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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances.

In fact, partyism, as some call it, now beats race as the source of divisive prejudice. When Americans moved in the past, they left in search of better jobs, cheaper housing, or milder weather. But according to The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded Americans Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing, when people move today, it is more often to live near others who share their views.

Ninety percent of Democrats believe in the human role in climate change, surveys find, compared with 59 percent of moderate Republicans, 38 percent of conservative Republicans, and only 29 percent of Tea Party advocates. In fact, politics is the single biggest factor determining views on climate change. This split has widened because the right has moved right, not because the left has moved left.

Across the country, red states are poorer and have more teen mothers, more divorce, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrollment. On average, people in red states die five years earlier than people in blue states. Indeed, the gap in life expectancy between Louisiana (75.7) and Connecticut (80.8) is the same as that between the United States and Nicaragua. Red states suffer more in another highly important but little-known way, one that speaks to the very biological self-interest in health and life: industrial pollution.

Out of the 50 states, Louisiana ranked 49th and in overall health ranked last. According to the 2015 National Report Card, Louisiana ranked 48th out of 50 in eighth-grade reading and 49th out of 50 in eighth-grade math.

Given such an array of challenges, one might expect people to welcome federal help. In truth, a very large proportion of the yearly budgets of red states—in the case of Louisiana, 44 percent—do come from federal funds; $2,400 is given by the federal government per Louisianan per year.

Mike had long worked for a small business and advocates a free market for businesses of all sizes, and from this yet another paradox seemed to unfold. Many Tea Party advocates work in or run small businesses. Yet the politicians they support back laws that consolidate the monopoly power of the very largest companies that are poised to swallow up smaller ones.

Wrapped around these puzzles was a bigger one: how can a system both create pain and deflect blame for that pain? In 2008, reckless and woefully underregulated Wall Street investors led many to lose savings, homes, jobs, and hope. Yet, years later, under the banner of a “free market,” many within the growing small-town right defend Wall Street against government “overregulation.” What could be going on?

In his New York Times essay, “Who Turned My Blue State Red?” Alec MacGillis offers an intriguing answer to the Great Paradox. People in red states who need Medicaid and food stamps welcome them but don’t vote, he argues, while those a little higher on the class ladder, white conservatives, don’t need them and do vote—against public dollars for the poor.

Nearly all the recent growth of the right has occurred below the Mason-Dixon line, an area that, encompassing the original Confederate states, accounts for a third of the U.S. population. In the last two decades the South has also grown by 14 percent.

At play are “feeling rules,” left ones and right ones. The right seeks release from liberal notions of what they should feel—happy for the gay newlywed, sad at the plight of the Syrian refugee, unresentful about paying taxes. The left sees prejudice. Such rules challenge the emotional core of right-wing belief.

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

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

Finally, we came to Madonna’s basic feeling that Limbaugh was defending her against insults she felt liberals were lobbing at her: “Oh, liberals think that Bible-believing Southerners are ignorant, backward, rednecks, losers. They think we’re racist, sexist, homophobic, and maybe fat.” Her grandfather had struggled as a desperately poor Arkansas sharecropper. She was a gifted singer, beloved by a large congregation, a graduate of a two-year Bible college, and a caring mother of two. In this moment, I began to recognize the power of blue-state catcalls taunting red state residents. Limbaugh was a firewall against liberal insults thrown at her and her ancestors, she felt.

According to the American Cancer Society, Louisiana has the second highest incidence of cancer for men and the fifth highest male death rate from cancer in the nation. But Lee has recently volunteered to post lawns signs for Tea Party congressman John Fleming, who earned a score of 91 on the right-wing FreedomWorks scorecard and favors cutting the Environmental Protection Agency, weakening the Clean Air Act, and drilling on the outer continental shelf, as well as opposing the regulation of greenhouse gases and favoring less regulation of Wall Street. Lee is a regular at meetings of the DeRidder Tea Party, wearing his red, white, and blue party T-shirt featuring an eagle sharpening its talons. So why was Lee the environmentalist eager to plant lawn signs for a politician calling for cuts in the EPA? If I could answer this question, maybe I could unlock the door to the Great Paradox.

