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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Like nearly everyone I spoke with, Donny was not one to think of himself as a victim. That was the language of the “poor me’s” asking for government handouts. The very word “victim” didn’t sit right. In fact, they were critical of liberal-sounding talk of victimhood. But I began to wonder whether the white, older conservatives in southwest Louisiana—Team Player, Worshipper, Cowboy—were not themselves victims. They were braving the worst of an industrial system, the fruits of which liberals enjoyed from a distance in their highly regulated and cleaner blue states.

Brother Cappy had never reached for the Vidalia onion—Tritico makes a last try to bait his adversarial friend. “So Donny, how do you feel about crossing the I-10 bridge?” “If my kids weren’t with me,” Donny answers, smiling. “I’d drive fast.”

The federal government, the EPA, stood up for the biological environment, but it was allowing—and it seemed at times it was causing—a cultural erosion. What seemed to my Tea Party friends to be dangerously polluted, unclean, and harmful was American culture. And against that pollution, the Tea Party stood firm.

the Tea Party movement is one in a long line of periodic heightened expressions “of a popular impulse endemic in American political culture,” as the historian Richard Hofstadter has noted. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, movements rose up against secularism, modernity, racial integration, and a culture of experts. But none before the Tea Party have so forcefully taken up the twin causes of reversing progressive reform and dismantling the federal government—a movement in response to the deep story. So within the long line of such movements, why this one? To answer that, we must look to two pivotal moments in history, I believe. One is the era of the 1860s, which has special meaning for the South. The second is the era of the 1960s, which resonates for the right wing across the nation.

The contemporary turn to the right in America has occurred mainly in the South, which is what drew me there. You don’t have to be Southern to be Tea Party, of course, but the white South has been a center of it. What interests me about Southern history is the series of emotional grooves, as we might call them, carved into the minds and hearts of the people I came to know through the lives of their ancestors—many of whom were white farmers of small farms. It isn’t the origin of certain ideas in history that I am curious about, as much as the way the past fixes patterns of class identification in our minds that we impose on the present.

The 1860s The South had become “a section apart,” in C. Vann Woodward’s words, because of the plantation system. This system deeply affected well-to-do white planters and black slaves, of course. But it also left a deep imprint on another large group we often forget—poor white sharecroppers, small farmers, and tenant farmers, some of whom were the ancestors of those I came to know in Louisiana. In his classic The Mind of the South, W.J. Cash says that the plantation system “threw up walls [which] . . . enclosed the white man, walls he did not see.” The poor white did not see himself “locked into a marginal life” but as “a potential planter or mill baron himself.”

Within those walls, the cultural imagination focused intently on two groups—the dominant and dominated, very rich and very poor, free and bound, envied and pitied, with very little in between. Rich planters sipped foreign wine under crystal chandeliers, seated on European chairs, in white-pillared mansions. They saw themselves not as wicked oppressors but as generous benefactors, and poor whites took them as such. At the other extreme, poor whites saw the terrifying misery of the traumatized, short-lived slave. This set in their minds a picture of the best and worst fates in life. Compared to life in New England farming villages, there was much more wealth to envy above, and far more misery to gasp at below. Such a system suggested its own metaphoric line waiting for the American Dream—one with little room for the lucky ahead, and much room for the forgotten behind.

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.

Like cotton, oil is a single commodity requiring huge investment and has, like cotton and sugar, come to dominate the economy.

just as yeomen farmers were pressed back to make way for the sugar and cotton plantations, so too has oil partly crowded out the seafood industry and tourism, as Paul Templet noted. That also happened to a talkative man whom I discovered on one summer visit, a man sweating in his woolen Confederate cap and uniform as he worked as a period actor at the restored Oak Alley Plantation. This was the grandest of the majestic mansions along River Road, now a popular tourist attraction. He was stationed in a small tent behind the Big House. Displayed was a Civil War–era rifle, and on a hanger a Confederate uniform, cap, and knapsack. A friendly, blond man in his forties, he was paid to talk about the details of his make-believe life as a Confederate soldier of the 1860s, and he was doing a convincing job.

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.

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 of victimization had crept in. And where did that leave the older white male? As an ideal, fairness seemed to stop before it got to him.

