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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

“I am so for capitalism and free enterprise,” Madonna tells me as we sip our sweet teas at a cafeteria. “I hate the word ‘regulate.’ I don’t want the size of my Coke bottle or type of lightbulb regulated. The American Dream is not due to socialism or the EPA. Sure, I want clean air and water,” Madonna adds, “but I trust our system to assure it.” Government workers do that, the thought streaks through my head. Still, in Madonna’s worldview, it seems that one has the police to protect one’s property, Rush Limbaugh to protect one’s pride, and God to take care of the rest.

Madonna was born in the non-dream town of Lake Providence, Louisiana, which Time magazine named as the poorest town in America. And she has since prospered beyond her wildest dreams. She is helping her husband build a much-beloved megachurch.

In a startling 2006 PBS television show called Is God Green? Bill Moyers tried to interview top leaders of the evangelical churches—including the Reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and the Christian activist Ralph Reed. All of them referred Moyers to their shared spokesman, Dr. Calvin Beisner, an adjunct fellow at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Beisner, in turn, cited Genesis chapter 1, verse 28: “Then God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’” Dr. Beisner said the Bible also sanctioned mountaintop removal, presumably by coal companies. “If you are going to mine for precious metals, for fossil fuels, for anything else, you don’t do that with a feather brush,” Beisner tells Moyers. “I think the Scriptures actually tell us about the wonderful things that we can do with metals. We’re told of gold and silver and other such things. Those things require mining, and ‘force’ is simply a scientific term for the application of energy to physical objects to bring about change. . . . My simple point about Genesis 1:28 [is] that we cannot escape the force involved in the Hebrew word for ‘subdue.’” The Acton Institute was founded to “teach on (and) to favor a free market perspective,” its website says, and it is financially supported by various co...

Word from the Lake Charles pulpits seemed to focus more on a person’s moral strength to endure than on the will to change the circumstances that called on that strength. The service offered a collective, supportive arena, it seemed, within which it was safe to feel helpless, sad, or lost. As in an hour of therapy, the individual drew strength from support in order to endure what had to be endured.

Given automation and corporate offshoring, real wages of high school–educated American men have fallen 40 percent since 1970. For the whole bottom 90 percent of workers, average wages have flattened since 1980. Many older white men are in despair. Indeed, such men suffer a higher than average death rate due to alcohol, drugs, and even suicide. Although life expectancy for nearly every other group is rising, between 1990 and 2008 the life expectancy of older white men without high school diplomas has been shortened by three years—and truly, it seems, by despair. In their tough secular lives, life may well feel like “end times.”

word from the pulpit also seems to turn concern away from social problems in Louisiana—poverty, poor schools, pollution-related illness—away from government help, and away from the Great Paradox.

Media as Anxiety ...

As a powerful influence over the views of the people I came to know, Fox News stands next to industry, state government, church, and the regular media as an extra pillar of political culture all its own. Madonna tunes into Fox on the radio, television, and Internet. Up in Longville, where few subscribe to cable, Mike Tritico told me he could tell who was watching Fox News by the tilt of rooftop aerials. “It’s nearly all Fox,” he said. Fox gives Madonna and others the news. It suggests what the issues are. It tells her what to feel afraid, angry, and anxious about.

Fox News stokes fear. And the fear seems to reflect that of the audience it most serves—white middle- and working-class people. During the series of police killings of young black men, Fox reporters tended to defend white police officers and criticize black rioters. It defended the right to own guns and restrict voter registration, and it continually derided the federal government.

Behind all I was learning about bayou and factory childhoods and the larger context—industry, state, church, regular media, Fox News—of the lives of those I had come to know lay, I realized, a deep story.

A deep story is a feels-as-if story—it’s the story feelings tell, in the language of symbols. It removes judgment. It removes fact. It tells us how things feel. Such a story permits those on both sides of the political spectrum to stand back and explore the subjective prism through which the party on the other side sees the world. And I don’t believe we understand anyone’s politics, right or left, without it. For we all have a deep story. There are many kinds of deep story, of course. Lovers come to know each other’s childhood in order to understand how it feels to be the other person; they learn a personal deep story. Foreign leaders and diplomats try to understand national deep stories in order to relate more effectively to world leaders. They gather international deep stories. The deep story here, that of the Tea Party, focuses on relationships between social groups within our national borders. I constructed this deep story to represent—in metaphorical form—the hopes, fears, pride, shame, resentment, and anxiety in the lives of those I talked with. Then I tried it out on my Tea Party friends to see if they thought it fit their experience. They did. Like a play, it unfolds in scenes.

