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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

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.

Harold and Annette look forward to the rapture too, but they want man to repair the earth before it comes.

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. A political campaign has a central place in the cultural life of a people. It tells citizens what issues powerful people think are worth hearing about.

I was backing into the picture I wanted to see by noticing what wasn’t in it. It was like trying to understand a photograph by studying the negative. I found myself focusing not on what people remembered, focused on, and said, but on what they forgot, disregarded, and did not say. I was backing into the deep story, as I am calling it, and noticing what, in human consciousness, it crowded out.

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. At the same time, the rivals both express and promote a culture that has produced the Great Paradox. They disdain “insider Washington” while trying to pry as much money from it for Louisiana as they can. The two men verge on—but refrain from—competing for how many government agencies they would strip away, as other prominent Southern Republicans have done.

On my keyhole issue, the story was this: the seat of District 3, the parish of Calcasieu, which the two were competing to represent, is one of the most polluted counties in the nation—the district includes companies on Mike Tritico’s napkin map, as well as the half-remembered, half-forgotten tragedy of Bayou d’Inde. (In 2015, of the nine main waterways in the parish, the EPA listed eight as “impaired” and the ninth as “unassessed.”)

But all along the campaign trail, I heard not a word about Boustany’s vote to roll back regulation of Wall Street, a measure that would strengthen monopolies and hurt small business people, many of whom were Tea Party members. I heard nothing about federal and state subsidies to oil companies, lowered corporate taxes, the role of oil in the erosion of the Louisiana coast, or unclean waters. Their voting records told where they stood. Boustany voted to cut funds for the Environmental Protection Agency, to block fuel-efficiency standards for cars, to ban federal fracking safeguards, to halt Clean Air Act protections for smog, soot, and mercury pollution, and to gut the core of the Clean Water Act—the federal “floor” of water quality standards that states must meet. He voted to redefine “healthy air,” basing the definition of it on the feasibility and cost to polluting industries, and not on human health. Representative Landry did the same. On the League of Conservation Voters’ scorecard of members of Congress, both Boustany and Landry had earned a lifetime score of 6 out of a total possible 100. Louisiana produced 31 pounds of toxic release per person to air, water, and land in 2012. By comparison, the United States as a whole produced 11 pounds per capita. Neither candidate said a word about all this.

As with Mike Schaff, Lee Sherman, and the Arenos, conversations moved toward this rift between deserving taxpayers and undeserving tax money takers, those in a class below them. Repeatedly, I was to find, this rift was an emotional flashpoint, especially for men who worked in oil and other predominantly male jobs in the private sector.

“You know what you’re looking at?” Honoré asked. I thought I did. “That’s not the Mississippi’s water. That’s Monsanto water. Exxon water. Shell Oil water. It’s a public waterway, but that’s private water. Industry owns the Mississippi now. There’s hardly a public dock along it.”

Louisiana is the nation’s sixth leading state in generating hazardous waste, and it is third in the nation for the amount of hazardous waste it imports from other states. “We import hazardous waste from Arkansas,” the General continues, eyes wide as if in disbelief, “because they’ve got stricter regulations than we do.” Throughout the state, there are many injection wells drilled deep underground and surrounded by casing into which hazardous waste is pumped, and worrisome studies had occasionally appeared in the press about them.

Of course, just such a spectacular event did occur 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.

Maybe, I thought, the coastal Louisianans who opposed the ban were expressing loyalty to the oil industry and private sector, and falling into a historic refrain against the federal government. But given their vulnerability to loss and contamination, maybe they were managing strong feelings of anxiety, fear, and anger about what they already knew. Maybe they were saying to themselves, “We can’t afford to worry about this. We need to set thoughts of it aside, manage our anxiety and not acknowledge that we’re doing so.” With this in mind, I returned to the Great Paradox. From my initial perspective, Louisiana, like other red states, was coping with a great number of challenges. Perhaps for better-off people of the far right, problems such as poverty, poor schools, and medical care didn’t come up because such problems didn’t hit them directly. Pollution hit better-off people too. But they seemed braced to tough it out. As for blame, it seemed as if Dad had left a dreadful mess, and you blamed Mom because Mom’s used to absorbing blame for what goes wrong and trying to fix it, and she’s still there. At least it seemed like that at first. Freedom

So how did Louisianans look at government regulation of any sort? I thought an answer to that might help me understand the coastal Louisianans who were sad at the spill but mad at the government. Maybe it was government regulations in general they resented.

Louisiana had the highest rate of death by gunfire in the country, nearly double the national average.

Looked at more closely, an overall pattern in state regulation emerges, and the Great Paradox becomes more complicated than it first seemed. 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.

