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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

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. Was the right-wing media making them up to stoke hatred, I wondered, or were there enough blue-state insults to go around?

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. Lee’s biggest beef was taxes. They went to the wrong people—especially welfare beneficiaries who “lazed around days and partied at night” and government workers in cushy jobs. He knew liberal Democrats wanted him to care more about welfare recipients, but he didn’t want their PC rules telling him who to feel sorry for.

“I’m a stubborn man,” Lee explains, “and if you cross me, I don’t ever forget it.” He wanted to feel vindicated, just as he’d felt against PPG’s accusations of absenteeism when a member of the Termination Committee appeared at the seafood advisory meeting in the Burton Coliseum. He’d also found vindication, he felt, against that government clerk, all IRS clerks, and indeed the source of all taxes—the government. He’d gotten even. He’d done another Burton Coliseum. He’d joined the Tea Party.

Counterintelligence profiling

“We vote for candidates that put the Bible where it belongs,” Harold adds. “We try to be right-living, clean-living people, and we’d like our leaders to live that way and believe in that, too.” Before settling on Romney in the 2012 election, they had favored the former senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum. The Arenos disapprove of “greedy corporations” stepping on the little guy. “Oil interests tried to suppress the development of the electric car,” Annette adds. Agreeing, Harold says: “Republicans stand for big business. They won’t help us with the problems we’ve got here.” But Republicans put God and family on their side and “we like that. The Scripture says Jesus wants us to be about his Father’s business,” Annette says. Their faith had guided them through a painful loss of family, friends, neighbors, frogs, turtles, and trees. They felt God had blessed them with this courage to face their ordeals, and they thanked Him for that. “I don’t know what people do if they don’t know Him,” Annette adds. For the Arenos, religious faith has moved into the very cultural space in which politics might have played a vital, independent role. Politics hadn’t helped, they felt, and the Bible surely had.

For governor of Louisiana, the Arenos had twice voted for Bobby Jindal on grounds of faith and family values. 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. Lee Sherman was eager to lower his taxes, the Arenos to protect their Christian faith. Added to these basic motives were certain personal wishes: Lee, who had borne the guilt of polluting public waters and been cheated by a dishonest official at a tax office, wanted to feel vindicated. The tax office was corrupt, and taxes themselves were connected to dishonesty, he felt. One didn’t know where they went or for what. The Arenos shared Lee’s concern, but added another personal wish. Given their extended ordeal and the importance of God and the church in getting through it, they felt a powerful drive to place themselves in spiritually guided hands. For both Lee and the Arenos, at issue in politics was trust. It was hard enough to trust people close at hand, and very hard to trust those far away; to locally rooted people, Washington, D.C., felt very far away. Like everyone I was to talk with, both also felt like victims of a frightening loss—or was it theft?—of their cultural home, their place in the world, and their honor. The politicians who most won their trust offered no help on cleaning the place up. And those who offered help, well, who were they? What were they pushing? That was the dilemma.

...ss--or was it theft?--of their cultural home, their place in the world, and their honor. The politicians who most won their trust offered no help on cleaning the place up. And those who offered help, well, who were they? What were they pushing? That was the dilemma.

“The state always seems to come down on the little guy,” he notes. “Take this bayou. If your motorboat leaks a little gas into the water, the warden’ll write you up. But if companies leak thousands of gallons of it and kill all the life here? The state lets them go. If you shoot an endangered brown pelican, they’ll put you in jail. But if a company kills the brown pelican by poisoning the fish he eats? They let it go. I think they overregulate the bottom because it’s harder to regulate the top.” It isn’t just that the power structure rigs collective memory. It rigs the enforcement of rules too. The higher up the ladder of power, the more likely one was to get off; the lower down, the less likely.

If the power elite want to forget about pollution, and if they impose structural amnesia on a community, you need an omnipotent mind to remember how things once were. You needed, the Arenos felt, God. He remembers how it was. He knows what was lost. If the federal government was committed to a multicultural America that dimmed the position of the Christian church, it was getting in the way of that church, diminishing the importance of God, and it was God who had enabled them to survive their terrible ordeal.

Harold walks me to my car. I get in, open my window, and fasten my seat belt. “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.”

“Why,” I ask Honoré, “don’t citizens ask politicians to clean up their environment?” The General pauses: “All the people in Louisiana hear is jobs, jobs, jobs. And there’s just enough to it, that people slip into believing it’s the whole story. Really they’re captives of a psychological program.”

The General points his arm out the window at the Mississippi. I am reminded of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, and looking at the map I had been charmed by the names of the towns along it: Convent, Saint Gabriel, Saint Rose, Saint James. I knew that here over half of the nation’s grain and a fifth of its other exports floated to the Gulf and out to the world.

Industry owns the Mississippi now. There’s hardly a public dock along it.”