The American Dream is a dream of progress—the idea that you’re better off than your forebears just as they superseded their parents before you—and extends beyond money and stuff. You’ve suffered long hours, layoffs, and exposure to dangerous chemicals at work, and received reduced pensions. You have shown moral character through trial by fire, and the American Dream of prosperity and security is a reward for all of this, showing who you have been and are—a badge of honor.

And President Obama: how did he rise so high? The biracial son of a low-income single mother becomes president of the most powerful country in the world; you didn’t see that coming. And if he’s there, what kind of a slouch does his rise make you feel like, you who are supposed to be so much more privileged? Or did Obama get there fairly? How did he get into an expensive place like Columbia University? How did Michelle Obama get enough money to go to Princeton? And then Harvard Law School, with a father who was a city water plant employee? You’ve never seen anything like it, not up close. The federal government must have given them money. And Michelle should feel grateful for all she has but sometimes she seems mad. She has no right to feel mad.

Blacks, women, immigrants, refugees, brown pelicans—all have cut ahead of you in line. But it’s people like you who have made this country great. You feel uneasy. It has to be said: the line cutters irritate you. They are violating rules of fairness. You resent them, and you feel it’s right that you do. So do your friends. Fox commentators reflect your feelings, for your deep story is also the Fox News deep story.

Betrayal Then you become suspicious. If people are cutting in line ahead of you, someone must be helping them. Who? A man is monitoring the line, walking up and down it, ensuring that the line is orderly and that access to the Dream is fair. His name is President Barack Hussein Obama. But—hey—you see him waving to the line cutters. He’s helping them. He feels extra sympathy for them that he doesn’t feel for you. He’s on their side.

Intermission Meanwhile, for the white, Christian, older, right-leaning Louisianans I came to know, the deep story was a response to a real squeeze. On the one hand, the national ideal and promise at the brow of the hill was the American Dream—which is to say progress. On the other hand, it had become hard to progress.

Meanwhile, if men like Bill were being squeezed by automation, outsourcing, and the rising power of multinationals, they were also being squeezed by greater competition from other groups for an ever-scarcer supply of cultural honor. As we shall see, the 1960s and 1970s had opened cultural doors previously closed to blacks and women, even as immigrants and refugees seemed to be sailing past the Statue of Liberty into a diminishing supply of good jobs. And the federal government was helping this happen. After Clinton’s 1990s claim to “end welfare as we know it,” rates of financial aid to the poor fell. But in response to the Great Recession, after 2008, welfare rose—mainly through Medicaid and SNAP—although these rates have peaked and are falling.

You turn to your workplace for respect—but wages are flat and jobs insecure. So you look to other sources of honor. You get no extra points for your race. You look to gender, but if you’re a man, you get no extra points for that either. If you are straight you are proud to be a married, heterosexual male, but that pride is now seen as a potential sign of homophobia—a source of dishonor. Regional honor? Not that either. You are often disparaged for the place you call home. As for the church, many look down on it, and the proportion of Americans outside any denomination has risen. You are old, but in America, attention is trained on the young. People like you—white, Christian, working and middle class—suffer this sense of fading honor demographically too, as this very group has declined in numbers.

his interviews with Tea Party members in New York, Jersey City, Newark, and elsewhere in New Jersey, the sociologist Nils Kumkar found spontaneous mention of the idea of annoyance at others cutting in line. In their interviews with Tea Party advocates in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Arizona and in their 2011 examination of nearly a thousand Tea Party websites, the sociologists Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson also reported attitudes toward blacks, immigrants, public sector workers, and others parallel to those I found here.

Behind the Deep Story: Race The deep story of the right, the feels-as-if story, corresponds to a real structural squeeze. People want to achieve the American Dream, but for a mixture of reasons feel they are being held back, and this leads people of the right to feel frustrated, angry, and betrayed by the government. Race is an essential part of this story.

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.

Missing from the image of blacks in most of the minds of those I came to know was a man or woman standing patiently in line next to them waiting for a well-deserved reward.