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.

Sometimes they don’t tell us the truth about what’s going on because they don’t want to alarm us,” he replied. “And, of course, we don’t want to be alarmed.”

“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.’”

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.

“Part of the psychological program is that people think they’re free when they’re not,” he said. “A company may be free to pollute, but that means the people aren’t free to swim.”

How did the psychological program work? Maybe I was missing the most obvious answer: jobs. Oil brought jobs. Jobs brought money. Money brought a better life—school, home, health, a piece of the American Dream. Maybe it was not so much that the people sitting with me in the audiences of the campaign rallies hated the federal government but that they loved the private sector, especially the queen of it in Louisiana: oil. Maybe I’d been so busy listening to the “unsung tune” about cleaning up pollution that I wasn’t hearing the loud and clear song about jobs. After all, Jeff Landry had held up a sign in Congress during a speech by President Obama: “Oil = Jobs.” And maybe government regulations were killing them.

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.

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, giving less to it. Meanwhile, to pay for this, public workers were fired and the state debt—$83 billion in 2012, much of it in unfunded public pension liabilities—remained.

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.

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’t improved the schools—they are financed by local property taxes, which are higher in rich areas and lower in poor ones.

Templet and I are on our third round of coffee and cake, and I want to return to a central idea in General Honoré’s “psychological program”—one that taps into understandable right-wing anxiety about good jobs—that in America, you must choose between jobs or a clean environment. 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.

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.”

If, in 2010, you lived in a county with a higher exposure to toxic pollution, we discovered, you are more likely to believe that Americans “worry too much” about the environment and to believe that the United States is doing “more than enough” about it. You are also more likely to describe yourself as a strong Republican. There it was again, the Great Paradox, only now it applied to my keyhole issue: environmental pollution across the entire nation. Far from being an oddball state, Louisiana told a nationwide story.

But were there other factors too? The poorer the state, research found, the less regulated it was likely to be. So were poor people in poor states less likely to worry about out-of-state profit “leakage” or state handouts to industry? Or were they understandably just hoping for a job and preparing to endure?

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

Those who resisted the oil industry fit a very different profile—young, college educated, urban, liberal, strongly interested in social issues, and believers in good government. Was the “least resistant personality” one susceptible to what General Honoré had called the “psychological program”—the talk of “jobs, jobs, jobs” that had “just enough to it?” Or was that too easy an idea, an idea from my side of the empathy wall?

I’d taken measure of the talk and silences of public life in the heartland of the right. I’d seen what my Tea Party friends were putting up with. But the empathy wall was higher than I’d imagined. I could see what they couldn’t see, but not—as Yogi Berra might say—what I couldn’t see. I still felt blind to what they saw and honored. I needed to do something else, to enter the social terrain that surrounded and influenced them. Included in that were industry, state government, the church, and the press. How did these basic institutions influence their feelings about life? I thought I would start with industry, which is what brought me across the I-10 bridge from Lake Charles to an open door at the office of Mayor Bob Hardey in Westlake City Hall.

The people I was getting to know would have strongly resisted Dr. Templet’s analysis that the oil industry suppressed other lines of work, drew a third of revenue out, left pollution, and did nothing to resolve the many problems saddling the state. I was trying to enter the state of mind in which criticisms of the overreliance on oil or the harmful side effects of fracking would seem misdirected, in which other things loomed more important.

Seen as an environmental curse to many, the fracking boom brought money and pride to Mayor Hardey and most others I talked to. Stuck in the South, the poorest region in the nation, Louisiana now seemed perched to become the proud center of an industrial renaissance, a shiny new buckle in the nation’s energy belt. Louisiana wouldn’t come last; it would come first. And that would bring a welcome end to the Great Paradox.

“The Sasol plant alone is expected to emit 85 times the state’s ‘threshold’ rate of benzene each year,” Dennis Berman wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “It will also produce massive streams of carbon dioxide and treated water.” “I don’t want to wear a gas mask to go to bed at night,” one pipefitter declared at one four-and-a-half-hour public hearing regarding the Sasol expansion.

As I was trying to climb this slippery empathy wall, a subversive thought occurred to me: do we need all the new plastic the American Chemical Association is promising us? Weren’t we entering into a strange cycle? Many people I was talking to carried around plastic water bottles, partly for convenience, partly out of distrust of local waters. And with cheap natural gas at hand, the American Chemical Association said it could triple the amount of feedstock needed to make plastic. But if we triple our plastics, more petrochemical companies will pollute more public waters, which will lead more people to pay for more plastic bottles filled with ever more scarce clean water. We’ll throw away more plastic bottles, buy more, and further expand the market for plastic, the production of which pollutes water. But I was straying from my goal, getting into the spirit of things.