“Back in the 1950s,” one man told me, “a steam boat left New Orleans propelled by freshly painted red paddles. By the time it had arrived upriver in Natchez, the red paint had vanished.”

But the Jambalaya Capital is sadly located on one the most polluted industrial strips in the world. A hundred and fifty facilities line the two sides of the Mississippi, an eighty-five-mile strip, each plant surrounded by chain-link fences, some with entrances whose signs proudly announce the small number of work days missed due to accidents. Many plants were built on former cotton and sugarcane plantations. Other towns along River Road—Plaquemine, St. Gabriel, Geismar, Donaldsonville—lie in parishes that in 2013 ranked in the top 3 percent of U.S. counties in reported toxic releases, according to the EPA. Louisiana is the nation’s sixth leading state in generating hazardous waste, and it is third in the nation for the amount of hazardous waste it imports from other states. “We import hazardous waste from Arkansas,” the General continues, eyes wide as if in disbelief, “because they’ve got stricter regulations than we do.”

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.” The rest—interestingly, the less educated and female—said “yes.” The inland Louisianans I spoke with, like Congressmen Boustany and Landry, were also adamantly opposed to Obama’s moratorium. Why? Loss of drilling revenue was one thing. But federal government “over-regulation” was another. “It’s not in the company’s own interest to have a spill or an accident. They try hard,” one woman told me. “So if there’s a spill, it’s probably the best the company could do.” Another recalled all the everyday things we use that are made from oil. One man even declared that “what caused the spill was overregulation. If the government hadn’t been looking over BP’s shoulder, it would have regulated itself, and the spill wouldn’t have happened.” One woman summed it up: “The spill makes us sad, but the moratorium makes us mad.”

Liquor, guns, motorcycle helmets (legislation had gone back and forth on that)—mainly white masculine pursuits—are fairly unregulated. But for women and black men, regulation is greater. Within given parameters, federal law gives women the right to decide whether or not to abort a fetus. But the state of Louisiana has imposed restrictions on clinics offering the procedure, which, if upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court, would prevent all but one clinic, in New Orleans, from offering women access to it. Any adult in the state can also be jailed for transporting a teenager out of state for the purposes of an abortion if the teen has not informed her parents. Young black males are regulated too. Jefferson Davis Parish passed a bill banning the wearing of pants in public that revealed “skin beneath their waists or their underwear,” and newspaper accounts featured images, taken from the back, of two black teenage boys exposing large portions of their undershorts. The parish imposed a $50 fine for a first offense and $100 for a second. A town ordinance in Ville Platte (in which 54 percent of the population is black) requires residents to wear “something reflective” and visible from all directions on an outer garment when walking after dark.

“But here we have ‘self-regulation.’ The federal EPA passes the buck to the state Department of Environmental Quality. The state passes the buck to the oil companies. They regulate themselves.

Boeing/FAA

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.

“How many Louisiana jobs are in oil and petrochemical plants?” “Today, less than 10 percent,” he answers.

But later when I check his figures I discover that the highest estimate—offered by the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association—was 15 percent of all jobs in the state. The lowest—from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics—was 3.3 percent. (This included all jobs in oil and gas extraction, support activities for mining, petroleum, and coal products manufacturing, and pipeline transportation in 2014.)

The industry is highly automated. To build a petrochemical plant, you need many construction workers for a temporary period, and then their job is over. To run a petrochemical plant, you need a small number of highly trained engineers, chemists, and operators to keep watch over panels of gauges and to know what to do when there’s trouble. Then you need a few repairmen such as Lee Sherman. But a fracking boom was on, and maybe that meant more jobs coming in. According to the 2014 Sasol-sponsored Southwest Louisiana Regional Impact Study, some 18,000 jobs, a small proportion of them permanent, would open up by 2018. But seven out of ten of these jobs would be filled, the report said, by workers from outside southwest Louisiana. Many companies would recruit professionals from around the world. Construction workers building the “man camps”—barracks within enclosed encampments—were Mexican, people said. The man camps would house 5,000 pipefitters, an undisclosed number of them Filipinos on temporary visas. Filipino workers have worked for over a decade on oil platforms in the Gulf.

But severance taxes—fees paid when oil or gas is taken out of the ground—from oil contributed only 14 percent of the state’s budget revenue, down from 42 percent in 1982.

