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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

while I have my views too, as a sociologist I had a keen interest in how life feels to people on the right—that is, in the emotion that underlies politics. To understand their emotions, I had to imagine myself into their shoes. Trying this, I came upon their “deep story,” a narrative as felt.

All this work led me to believe strongly in paid parental leave for working parents of newborns and adoptive babies—a policy offered by all the world’s major industrial nations except the United States. Now that most American children live in homes in which all adults work, the idea of paid parental leave seemed to me highly welcome, humane, overdue. But this ideal has come slam up against a new truth—many on the right oppose the very idea of government help for working families. In fact, apart from the military, they don’t want much government at all. Other ideals—strengthening environmental protection, averting global warming, ending homelessness—face the same firmly closed door. If we want government help in achieving any of these goals, I realized, we need to understand those who see government more as problem than solution. And so it was that I began my journey to the heart of the American right.

Already in the late 1960s, sensing a split in American culture, my husband Adam and I set off to live for a month in Kings Kauai Garden Apartments—complete with jungle bird and beast sound effects piped into a common jungle decorated patio—in Santa Ana, California, to try to get to know members of the John Birch Society, an earlier right-wing precursor to the Tea Party. We attended meetings of the society and talked to as many people as we could. Many members we met had grown up in small towns in the Midwest and felt deeply disoriented in California’s anomic suburbs, an unease they transformed into a belief that American society was at risk of being taken over by communists. Looking around, we could well understand why they felt “taken over”—in a few years, entire orange groves had disappeared into parking lots and shopping malls, a case of wildly unplanned urban sprawl. We too felt taken over by something, but it wasn’t communism.

We, on both sides, wrongly imagine that empathy with the “other” side brings an end to clearheaded analysis when, in truth, it’s on the other side of that bridge that the most important analysis can begin.

Our polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don’t know each other, makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt.

Texas border, or, once, residents of East and West Berlin. It was empathy walls that interested me. 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.

In a period of political tumult, we grasp for quick certainties. We shoehorn new information into ways we already think. We settle for knowing our opposite numbers from the outside. But is it possible, without changing our beliefs, to know others from the inside, to see reality through their eyes, to understand the links between life, feeling, and politics; that is, to cross the empathy wall? I thought it was.

“I’m pro-life, pro-gun, pro-freedom to live our own lives as we see fit so long as we don’t hurt others. And I’m anti–big government,” Mike said. “Our government is way too big, too greedy, too incompetent, too bought, and it’s not ours anymore. We need to get back to our local communities, like we had at Armelise. Honestly, we’d be better off.”

In fact, partyism, as some call it, now beats race as the source of divisive prejudice.

according to The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded Americans Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing, when people move today, it is more often to live near others who share their views. People are segregating themselves into different emotionally toned enclaves—anger here, hopefulness and trust there. A group of libertarian Texans have bought land in the salt flats east of El Paso, named it Paulville, and reserved it for enthusiastic “freedom-loving” followers of Ron Paul. And the more that people confine themselves to like-minded company, the more extreme their views become.

politics is the single biggest factor determining views on climate change. This split has widened because the right has moved right, not because the left has moved left. Republican presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford all supported the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1960, the GOP platform embraced “free collective bargaining” between management and labor. Republicans boasted of “extending the minimum wage to several million more workers” and “strengthening the unemployment insurance system and extension of its benefits.” Under Dwight Eisenhower, top earners were taxed at 91 percent; in 2015, it was 40 percent. Planned Parenthood has come under serious attack from nearly all Republican presidential candidates running in 2016. Yet a founder of the organization was Peggy Goldwater, wife of the 1964 conservative Republican candidate for president Barry Goldwater. General Eisenhower called for massive investment in infrastructure, and now nearly all congressional Republicans see such a thing as frightening government overreach. Ronald Reagan raised the national debt and favored gun control, and now the Republican state legislature of Texas authorizes citizens to “open carry” loaded guns into churches and banks. Conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or liberal today.

