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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

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.

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.

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.

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.

I 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.

Being a Team Player meant braving problems. To do so, Janice did a kind of work she didn’t even count as work: the emotional work of accommodating such things as nearby toxic waste landfills, which in her heart of hearts she never would choose to live with. Sometimes Team Players had to suck it up and just cope.

“I was riding my palomino horse, Ted,” he recalls. “Normally Ted cleared ditches five feet across just fine. But this time the horse fell back into the water and sank down. He tried to climb up but couldn’t. We tried to pull his reins, but couldn’t get him up. Finally my uncle hauled him out with a tractor. But when Ted finally scrambled back out, he was coated all over with a strange film. I hosed him off but that only hardened the film on him. It was like a terrible glued-on wet suit. It was like rubber. The vet tried but couldn’t save him, and Ted died two days later.” The ditch was downstream from a Firestone polymers plant.

What she holds separate from this betrayal and pursuit of self-interest are the Constitution and the American flag.

The American government is a betrayer, she feels, but the American flag stays true.

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.”

“To set up the air monitors, I had to wear a respirator. Staff asked me to take it off since it might make workers who saw me with it on worry about the ill effect of the air on them. But they needn’t have worried. Some of the guys started to taunt me, the corporate sissy who couldn’t tough it out like they [did]. But when they laughed at me, I could see their teeth were visibly eroded by exposure to sulfuric acid mist.”

Stepping back in time, three streams of influence seemed present in the feelings of my Tea Party friends in Louisiana, one often spoken of and two, rarely. For one thing, 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.

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. Between this top and bottom, Cash describes poor whites as living in unpainted houses with “sagging rail fences . . . and crazy barns which yet bulged with corn.” However, as the plantation system grew, it became harder and harder to cope. Planters bought up the most desirable fertile plains, pressing poorer farmers onto the barren uplands. If poor white farmers tried to move to better land, they found that the planters had “seized the best lands there” even “beyond the Mississippi” in “Arkansas and Texas armed with plentiful capital and solid battalions of slaves.” Poor whites were driven back “to the red hills and the sand lands and the pine barrens and the swamps—to all the marginal lands of the South.” To plant cotton and sugarcane, plantation owners destroyed forests, which deprived “the farmer’...

“I’m here in my costume to represent a Confederate trooper. Confederates tried to get out from under the control of the federal government—to secede. But you can’t secede from oil. And you can’t secede from a mentality. You have to think your way into and out of that mentality. But they should get me in a different costume to talk about that.”

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.

Many upper-middle-class liberals, white and black, didn’t notice what, emotionally speaking, their kind of self was displacing. For along with blue-collar jobs, a blue-collar way of life was going out of fashion, and with it, the honor attached to a rooted self and pride in endurance—the deep story self. The liberal upper-middle class saw community as insularity and closed-mindedness rather than as a source of belonging and honor. And they didn’t see that, given trends “behind the brow of the hill,” their turn to be displaced might be next.

For the Tea Party around the country, the shifting moral qualifications for the American Dream had turned them into strangers in their own land, afraid, resentful, displaced, and dismissed by the very people who were, they felt, cutting in line. The undeclared class war transpiring on a different stage, with different actors, and evoking a different notion of fairness was leading those engaged in it to blame the “supplier” of the imposters—the federal government.

Liberals were asking them to feel compassion for the downtrodden in the back of the line, the “slaves” of society. 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.

“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.

So it was with joyous relief that many heard a Donald Trump who seemed to be wildly, omnipotently, magically free of all PC constraint.

This giddy, validating release produced a kind of “high” that felt good. And of course people wanted to feel good. 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.

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.

During the eight years Bobby Jindal was governor of Louisiana, he fired 30,000 state employees and furloughed many others. Social workers increased their caseloads. Child abuse victims were for the first time spending nights at government offices. Since 2007–2008, in the nation’s second poorest state, Governor Jindal had cut funding for higher education by 44 percent.

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.

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. (See Appendix C.) Still, differences between the parties are otherwise far from clear; Bill Clinton, a Democrat, ushered in an era of deregulation, generally favored by the right, while Richard Nixon, a Republican, initiated environmental regulations now generally favored by the left. And Louisianans, take a look at Norway. It’s a small, capitalist democracy with about the same population as Louisiana, five million people. It has a long coast and its people, like you, look to the water, boats, and fishing. Like you, Norway has o...

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.”

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”).

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.

In addition, of course, 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, occupations in which blacks were overrepresented.

So if, relatively speaking, black wages have not risen, and if despite educational gains women’s wages have yet to reach parity, and if 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 McKinsey Global Institute study of two thousand work activities across eight hundred occupations, “half of today’s work activities could be automated by 2055.”

About a year after Strangers in Their Own Land first appeared, it was assigned as summer reading to all the entering freshmen at the Ogden Honors College of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, the flagship campus of the state’s university system.

When I speak to audiences elsewhere in the country, I use different examples, but the spirit of what I say is the same. 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...

More than seventy grassroots groups have risen across the country and I’ve personally participated in one of them, Living Room Conversations (https://livingroomconversations.org). On the website of the Bridge Alliance, one can find other cross-partisan groups with names such as Common Good, Better Angels, American Public Square, and AllSides. As of October 2017, the Bridge Alliance had three million supporters.

I 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.

The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) calculates various measures of exposure to toxic chemical releases and waste disposal. Based on reports from industrial and federal facilities, the most comprehensive of TRI measures are called the Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators (RSEI).

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.

“A lot of people—maybe 40 percent—work for the federal and state government.” 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.

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.”

In 2013, Louisiana paid $240,000,000 in tax exemptions to fracking companies, but Russell notes, “There is little evidence the tax break stimulates drilling . . .” Drilling goes up and down with the availability and price of oil and gas, he says, not with changing amounts of government subsidies. State subsidies to corporations have also been growing faster than the Louisiana state economy.

For most years, leakage out of Louisiana is between 20 and 35 percent. (Leakage also varied from year to year; low in 2003 and high in 2005, for example.) Local businesses tend not to leak their profits away to other states, while large, multinational businesses with operations and headquarters elsewhere do.