Gender, too, lay behind the disorientation, fear, and resentment evoked by the deep story. All the women I talked to worked, used to work, or were about to return to work. But their political feelings seemed based on their role as wives and mothers—and they wanted to be wives to high-earning men and to enjoy the luxury, as one woman put it, of being a homemaker.

even within these conservative groups, women are more likely than men to appreciate the government’s role in helping the disadvantaged, in making contraception available, in equal pay for equal work. It was this range of issues—especially the need for parental leave—that had led me, as I note in the preface, on this journey in the first place. The women I spoke to seemed to sense that if we chop away large parts of the government, women stand to lose far more than men, for women outnumber men as government workers and as beneficiaries.

When I asked one couple what proportion of people on welfare were gaming the system, the woman estimated 30 percent while her husband estimated 80 percent. There, inside the Tea Party, was the gender gap. Despite this difference, women and men of the right voted in similar ways, and more than gender—those affirmative action women cutting ahead in line—they jointly focused on race and class.

Behind the Deep Story: Class, the Federal Government, and Free Market as Proxy Allies One can see the experience of being “cut in on” by one group after another as an expression of class conflict. This is perhaps a curious term to use. Certainly it is a term avoided by the right, and it is applied elsewhere by the left. But throughout American history such conflicts have appeared in different theaters of life, with different actors and different moral vocabularies in play. Each called for deep feelings about fairness. In the industrial nineteenth century, the classic form of class conflict took place on the factory floor, between owner and worker, and the issue was one of fair recompense for work.

For the right today, the main theater of conflict is neither the factory floor nor an Occupy protest. The theater of conflict—at the heart of the deep story—is the local welfare office and the mailbox where undeserved disability checks and SNAP stamps arrive. Government checks for the listless and idle—this seems most unfair. If unfairness in Occupy is expressed in the moral vocabulary of a “fair share” of resources and a properly proportioned society, unfairness in the right’s deep story is found in the language of “makers” and “takers.” For the left, the flashpoint is up the class ladder (between the very top and the rest); for the right, it is down between the middle class and the poor. For the left, the flashpoint is centered in the private sector; for the right, in the public sector. Ironically, both call for an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work.

this may explain why much of the right isn’t bothered by something else—the unaligned interests between big and small business. Many members of the Tea Party run or work in a small business—oil company suppliers, trailer parks, restaurants, small banks, and shops. Small businesses are vulnerable to the growth of big monopolies. What is transpiring today, Robert Reich argues in Saving Capitalism, is that big monopolies support policies that help them compete against smaller businesses by rewriting property bankruptcy and contract laws that favor big business over small. Under recently revised bankruptcy laws, the billionaire Donald Trump can freely declare bankruptcy while insulating himself from risks to investment, while smaller businesses cannot. The choice is not, Reich argues, between a governed and an ungoverned market, but between a market governed by laws favoring monopolistic companies and one governed by those favoring small business. Ironically, the economic sector that stands to suffer most from big monopolies is small business, many of which are run by those who favor the Tea Party.

Under the same banner of the “free market,” the big are free to dominate the small. But it is very hard to criticize an ally, and the right sees the free market as its ally against the powerful alliance of the federal government and the takers. Even Lee Sherman, who had greatly suffered at the hands of Pittsburg Plate Glass, owned stock in it and exclaimed proudly to me, when I asked him how he felt about getting fired, “I was pissed and stunned but, hey, I didn’t lose everything. I had $5,000 in stocks!”

In the undeclared class war, expressed through the weary, aggravating, and ultimately enraging wait for the American Dream, those I came to know developed a visceral hate for the ally of the “enemy” cutters in line—the federal government. They hated other people for needing it. They rejected their own need of it—even to help clean up the pollution in their backyard. But that kind of extraordinary determination takes a certain kind of person—a deep story self.