To offer an “incentive,” Jindal lowered corporate income taxes so that state revenue from such companies fell from $703 million in 2008 to $290 million in 2012. He lowered oil severance taxes so that the state received over $1 billion in 2008 but less than $886 million in 2012. It also lost another $2.4 billion between 2000 and 2014 because some oil companies were exempted from oil severance taxes altogether. (With approval from the state, new businesses are eligible to avoid paying local property taxes on new building and equipment costs.) Indeed, according to the Louisiana Economic Development and Tax Foundation, Louisiana offers “the lowest business taxes in the entire country for new manufacturing projects.” And for three years it was impossible to tell whether the oil companies paid anything at all to the state since the job of auditing oil company payments was handed over to the Office of Mineral Resources, which has close ties with the industry and which, between 2010 and 2013, performed no audits at all. So apart from providing 15 percent of jobs in Louisiana, oil was providing less and less financial benefit to the state. Oil was costing more to lure to the state and, once there, giving less to it. Meanwhile, to pay for this, public workers were fired and the state debt—$83 billion in 2012, much of it in unfunded public pension liabilities—remained.

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. Sasol is based in Johannesburg. Royal Dutch Shell is based in The Hague. BP is based in London. Citgo is a wholly owned subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela. Magnolia LNG is based in Perth, Australia. Phillips 66, spun off from ConocoPhillips in 2012, is based in the United States but not in Lake Charles. So most top executives in these companies are not building luxury homes and swimming pools in Lake Charles, Sulphur, or Westlake. Stockholders aren’t spending their dollars there either, but rather where they live, in Greenwich, Connecticut, say, or Mill Valley, California.”

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. Dow Chemical gives to the Audubon Nature Institute. Shell Oil Company supports the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Pittsburgh Plate Glass pays for a “Naturelab–Classroom in the Woods” near Lake Charles. Sasol funds a project to record the history of Mossville, a black community its expansion displaced. The Louisiana Chemical Association gives to the Louisiana Tumor Registry. The people of Louisiana are now grateful—here Templet pauses for a moment of sad irony—“not just for jobs, but for gifts.”

After I’d returned home from my visit to Baton Rouge, I discovered an illuminating report on how industries deal with the fact that people don’t want them to move in next door. It was written by J. Stephen Powell of the Los Angeles–based consulting firm Cerrell Associates, Inc., and was entitled “Political Difficulties Facing Waste-to-Energy Conversion Plant Siting.” The fifty-seven-page report was proprietary and eventually leaked—by whom, I couldn’t find out. It was produced in a different time (1984) and place (Los Angeles) but is as relevant today as it was then. The California Waste Management Board paid Cerrell Associates $500,000 to define communities that would not resist “locally undesirable land use” (LULU).

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

When I ask Hardey about his political orientation—he was a moderate Republican—he immediately answers, “I’ve had enough of poor me.” As he explains, “I don’t like the government paying unwed mothers to have a lot of kids, and I don’t go for affirmative action. I met this one black guy who complained he couldn’t get a job. Come to find out he’d been to private school. I went to a local public school like everyone else I know. No one should be getting a job to fill some mandated racial quota or getting state money not to work.”

Why couldn’t blacks and legal immigrants do the same? he thought. As a young man in the 1970s, seeking work in the plants, Hardey had been told, “We had to fill our quotas for blacks.” Was this truly the case, I wondered, or was this what company recruiters told white job seekers they turned down? He was not a racist, Hardey told me, but he favored no special breaks for blacks or foreigners. In a racially separated world, it’s possible to have racial disadvantage without racial prejudice. Whites can turn for help to white neighbors with good connections in the plant. Blacks turn to black neighbors without them. Maybe, Hardey thought. But that seemed a problem you could fix without the federal government horning in. Hardey had worked his own way up despite federal intervention, as he saw it.

“There it is again, more bad government. Why raise salaries? Take Steve Schultz, who heads our Department of Natural Resources. When he first went to work for me and other Louisiana taxpayers, he started at $30,000, probably bought himself a mobile home or efficiency apartment his family could fit in. Then he got raises and moved to some fancy subdivision. Say we increase the budget for environmental protection. His salary rises from $150,000 to $190,000. The more money we give him, the more reason he has to be a yes man to Jindal and oil. To me, a public servant who doesn’t make very much is more likely to be dedicated to what he’s doing.” Mike’s idea of dedication was modeled on the church. On another visit, Mike had driven me in his red truck to the Catholic grade school he’d attended across the street from the Catholic church where he had been confirmed and next to a graveyard where his parents and maternal grandparents lay buried. He recalled the nuns instructing him to clap the blackboard erasers on the sidewalk (God would reward him if he did). But he remarked in passing, “The nuns were great teachers and lived very modestly. I think all public servants ought to be like those nuns.” They wouldn’t need much tax money. But he realized that the incentives to enter public service would be almost nil, making it hard to attract the best people, and on yet another visit, he confessed, “I could never live like they do.”

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.