Two Roads to Prosperity: Huey Long Versus Bobby Jindal

By contrast, from 2007 to 2015, as mentioned, Governor Bobby Jindal drew $1.6 billion from schools and hospitals to give to companies as “incentives.” This strategy put some chickens in some pots, of course, and indirectly took them away from others. Like nearly everyone I talk to, Mayor Hardey twice voted for Governor Jindal, as did his family. And were he alive today, very few Louisianans would vote for Huey Long.

Meanwhile, missing from the speeches at the groundbreaking ceremony and from the memories of nearly everyone I spoke to was an event that took place near these very grounds: one of the largest chemical leaks in American history. The leak was discovered in 1994 in a forty-year-old, mile-long underground pipeline connecting Condea Vista to the Conoco docks, which were a few miles from the Arenos’ home on Bayou d’Inde. The pipe carried ethylene dichloride (EDC) and was used to store it as well. EDC is known for its capacity to penetrate dense clay and much else. A slow leak had gone undetected for decades. By the time it was discovered, eighteen to forty-six million pounds of EDC had sunk through the southern Louisiana blackjack clay, and scientists feared it was heading for the Chicot Aquifer, the sole source of drinking water for the 700,000 people of southwest Louisiana.

the Cerrell report had suggested, companies may try to avoid challenge by moving to communities that tend to be conservative, Republican, Catholic, high school educated, and not activist.

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 of such concerns? Don’t we need government workers—ones with no skin in the game—to do the safeguarding? How did my good, bright, and caring friend Mike Schaff and others put these two desires together?

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.

In a 2005 study of the Calcasieu Estuary, Louisiana state scientists inexplicably concluded that it would be dangerous for children aged six to seventeen to swim in estuary waters, but not dangerous for “children six and under.” Such reports were also nearly unreadable. One typical report read: “Analyses reported as non-detects were analyzed using method detection limits that were higher than the comparison values used as screening tools.”

But did a total free-market world and local community go together? And in essence, wasn’t Louisiana already like a society based on a near pure free market? Governor Jindal advocated the free market and small government—Mike had voted for him on those very grounds. He had cut public services, lowered funds for environmental protection, and installed pro-industry “protectors.” The state hadn’t functioned to protect the residents of Bayou Corne at all and, in the minds of some, had even absorbed the main blame for the sinkhole, just as Lee had absorbed the blame for PPG’s pollution of Bayou d’Inde.

I had criticisms of the federal government myself—over-surveillance, the declaration of war in Iraq, letting off Wall Street speculators behind the 2008 crash, for example. But my criticisms were based on a faith in the idea of good government. Mike lands his boat at his dock and we return to his dining room table. He has told me that we don’t need Social Security or Medicare. “Take Social Security. If you and I hadn’t had to pay into it,” he told me, “we could have invested that money ourselves—even given the 2008 downturn—you and I would be millionaires by now.”

Just as Berkeley hippies of the 1960s felt proud to be “above consumerism,” to demonstrate their higher ideals of love and world harmony—even though they often depended on the parental money they were “above”—so too 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.

But something else animated Mike’s dislike for the government, something I was to discover wherever I went. Sometimes talk of it was angry, front and central; sometimes it was quietly alluded to. But over their heads, the federal government was taking money from the workers and giving it to the idle. It was taking from people of good character and giving to people of bad character. No mention was made of social class and enormous care was given to speak delicately and indirectly of blacks, although fear-tinged talk of Muslims was blunt. If the flashpoint between these groups had a location, it might be in the local welfare offices that gave federal money to beneficiaries—Louisiana Head Start, Louisiana Family Independence Temporary Assistance Program, Medicaid, the national School Lunch and Breakfast Program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. Liberals were telling Americans to “feel sorry” for recipients, but those were coastal urban liberals trying to impose their feeling rules on older Southern and Midwestern Christian whites. And they seemed to be on the other side. So I wondered: did some of the malaise I was seeing derive from a class conflict, appearing where one least expected it (in the realm of government) and between groups (the middle/blue-collar class and the poor) that liberals weren’t focusing on? Was this a major source of resentment fueling the fire of the right? And in that fight, did the entire federal government...

Upholding the right-leaning culture that surrounded me now was a social terrain. I had explored industry and the state. But what of the church and the press? Mike Schaff had defended his beloved community against the encroachment of government. Did others feel the same about the church? Were my new Louisiana friends defending an honored sphere? Or, independent of that, did the church promote personal values that might resolve the paradox I was exploring?