In 1970, not a single U.S. senator opposed the Clean Air Act. Joined by ninety-five Republican congressmen, Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, one of the most polluted states in the union, has called for the end of the Environmental Protection Agency.

in the end, a healthy democracy depends on a collective capacity to hash things out. And to get there, we need to figure out what’s going on—especially on the more rapidly shifting and ever stronger right.

Inspired by Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, I began my five-year journey to the heart of the American right carrying with me, as if it were a backpack, a great paradox. Back in 2004, when Frank’s book appeared, there was a paradox underlying the right–left split. Since then the split has become a gulf. Across the country, red states are poorer and have more teen mothers, more divorce, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrollment. On average, people in red states die five years earlier than people in blue states. Indeed, the gap in life expectancy between Louisiana (75.7) and Connecticut (80.8) is the same as that between the United States and Nicaragua. Red states suffer more in another highly important but little-known way, one that speaks to the very biological self-interest in health and life: industrial pollution.

Many Tea Party advocates work in or run small businesses. Yet the politicians they support back laws that consolidate the monopoly power of the very largest companies that are poised to swallow up smaller ones. Small farmers voting with Monsanto? Corner drugstore owners voting with Walmart? The local bookstore owner voting with Amazon? If I were a small business owner, I would welcome lower company taxes, sure, but strengthening the monopolies that could force me out of business? I didn’t get it. Wrapped around these puzzles was a bigger one: how can a system both create pain and deflect blame for that pain?

People in red states who need Medicaid and food stamps welcome them but don’t vote, he argues, while those a little higher on the class ladder, white conservatives, don’t need them and do vote—against public dollars for the poor.

MacGillis suggests that voters really act in their self-interest. But do they? The “two notches up” idea doesn’t explain why red state voters who were not themselves billionaires opposed taxing billionaires, the money from which might help expand a local library, or add swings to a local park. The best way to test the MacGillis idea, I figured, is to pick out a problem that affluent voters in poor red states do have, and to show they don’t want government help for that either. In other words, the two-notch-up voter may say, “Let’s cut welfare to the poor because I’m not poor.” Or, “Never mind improving public schools. My kid goes to a private one”—although no one I spoke to talked like this. But they do themselves face other problems the government could help with, which brings me to the keyhole issue in this book: environmental pollution. Through a close-up view of this issue, I reasoned, I could uncover the wider perspective that drove people’s responses to it and to much else.

The New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer describes the strategy of billionaire oil baron brothers Charles and David Koch to direct $889,000,000 to help right-wing candidates and causes in 2016 alone. “To bring about social change,” Charles Koch says, “requires a strategy” that uses “vertically and horizontally integrated” planning “from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action.” It was like a vast, sprawling company that owns the forest, the pulp mill, the publishing house, and pays authors to write slanted books. Such a political “company” could wield astonishing influence. Particularly in the years after Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 Supreme Court decision permitting unlimited anonymous corporate gifts to political advocacy groups, this influence is, indeed, at work.

Just 158 rich families contributed nearly half of the $176 million given to candidates in the first phase of the presidential election of 2016—$138 million to Republicans and $20 million to Democrats. Through Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers have circulated a pledge in Congress to curb the authority of the EPA.

In What’s the Matter With Kansas? Frank argues that people like Mike are being greatly misled. A rich man’s “economic agenda” is paired with the “bait” of social issues. Through appeal to abortion bans, gun rights, and school prayer, Mike and his like-minded friends are persuaded to embrace economic policies that hurt them. As Frank writes, “Vote to stop abortion: receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. . . . Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meat packing. Vote to strike a blow against elitism, receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes.”

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.

Our home enclaves often reflect special cultures of governance tying politics to geography. This is the thesis of Colin Woodard’s American Nations. Rural areas in the Midwest, the South, and Alaska lean right while large cities, New England, and the two coasts lean left, he notes. Bound by a tradition of small-town governance and oriented toward Europe, New Englanders tend to believe in good government for the “common good.” Appalachians and Texans tend to be freedom-loving government minimalists. Tracing their roots to a caste system, whites in Dixie states treasure local control and resist federal power—linked as that is to the defeat, 150 years ago, of the South by the North. Resistance to federal taxation, the historian Robin Einhorn notes, also originated in the South. Regional traditions are real, of course, but less immutable than Woodard suggests. And while the far right is strongest in the South, most of its members make up a demographic—white, middle to low income, older, married, Christian—that spans the whole nation.