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

Most of what polluted the bayou sank to the bottom of it—mercury, heavy metals, ethylene dichloride (EDC), and chlorinated dioxins. So at first the danger lay mainly there. But when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers twice dredged the nearby ship channel to ease the passage of commercial ships, “they scooped the toxic sludge from the bottom and pasted it on the banks right and left, without marking where they put it,” Harold tells me. So now the Arenos can’t trust the banks either.

Jindal wasn’t for cleaning up the environment, however. In remarks to the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank, he had said that emissions regulations and environmental protections were a way President Obama was “holding our economy hostage to their radical ideas.” In 2014 Jindal had also given $1.6 billion to industry as “incentives” to invest in Louisiana—$394 per citizen of Louisiana—while simultaneously cutting about the same amount out of the state budget and laying off 30,000 public sector workers—among them nurses, nurse’s aides, medical technicians, public school teachers, and safety inspectors.

People on the right seemed to be strongly moved by three concerns—taxes, faith, and honor.

Both Lee and the Arenos had voted for Republican congressman David Vitter, who voted in 2011 to eliminate the entire Environmental Protection Agency. He also voted against a National Endowment for the Oceans, which would protect oceans, coastal areas, and Great Lakes ecosystems. He battled the EPA on its report of a relationship of formaldehyde exposure to cancer, and won a score of 0 on the League of Conservation Voters scorecard.

The Greek word “nostalgia” derives from the root nostros, meaning “return home,” and algia, meaning “longing.” Doctors in seventeenth-century Europe considered nostalgia an illness, like the flu, mainly suffered by displaced migrant servants, soldiers, and job seekers, and curable through opium, leeches, or, for the affluent, a journey to the Swiss Alps. Throughout time, such feeling has been widely acknowledged. The Portuguese have the term saudade. The Russians have toska. The Czechs have litost. Others too name the feeling: for Romanians, it’s dor, for Germans, it’s heimweh. The Welsh have hiraeth, the Spanish mal de corazon.

Many workers in the petrochemical plants were conservative Republicans and avid hunters and fishers who felt caught in a terrible bind. They loved their magnificent wilderness. They remembered it from childhood. They knew it and respected it as sportsmen. But their jobs were in industries that polluted—often legally—this same wilderness. They had children to take care of and felt wary of supporting any environmental movement or federal government action that might jeopardize them. The general talk around town was that the choice was between the environment and jobs.

The Arenos were rememberers facing a strange “structural amnesia,” as the British anthropologist Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard called it when studying something utterly different. Evans-Pritchard had been researching a pastoral people of the Sudan called the Nuer, who had a remarkable memory for some things and completely forgot about others. Men and women both remembered eleven generations of male ancestors, for example, but largely forgot their female counterparts. There was, the anthropologist sensed, a structure to what they remembered and forgot that was based on the power of the Nuer’s dominant institution—the kin system. Dominant within that system were men. So memory, Evans-Pritchard reasoned, was an indirect expression of power. The Arenos faced structural amnesia about something else and linked to a different source of power: the Louisiana Chemical Association, the Society of the Plastics Industry, the Vinyl Institute, Shell Oil, PPG Industries, and their leaders in government. Spokesmen for this source of power drew the popular imagination to the exciting economic future. The Arenos felt that their silent bayou, their buried kin, their dead trees were forgotten, like the female half of the Nuer.

In 2012, all three were watching speeches by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. He wouldn’t help the country clean up dirty rivers, they thought, but as an opponent to the right to abortion, he was for “saving all those babies”—and that seemed to them the more important moral issue on which they would be ultimately judged.

“We’re on this earth for a limited amount of time,” he says, leaning on the edge of the window. “But if we get our souls saved, we go to Heaven, and Heaven is for eternity. We’ll never have to worry about the environment from then on. That’s the most important thing. I’m thinking long-term.”

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.

What he felt was being given away was tax money to non-working, non-deserving people—and not just tax money, but honor too. If that tax money could come back to citizens—as a sort of “raise” in the midst of a three-decade-long national economic lull, why not? 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.

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.

But months later, a team of Louisiana State University researchers asked some 2,000 residents of the devastated coast, “Do you favor or oppose a moratorium that would halt offshore drilling until new safety requirements are met?” Half opposed it, and only a third favored it. When asked, “Have your views about other environmental issues such as global warming or protecting wildlife changed as a result of the oil spill?” seven out of ten answered “no.”