In truth, her home team is the right wing of the elephant, the Republican Party. Her loyalty to it defines her world. Sixty-one and single, she is devoted to a large extended family and notes proudly, “I raised my sister’s kids like my own.” One nephew, now grown, lives in a trailer on her property and is helping her construct rooms in her large new home to accommodate one sister, maybe two, and anyone else it works out with.

worked hard all my life. I started at age eight and never stopped,” Janice begins. In the course of her work life, she had learned to tough things out, to endure. Endurance wasn’t just a moral value; it was a practice. It was work of an emotional sort. Not claiming to be a victim, accommodating the downside of loose regulations out of a loyalty to free enterprise—this was a tacit form of heroism, hidden to incurious liberals. Sometimes you had to endure bad news, Janice felt, for a higher good, such as jobs in oil.

was discovering three distinct expressions of this endurance self in different people around Lake Charles—the Team Loyalist, the Worshipper, and the Cowboy, as I came to see them. Each kind of person expresses the value of endurance and expresses a capacity for it. Each attaches an aspect of self to this heroism. The Team Loyalist accomplishes a team goal, supporting the Republican Party. The Worshipper sacrifices a strong wish. The Cowboy affirms a fearless self. Janice was a Team Loyalist.

Work had been a passport out of fear, poverty, and humiliation for her father and others a generation back. But Janice doesn’t base her own sense of honor or that of others just on money. She doesn’t base it on how gifted she is in her work, or whether her job makes for a better world—at least, none of this comes up. If people work as hard as she does, it is a better world. Her feeling about work is part of a larger moral code that shapes her feelings about those ahead and behind her in line for the American Dream. “Hard” is the important idea. More than aptitude, reward, or consequence, hard work confers honor. It comes with clean living and being churched. Those getting ahead of her in line don’t share these beliefs, she feels. Liberals—those associated with the social movements that brought in the line cutters—share a looser, less defined moral code, she feels. Liberals don’t give personal morality itself its full due, probably because they aren’t churched. Janice opposes abortion except under certain circumstances, but imagines there are “fifty million abortions a year, probably all Democrats.” (She pauses for a moment of dark humor: “Maybe I should rethink that position.”) With Supreme Court approval of gay marriage, with federal welfare for the idle, with fewer Americans “churched,” with the PC amnesia concerning the heroism of the young boys who died for the South (however misguided the Confederate cause), her piece of America seems like a small, brave holdout again...

Gesturing around her large living room, she says, “This could all vanish tomorrow!” She had worked hard. She had waited in line. She’d seen others “cut ahead,” and this had galled her and estranged her from the government. Like Janice Areno, Jackie had developed a deep story self. She could accommodate the downside of the free market and sadly that included the bad news of industrial pollution, but she had her own way of doing so.

So how, I wonder, did someone who so deeply appreciated nature, who did not avoid knowledge of injuries done to it, end up celebrating industry and the unrestrained consumption of all it produced? How did she, too, live the deep story?

On the campaign trail, in the media, from the pulpit, and from industry I had observed a silence about pollution. It seemed like the kind of amnesia E.E. Evans-Pritchard had spoken of, the kind that had led the Areno family to remember the events on Bayou d’Inde in a spirit of defiance. This silence extends to Jackie’s personal world as well. “Pollution? I don’t talk about it much with friends,” Jackie muses. “This whole town operates off of oil. So I could be talking to two moms whose husbands work in the plants. They think government regulation will hurt jobs, or stop new plants from coming in. You don’t want to remind them of dangers. Or make them think you’re blaming them for the work they do. It’s too close to home.” Again, the silence. Many plant workers were indeed caught in a bind—as

As a Team Loyalist, Janice Areno had not allowed herself to feel too badly about pollution. Bayou d’Inde, the rubberized horse. As a loyalist to industry and the Republican Party, she defended herself against “too much” anxiety about pollution, the brown pelican, and human health.

“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.”

“We don’t believe in global warming.” That belief, too, seemed like an excuse for government expansion, part of the betrayal. “The commentator said that people that watch Fox News are idiots. It was a good thing I was watching TV with the kids and caught that. I thought, ‘How long are my kids going to believe me over them?’ A year? Six months?”

“As a kid, I wrote every president to tell him what I thought he needed to do. But now, I’m less involved. I do think a lot of activists are self-serving. You have to put up with things the way they are.” She has a deep story self: she had fought her way out of a tough childhood, to the front of the line for the American Dream, a line in which she feared her family could lose its place. Meanwhile, as we drive past the American flag draped over a stone at the edge of her neighbor’s yard, into the carport beside the Arctic Cat, with a small, sad shake of her head, Jackie says, “Pollution is the sacrifice we make for capitalism.”

bridge and to wish there had been better oversight.” Tritico is guided by the precautionary principle, the principle he returns to over and over in debates with Donny. “It’s the principle doctors abide by: first do no harm.” And to apply it to the I-10 you need good government, he feels.