So for older white men, the 1960s presented a delicate dilemma. On one hand, they did want to stand up, come forward, and express an identity like so many others had done. Why not us too? On the other hand, as members of the right, they had objected in principle to cutting in line, and disliked the overused word “victim.” Still—and this was unsayable—they were beginning to feel like victims. Others had moved forward; they were the left behind. They disliked the word “suffer,” but they had suffered from wage cuts, the dream trap, and the covert dishonor of being the one group everyone thought stood unfairly ahead of the line. Culturally speaking, the entire North had “cut in” and seemed to move the South to the back of the line, even as—and this was forgotten—federal dollars had steadily moved from North to South.

How, again, could the white male openly want to cut in line himself when he objected in principle to cutting in line? He was in conflict and responded to it by seeking honor in other ways. First, he would claim pride in work. But work had become less and less secure, and again, wages for the bottom 90 percent remained flat. Word was out that some workers at Toys “R” Us and Disneyland were being asked to train other workers destined to replace them for less pay. And the federal government was giving money to people who did no work, undercutting the honor accorded work itself.

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.

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 the 1970s, there was much talk of President Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” which appealed to white fear of black rise, and drove whites from the Democratic Party to the Republican. But in the twenty-first century, a “Northern strategy” has unfolded, one in which conservatives of the North are following those of the South—in a movement of the rich and those identified with them, to lift off the burden of help for the underprivileged. Across the whole land, the idea is, handouts should stop. The richer around the nation will become free of the poorer. They will secede.

I see that the scene had been set for Trump’s rise, like kindling before a match is lit. Three elements had come together. Since 1980, virtually all those I talked with felt on shaky economic ground, a fact that made them brace at the very idea of “redistribution.” They also felt culturally marginalized: their views about abortion, gay marriage, gender roles, race, guns, and the Confederate flag all were held up to ridicule in the national media as backward. And they felt part of a demographic decline; “there are fewer and fewer white Christians like us,” Madonna had told me. They’d begun to feel like a besieged minority. And to these feelings they added the cultural tendency—described by W.J. Cash in The Mind of the South, though shared in milder form outside the South—to identify “up” the social ladder with the planter, the oil magnate, and to feel detached from those further down the ladder.

All this was part of the “deep story.” In that story, strangers step ahead of you in line, making you anxious, resentful, and afraid. A president allies with the line cutters, making you feel distrustful, betrayed. A person ahead of you in line insults you as an ignorant redneck, making you feel humiliated and mad. Economically, culturally, demographically, politically, you are suddenly a stranger in your own land. The whole context of Louisiana—its companies, its government, its church and media—reinforces that deep story. So this—the deep story—was in place before the match was struck.

“We’re on the rise. . . . America will be dominant, proud, rich. I am just the messenger.”

In speeches to large, excited crowds, over the days to come, Trump tells his fans what he offers them. “I’ve been greedy. I’m a businessman . . . take, take, take. Now I’m going to be greedy for the United States” (wild cheers). He also draws a clear dividing line between Christians, to whom he promises the return of Christian public culture on one hand, and Muslims and protestors holding Black Lives Matter signs on the other. Some protestors he refers to as “bad, bad people. . . . They do nothing . . . you hear that weak voice out there? That’s a protestor. . . . They aren’t protestors. I call them disruptors.” In other speeches Trump said, in reference to a protestor, “I’d like to punch him in the face” (February 23, 2016). “In the good old days they’d have ripped him out of that seat so fast” (February 27, 2016). “Knock the crap out of him, would you? Seriously . . . I promise you I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise” (February 1, 2016). “Some are very violent. . . . Let’s ruin . . . they’re going to ruin . . . the rest of their lives . . . if they want to do this, let them have a big arrest mark. . . . Their lives are going to be ruined. . . . I’ll press charges” (March 13, 2016).

Trump is an “emotions candidate.” More than any other presidential candidate in decades, Trump focuses on eliciting and praising emotional responses from his fans rather than on detailed policy prescriptions. His speeches—evoking dominance, bravado, clarity, national pride, and personal uplift—inspire an emotional transformation. Then he points to that transformation. “We have passion,” he told the Louisiana gathering. “We’re not silent anymore; we’re the loud, noisy majority.” He derides his rivals in both parties for their inability to inspire enthusiasm. “They lack energy.” Not only does Trump evoke emotion, he makes an object of it, presenting it back to his fans as a sign of collective success.

