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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

In contrast to blacks, women have reduced the education and income gaps between themselves and men. They now earn slightly more bachelor’s degrees than men do and have made moderate strides in income, shifting from 62 percent of what a man earned per hour in 1980 to 83 percent in 2016. Part of this reduced gap is due to women’s higher wages, and some is due to a decline in male wages—itself largely due to a decline in the male-dominant manufacturing sector.

between 2009 and 2014 more Mexicans left the United States than entered it, and if in a state like Louisiana there are relatively few anyway—just who is cutting in line?

For the most part, the real line cutters are not people one can blame or politicians can thunder against. That’s because they’re not people. They’re robots. Nothing is changing the face of American industry faster than automation, and nowhere is that change more stark than in the cornerstone of Louisiana’s industrial wealth, oil. According to a 2017 Bloomberg report, “Robots Are Taking Over Oil Rigs,” Nabors Industries, the world’s largest onshore driller, expects to cut the average number of workers at each oil well site from twenty to five.

as old jobs go out, some new jobs appear. Still, automation as well as the squeeze big business mergers put on small business, as Robert Reich explains in Saving Capitalism, are very much at play. In manufacturing, studies show, the main cause of job loss is automation.

If automation is the big, hidden line cutter, why is it missing from our understanding of middle- and working-class resentment and from the deep story into which that resentment crystalizes? For one thing, we are invited to celebrate robots as a sign of progress, growth, greatness. They are technological marvels. They cut errors. They improve production. But whatever our politics, this leaves us at an emotional dead-end, for how can we get mad at wordless, raceless, genderless, home-made American robots cutting in line, one by one by one?

I decided to tell them how I would hope to respond to Strangers in Their Own Land if I were an eighteen-year-old Louisianan sitting in their seat that day. If I were interested in government, I told them, I’d want to know why U.S. surveys reflect a declining faith in government, and I’d want to check out the “best-practice” states around the world and to figure out what they’re doing right. Why does Norway, another oil state, with roughly the same size population as Louisiana, have the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, $800 billion, while Louisiana, also rich in oil, remains our nation’s second-poorest state and is facing its worst budget deficit?

If I were heading for a career in business, I said, I’d want to dig into the question of the relationship between industrial growth and clean environment. Must it be a trade-off? I’d investigate job prospects in clean energy and ask why West Virginia now has three times as many jobs in solar as in coal. If I were I interested in robots and jobs, I’d want to learn more about Germany, whose manufacturing sector is highly automated while maintaining high employment.

If I were interested in psychology, I suggested, I would investigate why many of the oil workers I talked to reject the scientific evidence for climate change, while most CEOs of the very oil companies they work for—BP, Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Citgo, for example—affirm, in official speeches and on company websites, their companies’ acknowledgment and acceptance of climate science?

I suggest we address our present-day political impasse through four pillars of activism. The first is to affirm in every possible way our precious and potentially fragile system of democracy: its checks and balances, its independent judiciary, its free press. The second is to recognize that if the Democratic Party is to pose a real, viable, attractive alternative to Donald Trump, it must address the grievances, the life experiences, the sense of losing ground, of people like those in this book. A third pillar of activism is the vote. We’re a democracy, but in the 2016 presidential election, voter turnout was at a twenty-year low. Four out of every ten eligible voters did not vote. Nearly six out of ten young people aged eighteen to twenty-four did not vote. We need to challenge unjust gerrymandering, needless long lines, and other voter restrictions, assure the reliability of voting machines, and above all encourage fellow citizens to exercise their priceless right to vote. Finally, to build the fourth pillar of activism I would reach across our painful partisan divide to initiate talks about race, robots, government, and more. Democrats might be surprised to discover that they are more isolated in their own political bubbles than Republicans are in theirs. According to a 2017 Pew poll, nearly half—47 percent—of Clinton supporters had no close friends who were Trump supporters, while only 31 percent of Trump supporters had no close friends who backed Clinton.

My goal has been to discover what that something actually is. I’ve long been fascinated by the emotional draw of right-wing politics; that’s my “something.” It took getting close and that determined my choice of method.

had imagined, before I came, that the more polluted the place in which people live, the more alarmed they would be by that pollution and the more in favor of cleaning it up. Instead I found Louisiana to be highly polluted, and the people I talked with to be generally opposed to any more environmental regulation and, indeed, regulations in general. So was Louisiana an oddball state in this regard, or not?

