment, women renewed their claim to a place in line for the American Dream. Then gays and lesbians spoke out against their oppression. Environmentalists argued the cause of forest animals without forests. The endangered brown pelican, flapping its long, oily wings, had now taken its place in line.

As the 1960s transitioned to the 1970s, a movement focused on the social and legal system shifted into a movement focused on personal identity. Now to gain public sympathy it was enough to be Native American, or a woman, or gay. The patience of many on both left and right was tried. All these social movements left one group standing in line: the older, white male, especially if such a man worked in a field that didn’t particularly help the planet. He was—or was soon becoming—a minority too.

Many older males I spoke with were children or teenagers in the 1960s. 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.”

Even though the federal government had been an instrument of racial segregation in the past, it now stood for racial equality. A slow drum roll began: in 1948, President Harry S. Truman integrated the armed services. In 1954, the Supreme Court, through Brown v. Board of Education, integrated schools. In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in federal troops and the National Guard to enforce federal law integrating schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. And that set the stage for more federal action in the decade to follow. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy sent five thousand federal troops to ensure the right of James Meredith to attend the University of Mississippi. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the most sweeping civil rights law since Reconstruction. This was followed by an executive order for government contractors instituting affirmative action for minorities in employment. In 1968, Johnson banned discrimination in housing. 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.

The feminist movement followed the civil rights movement, picking up from earlier struggles for the right to vote, hold office, and own property in a one’s own name. A series of legal decisions strengthening the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment were now applied in places of work that received any money from the fede...

Over time, new groups were added to older ones, and political and therapeutic cultures merged. Identity politics was born. Identities based on surviving cancer, rape, childhood sexual abuse, addiction to alcohol, drugs, sex work—these and more came to the media’s attention. It became a race “for the crown of thorns,” the critic Todd Gitlin, a former 1960s activist, lamented in his book, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars. On the heels of these movements for social change, a certain culture...

Putting the 1860s and the 1960s together, white men of the South seemed to have lived through one long deep story of being shoved back in line.

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.

With the arrival in 2015 of Syrian refugees to the United States, fleeing the flames of war at home, one more set of faces seemed to my Tea Party informants to be pulling ahead in line—and they were dangerous, besides. Lee Sherman saw the Syrians as potential members of ISIS. “Ninety percent of them are men, and I think we ought to put them in Guantánamo,” he said. “But they aren’t enemy combatants,” I reminded him. “I know, but you can take the fences down, make it less like a prison,” he replied. “If you let them into the U.S. they will have all our rights to things.”

Comparing the refugees to Southerners during the Civil War, Mike Schaff, himself a refugee from the Bayou Corne Sinkhole, said, “General Lee led brave Southerners who, though grossly outnumbered and woefully under-armed, refused to flee their country as refugees. They stayed, fought, and many died. Their wives and children, many raped and murdered, also stayed to care for their homes. After their defeat, again, they did not flee. They stayed to eventually reshape our government. The Syrians should stay, take a stand, and fight for what they believe in. If you flee, in my mind, you’re a traitor unto yourself. This is harsh, I know, but sometimes we have to make tough choices.”

Jackie Tabor said, “We are protecting Muslims and persecuting Christians. Have you ever seen a Muslim charity event for people in need, or soup kitchen for the homeless? A Muslim Thanksgiving? Where is the Muslim name on the Declaration of Independence?” If Mike saw the Syrian refugees through the eyes of the 1860s, Jackie saw the official welcome offered them as...

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.

One cultural contribution the South has made to the modern national right may be its persistent legacy of secession. In the nineteenth century, the secession was geographic: the South seceded from the North. Between 1860 and 1865, the eleven Confederate states established themselves as a separate territory and nation. The modern-day Tea Party enthusiasts I met sought a different separation—one between rich and poor. In their ideal world, government would not take from the rich to give to the poor. It would fund the military and the national guard, build interstate freeways, dredge harbors, and otherwise pretty much disappear.

In contrast, the mood in postelection Berkeley, California, was gloomy. Worried talk turned to Trump’s impulsive leadership, his attacks on newspapers and on judges who didn’t agree with him. 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? But in Louisiana, his joyous supporters were asking: how could liberals worry about Trump’s sexual wandering and not remember Bill Clinton’s? Why had the mainstream press turned against a man who promises to improve the national trade balance, halt illegal immigration, and restore good jobs and national pride?

Tragically and powerfully dividing many white Trump voters from Clinton or Sanders supporters were many things, among them family lore, history books, church sermons, and regional culture, but looming large, I believe, is everyone’s luck of the draw—social class.

In the deep story, as felt by those I profile in this book, the weary worker waiting in line for the American Dream sees the federal government giving special help to people he perceives as line cutters. Some who benefit are citizens (blacks, women, public sector workers), and others are not (immigrants, refugees, recipients of American foreign aid). We can well understand the worn patience of the one waiting in line, because in truth for most middle- and lower-income Americans, the line has indeed stalled or moved back.