His supporters have been in mourning for a lost way of life. Many have become discouraged, others depressed. They yearn to feel pride but instead have felt shame. Their land no longer feels their own. Joined together with others like themselves, they now feel hopeful, joyous, elated. The man who expressed amazement, arms upheld—“to be in the presence of such a man!”—seemed in a state of rapture. As if magically lifted, they are no longer strangers in their own land.

“Collective effervescence,” as the French sociologist Emile Durkheim called it in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, is a state of emotional excitation felt by those who join with others they take to be fellow members of a moral or biological tribe. They gather to affirm their unity and, united, they feel secure and respected. While Durkheim was studying religious rites among indigenous tribes in Australia and elsewhere, much of what he observed could be applied to the rally at the Lakefront Airport, as well as many others like it. People gather around what Durkheim calls a “totem”—a symbol such as a cross or a flag. Leaders associate themselves with the totem and charismatic leaders can become totems themselves. The function of the totem is to unify worshippers. Seen through Durkheim’s eyes, the ...

In nearly every rally, Trump points out a protestor, sometimes demonizing them and calling for their expulsion. (One protestor was even falsely depicted by his campaign as a member of ISIS.) Such scapegoating reinforces the joyous unity of the gathering. The act of casting out the “bad one” helps fans unite in a shared sense of being the “good ones,” the majority, no longer strangers in their own land.

“Let’s get rid of PC,” Trump calls out. He was throwing off not only a set of “politically correct” attitudes, but a set of feeling rules—that is, a set of ideas about the right way to feel regarding blacks, women, immigrants, gays—those alluded to in a sign held by a New Orleans woman protestor that said: “VOTE WITH YOUR HEART, NOT WITH YOUR HATE.”

Those on the far right I came to know felt two things. First, they felt the deep story was true. Second, they felt that liberals were saying it was not true, and that they themselves were not feeling the right feelings. Blacks and women who were beneficiaries of affirmative action, immigrants, refugees, and public employees were not really stealing their place in line, liberals said. So don’t feel resentful. Obama’s help to these groups was not really a betrayal, liberals said. The success of those who cut ahead was not really at the expense of white men and their wives. In other words, the far right felt that the deep story was their real story and that there was a false PC cover-up of that story. They felt scorned. “People think we’re not good people if we don’t feel sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees,” one man told me. “But I am a good person and I don’t feel sorry for them.”

The desire to hold on to this elation became a matter of emotional self-interest. Many liberal analysts—myself included—have tended to focus on economic interest. It is a focus on this that had led me, following Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, to carry the Great Paradox like a suitcase on my journey through Louisiana. Why, I’d repeatedly asked, with so many problems, was there so much disdain for federal money to alleviate them? These were questions that spoke heavily to economic self-interest. And while economic self-interest is never entirely absent, what I discovered was the profound importance of emotional self-interest—a giddy release from the feeling of being a stranger in one’s own land.

Having once experienced the elation—the “high”—of being part of a powerful, like-minded majority, released from politically correct rules of feeling, many wanted to hold on to that elation. To do this, they fended off challenge. They sought affirmation. One woman with whom I spent six hours talked about Trump continually, countering possible criticisms, leaving no interstitial moments when skepticism might emerge. It occurred to me that the reason for this shield of talk was to protect her elation.

What many admired about Trump was his success as a businessman. He was a champion of private enterprise, they felt, and that fact had great appeal. During the depression of the 1930s, a number of Americans turned to a belief in socialism and communism, idealizing the central government and believing in leaders who represented their—elation-inspired—faith in it. During the current economic downturn, some on the far right have placed a parallel faith in capitalism.

To white, native-born, heterosexual men, he offered a solution to the dilemma they had long faced as the “left-behinds” of the 1960s and 1970s celebration of other identities. Trump was the identity politics candidate for white men. And he didn’t actively oppose medical care for those in need. If he got elected, you could sign up for Trumpcare and feel manly too.