Others point to the moral values of the right. In The Righteous Mind, for example, Jonathan Haidt argues, unlike Frank, that people are not misled but instead vote in their self-interest—one based on cultural values. While right and left both value caring and fairness, he notes, they place different priorities on obedience to authority (the right) and originality (the left), for example. Surely, this is true. But a person can hold a set of values calmly, or in a state of fury that brings a whole new party into being. What makes the difference between the two? Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson rightly argue that it is a unique coalescence of circumstances—predisposing f...

While all these works greatly helped me, I found one thing missing in them all—a full understanding of emotion in politics. 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, ...

We can approach that core, I came to see, through what I call a “deep story,” a story that feels as if it were true. As though I were seeing through Alice’s looking glass, the deep story was to lead me to focus on a site of long-simmering social conflict, one ignored by both the “Occupy Wall Street” left—who were looking to the 1 and the 99 percent within the private realm as a site of class conflict—and by the anti-government right, who think of differences of class and race as matters of personal character. The deep story was to take me to the shoulds and shouldn’ts of feeling, to the management of feeling, and to the core feelings stirred by charismatic leaders. And, as we shall see, everyone has a deep story.

In the absence of the talismans of my world and in the presence of theirs, I came to realize that the Tea Party was not so much an official political group as a culture, a way of seeing and feeling about a place and its people.

in Louisiana, the Great Paradox was staring me in the face—great pollution and great resistance to regulating polluters. If I could truly enter the minds and hearts of people on the far right on the issue of the water they drink, the animals they hunt, the lakes they swim in, the streams they fish in, the air they breathe, I could get to know them up close. Through their views on this keyhole issue—how much, if at all, should government regulate industrial polluters?—I hoped to learn about the right’s perspective on a wider range of issues. I could learn about how—emotionally speaking—politics works in us all.

To prepare for my journey, I re-read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a Tea Party bible lauded by the conservative radio pundit Rush Limbaugh and former Fox News television commentator Glenn Beck. Rand describes serving the needy as a “monstrous idea.” Charity, she says, is bad. Greed is good. If Ayn Rand appealed to them, I imagined, they’re probably pretty selfish, tough, cold people, and I prepared for the worst. But I was thankful to discover many warm, open people who were deeply charitable to those around them, including an older, white liberal stranger writing a book.

When we sat down a week later to sweet teas at a local Starbucks, I asked Madonna what she loved about Limbaugh. “His criticism of ‘femi-nazis,’ you know, feminists, women

Finally, we came to Madonna’s basic feeling that Limbaugh was defending her against insults she felt liberals were lobbing at her: “Oh, liberals think that Bible-believing Southerners are ignorant, backward, rednecks, losers. They think we’re racist, sexist, homophobic, and maybe fat.”

“I do that too sometimes,” she said, “try to get myself out of the way to see what another person feels.”

How could kindly Madonna oppose government help for the poor? How could a warm, bright, thoughtful man like Mike Schaff, a victim of corporate malfeasance and wanton destruction, aim so much of his fire at the federal government? How could a state that is one of the most vulnerable to volatile weather be a center of climate denial? So, curious to find out, I began this journey into the heart of the right.

According to the American Cancer Society, Louisiana has the second highest incidence of cancer for men and the fifth highest male death rate from cancer in the nation.

“I knew what I did was wrong,” he repeats. “Toxins are a killer. And I’m very sorry I did it. My mama would not have wanted me to do it. I never told anybody this before, but I knew how not to get caught.” It was as if Lee had performed the company’s crime and assumed the company’s guilt as his own.

Louisiana had become the number-one hazardous waste producer in the nation. For another thing, the U.S. Congress had established the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), the Clean Air Act (1970), and the Clean Water Act (1972). In addition, many small grassroots environmental groups had sprung up throughout the state, led by homemakers, teachers, farmers, and others appalled to discover backyard toxic waste, illness, and disease. Around the time of the advisory, local activists were rising up against toxic dumping around Lake Charles and nearby Willow Springs, Sulphur, Mossville, and elsewhere, part of the “front-porch”—or “kitchen-sink”—politics of the 1970s and 1980s.