Why? Loss of drilling revenue was one thing. But federal government “over-regulation” was another.

With regard to alcohol, Louisiana is one of the most permissive states in the nation. You can pull into a drive-through frozen daiquiri stand and buy daiquiris in “go-cups”—the only legal proviso being that the plastic lid is pressed on and the straw is not yet inserted.

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.

In all the talk at the gatherings for Congressmen Boustany and Landry and around the table at the Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana, 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. General Honoré was no nervous nelly, but he was mindful of the vulnerable communities around the “self-regulated” plants. “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.”

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.

Dr. Templet and I are on a second round of coffee and a second layer of revelations. “Oil brought in some jobs,” Templet says, “but it causes other jobs to disappear or simply inhibits other sectors—such as the seafood industry and tourism—from growing.” Oil rig explosions such as the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon blowout severely hurt the seafood and tourism industries—oyster fishermen, deep sea fisherman, wholesalers, restaurateurs, and hotel workers were impacted.

One defense of oil jobs was that they were highly paid, and that salaries would “trickle down” through consumption that increased jobs and wages of other workers. But did it? “Not much,” Templet says. That’s because oil wages don’t trickle down; they leak out. As he explained, “Most of the plants are owned by foreign companies.

The income of temporary Filipino pipefitters and Mexican green-card holders doesn’t “trickle down” either, since most dutifully send money back to needy families abroad. Indeed, some local citizens complained that imported Filipino workers don’t spend their money in local stores. 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.

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.

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. A 2016 survey of the world’s major economies also found that strict environmental policies improved, rather than handicapped, competitiveness in the international market.

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.

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.

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

Pretty fucking diabolical

By 2015, under Governor Jindal, funds for the state’s twenty-eight public colleges and universities had been drastically cut. Louisiana has long stood 46th out of 50 states in per-student spending on public education. According to the Louisiana Commission on Higher Education, since 2008 the governor has eliminated $800 million from the higher education budget, leading to cuts of academic programs and the loss of 854 faculty and 4,734 other employees.

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.

The sinkhole grew. First it took the area of a house lot, then a football field. By 2015, the sinkhole stretched over thirty-seven acres. Then the gassy sludge had also infiltrated the aquifer, threatening the drinking water.

In the Napoleonville salt dome, a lively commerce was going on. Petrochemical companies own fifty-three caverns and some seven more companies rent space in them. These are valuable, large storage depots for the many chemicals used in oil drilling, fracking, and plastic manufacturing. Texas Brine rents six caverns. Dow and Union Carbide owns others into which they have pumped fifty million gallons of ethylene dichloride (EDC). While it surprised me to learn how far down into the earth free enterprise went, such underground storage systems have long been accepted practice in the Gulf region; the National Petroleum Reserves have themselves long been stored in a similar way.

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.

Ten years later, news of something called the “Lake Charles Project” surfaced. Wanting to stop troublemakers from helping workers bring more such lawsuits, Condea Vista had secretly hired a team to spy on RESTORE. Peter Markey, then manager of the Condea Vista’s supply-chain operations, admitted in sworn deposition that for a quarter of a million dollars, the company had hired spies to infiltrate RESTORE. The spies were Special Forces retirees who worked for a Maryland-based security firm.

The Line Cutters Look! You see people cutting in line ahead of you! You’re following the rules. They aren’t. As they cut in, it feels like you are being moved back. How can they just do that? Who are they? Some are black. Through affirmative action plans, pushed by the federal government, they are being given preference for places in colleges and universities, apprenticeships, jobs, welfare payments, and free lunches, and they hold a certain secret place in people’s minds, as we see below. Women, immigrants, refugees, public sector workers—where will it end? Your money is running through a liberal sympathy sieve you don’t control or agree with. These are opportunities you’d have loved to have had in your day—and either you should have had them when you were young or the young shouldn’t be getting them now. It’s not fair.

You’re a compassionate person. But now you’ve been asked to extend your sympathy to all the people who have cut in front of you. So you have your guard up against requests for sympathy. People complain: Racism. Discrimination. Sexism. You’ve heard stories of oppressed blacks, dominated women, weary immigrants, closeted gays, desperate refugees, but at some point, you say to yourself, you have to close the borders to human sympathy—especially if there are some among them who might bring you harm. You’ve suffered a good deal yourself, but you aren’t complaining about it.