“You want everything to be perfect, for companies to make no mistakes, and you—and we—can’t live like that. If you aim for perfection, then you’re being overly cautious, because we have to be able to take risks. That’s how they split the atom—risk. That’s how they made vaccines—risk. They were daring. A lot of good things happen because people dare to take risks. With all these environmental regulations, we’re being too cautious. We’re avoiding bad instead of maximizing good.

“To live in civilization, you’ve got to take risks. There will be mistakes. You can’t succeed by just always being perfect. People have to learn from their mistakes. We wouldn’t have made the discoveries we have, live with the world of plastics we’ve got—car steering wheels, computers, the telephone wires I deal with—a lot of that’s plastic. We wouldn’t have built this country if we were all as risk-averse as you are. Do we want to go back to life in shacks reading by kerosene? Accidents happen. They used to spill kerosene. So what? Do you wish they hadn’t ever used that?”

“Regulation is like cement: you lay it down, and it hardens and stays there forever.” A ripple of laughter circulates around the circle. The women now seat themselves around the men’s table. Donny (continuing): “Once something is regulated it’s hard to un-regulate it. And so, year after year at first—it’s just a little at a time—but then after a while it’s like it is now, hardened cement. Everything is regulated. We’re all stuck in cement.”

“Children have a natural desire to dominate and try to get what they want,” Donny says. “It only stops when one guy is afraid his lip is going to get busted. That’s the natural order. Regulation breaks that up. We don’t see the harm overregulation can do.” Mike: “I’m not talking about regulating everything or avoiding all mistakes. I just don’t want us to make certain kinds of mistakes—the kinds that spill chemicals into water and give people rare brain cancers and endometriosis, or that lead innocent people to drive on collapsing bridges and die, children too. Why let that happen if there’s a known way to prevent it?”

Tritico feels that Donny is an unwitting mouthpiece for the chemical companies. He embraces their right to take risks with our lives. And Donny, while conceding Mike’s greater information on the matter, feels Tritico speaks for the regulators, who would turn society into a giant block of cement. Through the years, their dispute has continued on the Internet. Once, after Mike arranged for a professor to give a lecture in Lake Charles on global warming, the talk was reported in an online news article. Mike spotted a discrediting comment accusing the professor of propagating “lies.” The comment was anonymous, but Tritico said, “Oh, that’s probably Donny.”

When asked about a long list of risks, white males stood out from all other groups as being less likely to see risk. Maybe Donny was more like the white male crafts worker, and Mike Tritico was more like the manager. The two men also differed in what they thought ought to be done about exposure. They assigned honor differently. Exposed to danger in some of his jobs, Donny tended to stand brave against it and to honor bravery. Less exposed to danger, Tritico wanted to reduce the need for bravery. Donny said, in essence, “I’m strong. You’re strong. Mother Nature is strong. We can take it.” In this way, he resembled the Cowboy. Tritico valued the precautionary principle and said, in essence, “The real strength we need is to stand up to industry and the almighty dollar.”

What was life like in the plants themselves? I wondered. Were they governed by Donny’s Cowboy perspective or Mike Tritico’s precautionary principle? One safety inspector for Axiall—which had an enormous explosion in 2013 and again in 2014—had the job of trying to reduce the risk of accidents. The young man climbed towers and squeezed under machines to check pipes and valves and attach small red flags to pipes that needed replacing or valves tightening. Operators didn’t like him coming around because each red flag meant extra work, he said. Some waved him away, “No, not today.” Then he said, “They would gang up. I’d have to call their boss, and they hated that. So when they saw me, they’d say, ‘Here comes Big Brother.’ It was a stressful job.”

To Donny, the Cowboy expressed high moral virtue. Equating creativity with daring—the stuff of great explorers, inventors, generals, winners—Donny honored the capacity to take risk and face fear. He could take hard knocks like a man. He could endure. Janice Areno had accommodated environmental pollution through loyalty to job-providing industries and the party she identified with them. Jackie Tabor had accommodated it because it was “the sacrifice we make for capitalism.” Donny accommodated out of respect for bravery. Each expressed a deep story self.