So while his central life experience had been betrayal at the hands of industry, he now felt—as his politics reflected—most betrayed by the federal government. He believed that PPG and many other local petrochemical companies at the time had done wrong, and that cleaning the mess up was right. He thought industry wouldn’t “do the right thing” by itself. But in the role of counterweight, he rejected the federal government. Indeed, Lee embraced candidates who wanted to remove nearly all the guardrails on industry and cut the EPA. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration had vastly improved life for workmen such as Lee Sherman—and he appreciated those reforms—but he felt the job was largely done.

Indeed, Tea Party adherents seemed to arrive at their dislike of the federal government via three routes—through their religious faith (the government curtailed the church, they felt), through hatred of taxes (which they saw as too high and too progressive), and through its impact on their loss of honor, as we shall see. 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.

Harold says: “Republicans stand for big business. They won’t help us with the problems we’ve got here.” But Republicans put God and family on their side and “we like that. The Scripture says Jesus wants us to be about his Father’s business,” Annette says. Their faith had guided them through a painful loss of family, friends, neighbors, frogs, turtles, and trees. They felt God had blessed them with this courage to face their ordeals, and they thanked Him for that.

People on the right seemed to be strongly moved by three concerns—taxes, faith, and honor. Lee Sherman was eager to lower his taxes, the Arenos to protect their Christian faith. Added to these basic motives were certain personal wishes: Lee, who had borne the guilt of polluting public waters and been cheated by a dishonest official at a tax office, wanted to feel vindicated. The tax office was corrupt, and taxes themselves were connected to dishonesty, he felt. One didn’t know where they went or for what.

at issue in politics was trust.

As for threats to coastal Louisiana from climate change, no one they voted for thought it was real. Republican governor Jindal had called climate change a “Trojan horse” from which would emerge a new horde of government regulators. Lee Sherman thought the idea of climate change was “a bunch of hooey.” It was a big state idea. It evoked liberal fear, not conservative suspicion and bravado.

Mike brought science to it. Together they worked out that climate change was, indeed, a man-made disaster-in-waiting that called for strong countermeasures. In the climate of opinion around them, they were brave to do so. But their concern raised the question: how could repairs be made? On that, the Bible gave them clearer answers than politics did.

The Arenos didn’t simply remember the good old days of a clean Bayou d’Inde. They remembered against the great forgetting of industry and state government. This larger institutional forgetting altered the private act of mourning. And not just that. It altered the Arenos’ very identity. They had not left Bayou d’Inde. They were stayers. They didn’t want to leave, and even if they had wanted to, they couldn’t afford to.

The Arenos had become stay-at-home migrants. They had stayed. The environment had left.

But Harold and Annette Areno live at home in an environment no longer there.

Talk was of “economic progress,” and nostalgia would get in its way. “Don’t you believe in economic progress?” people could ask. Also, as a cause, environmental protection had fallen into the hands, people felt, of left-leaning government expansionists and do-nothing local officials.

The general talk around town was that the choice was between the environment and jobs.

The New York–based Riverkeepers Alliance, started by Washington, D.C.–born environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., reminded a local citizenry what could be lost if citizens didn’t watch out. The Arenos welcomed these northern environmentalists as natural allies in their own difficult struggle, as did Mike Schaff, who had faced a great loss of his own.

The Arenos were rememberers facing a strange “structural amnesia,” as the British anthropologist Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard called it when studying something utterly different. Evans-Pritchard had been researching a pastoral people of the Sudan called the Nuer, who had a remarkable memory for some things and completely forgot about others. Men and women both remembered eleven generations of male ancestors, for example, but largely forgot their female counterparts. There was, the anthropologist sensed, a structure to what they remembered and forgot that was based on the power of the Nuer’s dominant institution—the kin system. Dominant within that system were men. So memory, Evans-Pritchard reasoned, was an indirect expression of power.

Q

The Arenos felt that their silent bayou, their buried kin, their dead trees were forgotten, like the female half of the Nuer.