Around the world in the early twenty-first century, as the multinational companies that roam the globe become more powerful than the political states vying for their favor, it is the right wing that is on the move. Rightwing regimes—focused on national sentiment, strong central rule, and intolerance for minorities or dissent—have come to power in Russia, where President Putin has declared dissident voices as a sign of weakness and “Western influence”; in India, where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has declared India a “Hindu” nation; in Hungary, where anti-Soviet monuments are being replaced by anti-German ones; and in Poland, which is cracking down on a free press. It is becoming more vocal in France (the National Front), Germany (Alternative for Germany), and the United Kingdom (the Independence Party).

Nearly every Tea Party advocate I talked to had voted for Jindal twice, because he promised to enact their values. But after eight years of his governance, they hated the result. He had done what he promised—reduced taxes and cut the public sector—but he left the state in shambles. Still, Jindal already seemed forgotten. Speaking of Edwards trying to pick up the pieces, many echoed a comment by Mike Schaff: “Now we have a Democratic governor, and the first thing he does is raise taxes.”

“Victim” is the last word my Louisiana Tea Party friends would apply to themselves. They didn’t want to be “poor me’s.” As Team Loyalists, Worshippers, and Cowboys, they are proud to endure the difficulties they face. But in the loss of their homes, their drinking water, and even their jobs in non-oil sectors of the economy, there is no other word for it: they are victims. Indeed, Louisianans are sacrificial lambs to the entire American industrial system. Left or right, we all happily use plastic combs, toothbrushes, cell phones, and cars, but we don’t all pay for it with high pollution. As research for this book shows, red states pay for it more—partly through their own votes for easier regulation and partly through their exposure to a social terrain of politics, industry, television channels, and a pulpit that invites them to do so. In one way, people in blue states have their cake and eat it too, while many in red states have neither. Paradoxically, politicians on the right appeal to this sense of victimhood, even when policies such as those of former governor Jindal exacerbate the problem.

As sociologist Richard Florida notes, “Blue state knowledge economies run on red state energy. Red state energy economies, in their turn, depend on dense coastal cities and metro areas, not just as markets and sources of migrants, but for the technology and talent they supply.”

For after decades of improvement, since 2009 rates of air, water, and land pollution have been rising again across the nation. The focus in this book on the keyhole issue—environmental pollution—is a keen reminder of the great importance to us all of what, beyond deep stories and politics, is at stake.

If I were to write a letter to a friend on the liberal left, I would say: Why not get to know some people outside your political bubble? Set aside Ayn Rand; she’s their guru, but you won’t find people personally as selfish as her words would lead you to expect. You’ll probably meet some very fine people who will teach you volumes about strong community, grit, and resilience. You may assume that powerful right-wing organizers—pursuing their financial interests—“hook” right-wing grassroots adherents by appealing to the bad angels of their nature—their greed, selfishness, racial intolerance, homophobia, and desire to get out of paying taxes that go to the unfortunate. As I saw at the Trump rally in New Orleans, some of that appeal goes on. But that appeal obscures another—to the right wing’s good angels—their patience in waiting in line in scary economic times, their capacity for loyalty, sacrifice, and endurance—qualities of the deep story self. Consider the possibility that in their situation, you might end up closer to their perspective.

If I were to write a letter to my Louisiana friends on the right, I might say: Many progressive liberals aren’t satisfied with the nation’s political choices any more than you are. And many see themselves in some parts of your deep story. As one sixty-year-old white, female, San Francisco–based elementary school teacher put it, “I’m a liberal but, hey, I can sympathize with that part about waiting in line.” I know the goals you have in mind—vital community life, full employment, the dignity of labor, freedom—but will the policies you embrace achieve those goals? You want good jobs and income, of course. You may not want to hear this, but in income and jobs, historically the Democrats have done better than the Republicans. In Bulls, Bears, and the Ballot Box, for example, Bob Deitrick and Lew Goldfarb note that over the last eighty years, on eleven of twelve indicators, the economy has fared better under Democratic presidents than under Republicans.

Q

As you get to know them, you’ll find progressives have their own deep story, one parallel to yours, one they feel you may misunderstand. In it, people stand around a large public square inside of which are creative science museums for kids, public art and theater programs, libraries, schools—a state-of-the-art public infrastructure available for use by all. They are fiercely proud of it. Some of them built it. Outsiders can join those standing around the square, since a lot of people who are insiders now were outsiders in the past; incorporation and acceptance of difference feel like American values represented in the Statue of Liberty. But in the liberal deep story, an alarming event occurs; marauders invade the public square, recklessly dismantle it, and selfishly steal away bricks and concrete chunks from the public buildings at its center. Seeing insult added to injury, those guarding the public square watch helplessly as those who’ve dismantled it construct private McMansions with the same bricks and pieces of concrete, privatizing the public realm. That’s the gist of the liberal deep story, and the right can’t understand the deep pride liberals take in their creatively designed, hard-won public sphere as a powerful integrative force in American life. Ironically, you may have more in common with the left than you imagine, for many on the left feel like strangers in their own land too.