According to previous research, the more polluted a state is, the more likely it is to vote red (chapter 5). So far from being an oddball state, what was true for Louisiana was true nationwide. But what went on within each red state? Was it, as journalist Alec MacGillis claimed in the New York Times, that within red states the people facing poverty, poor schools, and broken families didn’t show up in political polls because they didn’t vote at all and meanwhile, others living in the same state, two class levels higher, did vote as Republican? If we apply MacGillis’s logic, we might expect that the people who live near polluting industry wish the polluters were regulated but don’t bother to vote while Republicans, who are richer and live in cleaner places, don’t think there’s a problem and so reject the idea of regulating polluting industry. Maybe.

But a second possibility is more puzzling: did the same person both face pollution and vote against regulating polluters? Rebecca Elliott and I set about fin...

The most interesting findings are these: as the relative riskiness of the county a person lived in increased, the more likely that person was to agree with the statement “People worry too much about human progress harming the environment.” So the higher the exposure to environmental pollution, the less worried the individual was about it—and the more likely that person was to define him- or herself as a “strong Republican.”

Those who identified themselves as male, high income, conservative, Republican, Christian, and “strongly religious” were also likely to believe that air and water pollution were not a danger. Further, the higher the risk within a person’s county, the more likely a person was to agree with the statement that “the U.S. is doing more than enough to protect the environment.” Again, curiously, the higher a person’s exposure to pollution, given their residence, the more likely the individual was to think the United States is, in general, overreacting to the issue.

In the end, red states are more polluted than blue states. And whether an individual does or doesn’t vote, conservative and Republican individuals tend to brush aside the environment as an issue, and to suffer the consequences by living with higher rates of pollution. The Louisiana story is an extreme example of the politics-and-environment paradox seen across the nation.

By one estimate, half of all tax benefits go to the richest 20 percent of Americans.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at the end of 2014, 1.9 percent of the 143 million American non-farm workers were employed in the civilian sector of the federal government. An additional 1 percent were in the enlisted military. About 3.5 percent of workers work for state government, including school and hospital workers. In addition, 9.8 percent of workers—including public school teachers—work for local government. In 2014, 826,848 people—or 0.58 percent of all Americans—served in the military reserves. So adding together all military and civilian workers at the federal, state, and local levels, in 2014, less than 17 percent of Americans worked for the government.

“The more environmental regulations you have, the fewer jobs.” Nearly all the Tea Party sympathizers I interviewed referred to a trade-off between jobs and environmental protection. The tougher the environmental regulations, the logic goes, the higher the costs to firms, who pass that cost on by raising the price of their goods, thereby reducing sales and employment.

Do excessive demands imposed by environmental regulatory agencies lead to massive layoffs? According to the Mass Layoff Statistics kept by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 0.1 percent of all layoffs were “environment and safety-related” from 1987 to 1990. The most recent data, from 2012, covering 6,500 private, non-farm layoff events, show that forty-five events, or 0.69 percent of the total layoffs, were “disaster or safety” related, including events attributed to “hazardous work environment” or “natural disaster.” Only eighteen events, or 0.28 percent of the total, were attributed to “government regulations/intervention.”

An eight-part 2014 investigative special report in The Advocate, Louisiana’s largest daily newspaper, was entitled “Giving Away Louisiana.” If Louisiana gives away roughly $1.1 billion per year in taxpayer money to corporations as “incentives,” the team of journalists wanted to know, are citizens getting their money’s worth back in jobs? Their answer was “no.” The Louisiana taxpayer can pay enormous amounts for each job industry brings in.

“The economy always does better under a Republican president.” For the years 1949–2009, unemployment has been lower and gross domestic product has been higher under Democratic presidents. Political scientist Larry Bartels has also shown that inequality has increased greatly under Republican presidents and decreased slightly under Democrats. Recently, economists at Princeton confirmed that the U.S. economy has grown faster under Democratic presidents, who have also produced more jobs, lowered the unemployment rate, generated higher corporate profits and investments, and seen higher stock market returns. They attribute this, however, to the timing of oil shocks and when major technologies debuted that had positive effects on the economy (e.g., the Internet under Clinton)—in other words, some of the correlation is due to factors outside a president’s control. Republican presidents have also added far more to federal debt levels than Democrats have, as a percent of GDP; since 1945, Reagan has added the most, with an almost 60 percent increase in federal debt to GDP. Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton all managed to reduce debt as a percentage of GDP.