Robert Reich has argued that a more essential point of conflict is in yet a third location—between main street capitalism and global capitalism, between competitive and monopoly capitalism. “The major fault line in American politics,” Reich predicts, “will shift from Democrat versus Republican to anti-establishment versus establishment.” The line will divide those who “see the game as rigged and those who don’t.”

Interestingly, both respond to the new challenge of global capitalism with a call for activist government, but activist about different things. When Bobby Jindal gave $1.6 billion of Louisiana taxpayer money as “incentives” to private corporations, he was being a government activist. Liberal politicians calling to restore our crumbling infrastructure are being a different kind of activist. And there are ideas beyond either party yet to be born.

Our deep stories differ, of course, anchored as they are in biography, class, culture, and region. But I feel great admiration for the people I’ve met on the other side of the empathy wall. And while my vote will surely differ from theirs, I wish them well.

To this was often added the more familiar premise that most blacks were not as hardworking or law-abiding as whites. What these subnarratives shared, I felt, was the absence of historical context. It was as if the people I came to know strongly disavowed any unitary premise that fit my initial definition of racism. But given that, they adopted smaller narratives that hung free, the one from the other: one man was incensed by black athletes who knelt for the pledge but had no special feelings for the Confederate flag. Another complained about a friend’s son who was passed over for a place in college due to affirmative action but didn’t embrace the “slavery isn’t my responsibility” narrative. Disaggregated, such smaller narratives hung free, maybe to gather in some new way downstream. And to all this was the background presence of a powerful truth—life had been hard for them and it could get a lot worse.

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.

Along with blacks and immigrants, women were also “line cutters,” although in men’s minds, women tended to divide into separate mental categories: daughters (“Be anything you want”), wives or partners (“Earn a lot but don’t outshine me”), and potential rivals at work (“No pie charts, please”). Before

In The Politics of Resentment, a book based on talks with people in coffee shops and diners in small-town and rural Wisconsin, Katherine Cramer describes people with strong feelings about “being looked down on” by the “big-city elites in Madison.” A student—“the first in my family to go to college”—wrote from western Pennsylvania, where her father and uncles run a scrap-metal yard, operate a dirt track for car racing, and receive checks for natural gas extracted from their land: “the reason I don’t have college debt.” She explained that their childhoods were seared by a fear of poverty while hers was not, and this election sparked strong differences between them. So race, class, national identity, religion, region, views of gender and sexual orientation—all these joined to reinforce a sense that, outside of Louisiana, too, a precious way of life, like the nation itself, was being left behind.

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.

But what has caused this stall? Have blacks leapt ahead of whites in education and income? To judge by our daily exposure to images of African Americans as television news anchors, film stars, football and basketball stars, one could easily gain the impression that for a group that’s only 13 percent of the population, blacks have enjoyed spectacular success, leaving whites behind, and one might assume that things like Ray Bowman’s affirmative action pie chart were the cause. But images can mislead. For over the last thirty years, average blacks have not gained relative to average whites in education, jobs, or wealth. Shockingly, in 2015, black freshmen were more underrepresented at the nation’s top one hundred universities than they were in 1980. In 2015, 15 percent of American eighteen-year-olds were black, but at elite colleges only 6 percent of (noninternational) freshmen were black. The gap in household income has also remained about the same today as it was thirty years ago—with black households earning roughly 55 percent of that earned in white households. The 2008 financial crash also hit African Americans much harder than it hit whites. In 2004, the median wealth of white households was eleven times higher than that of blacks; in 2009 it was nineteen times higher.

the history of the United States has been the history of whites cutting ahead of blacks, first of all through slavery, and later through Jim Crow laws and then through New Deal legislation and the post–World War II GI Bill, which offered help to millions of Americans with the exception of those in farm and domestic work, occupa...