But something else animated Mike’s dislike for the government, something I was to discover wherever I went. Sometimes talk of it was angry, front and central; sometimes it was quietly alluded to. But over their heads, the federal government was taking money from the workers and giving it to the idle. It was taking from people of good character and giving to people of bad character. No mention was made of social class and enormous care was given to speak delicately and indirectly of blacks, although fear-tinged talk of Muslims was blunt. If the flashpoint between these groups had a location, it might be in the local welfare offices that gave federal money to beneficiaries—Louisiana Head Start, Louisiana Family Independence Temporary Assistance Program, Medicaid, the national School Lunch and Breakfast Program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. Liberals were telling Americans to “feel sorry” for recipients, but those were coastal urban liberals trying to impose their feeling rules on older Southern and Midwestern Christian whites. And they seemed to be on the other side. So I wondered: did some of the malaise I was seeing derive from a class conflict, appearing where one least expected it (in the realm of government) and between groups (the middle/blue-collar class and the poor) that liberals weren’t focusing on? Was this a major source of resentment fueling the fire of the right? And in that fight, did the entire federal government...

... seem to them on the wrong--betraying--side? Maybe this was the main reason Mike was later to tell me, in reference to the 2016 presidential election and only half jokingly, that he could never bring himself to vote for the menshevik (Hillary Clinton) or the bolshevik (Bernie Sanders).

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. The church had given comfort to Harold and Annette Areno. Another grief-stricken parishioner, the mother of an ill child living in the highly polluted town of Mossville, told me, “I don’t know how I could have gotten through this without my church.” As for altering the pollution, poverty, ill health, and other things that had to be endured, for many that lay beyond the doors of the church.

“How can you tell straight news from opinion?” I ask. “By their tone of voice,” she explains. “Take Christiane Amanpour. She’ll be kneeling by a sick African child, or a bedraggled Indian, looking into the camera, and her voice is saying, ‘Something’s wrong. We have to fix it.’ Or worse, we caused the problem. She’s using that child to say, ‘Do something, America.’ But that child’s problems aren’t our fault.” The Tea Party listener felt Christiane Amanpour was implicitly scolding her. She was imposing liberal feeling rules about whom to feel sorry for. The woman didn’t want to be told she should feel sorry for, or responsible for, the fate of the child. Amanpour was overstepping her role as commentator by suggesting how to feel. The woman had her feeling guard up. “No,” she told herself in so many words, “That’s PC. That’s what liberals want listeners like me to feel. I don’t like it. And what’s more, I don’t want to be told I’m a bad person if I don’t feel sorry for that child.” The social terrain around her—industry, government, church, media—lifted focus away from such a child’s needs and from her own detachment from them.

Among the older right-wing whites I came to know, blacks entered their lives, not as neighbors and colleagues, but through the television screen and newspaper where they appeared in disparate images. In one image, blacks were rich mega-stars of music, film, and sports—Beyoncé, Jamie Foxx, Michael Jordan, Serena Williams. Pro basketball legend LeBron James, they knew, earned $90 million from endorsements of commercial products alone. So what could be the problem? In a second image, blacks were a disproportionate part of the criminal class, and of its glorification in raunchy rap lyrics about guns, “hos,” and “bitches.” And in a third image, blacks were living on welfare. (But see Appendix C.) 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.

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.

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.

“I 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. 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.

Getting little or nothing from the federal government was an oft-expressed source of honor. And taking money from it was—or should be, Janice felt—a source of shame. The sharpest “burr under my saddle,” Janice declares, is “people who take government money and don’t work.”

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...

...st a national tide. The American Dream itself has become strange, un-Bibled, hyper-materialized, and lacking in honor. Even as she stands patiently in line, she is being made to feel a stranger in her own land. The only holdout for the better aspects of the past is the Republican Party.

If you have a job, you should apply yourself to it, even if you face a little risk, Janice feels. “Two of my brothers are pipe welders, and the guys they work with would stop work for small stuff,” she complains. “On one job, the guys were welding aluminum. It helps to counteract the fumes you inhale if you drink milk, so the company brings them ten o’clock milk. It’s in the union contract. If the company didn’t bring them their milk at ten o’clock, thirty guys would wobble the job [stop working]. Now is that stupid or what? It wouldn’t have killed them, one day. They could have brought their own milk.” Janice’s was a company perspective. For a period, she volunteered for the Lake Area Industry Alliance, visiting schools to explain the benefits of industry to students who might be getting another story from home or from the liberal media.

I ask her my ultimate question: what about children born poor? Is she so indignant about idle parents that she won’t reach out to the child? Does she oppose Head Start or subsidized lunch? “I would hope that the child would say, ‘I’m going to work hard and get me an education and good job and get myself out of this environment,’” Janice answers. Beyond that, her solution is to get children “churched” and to limit the fertility of poor women. “Some people say I’m too hard-nosed,” she says again, “but after one or two children, I’d have her tubes tied.” Wouldn’t that be the federal government acting as Big Brother? I prod. No, she answers. “She could decline to have her tubes tied and decline federal money.”

Not only does the federal government give too much, it does too much and owns too much, she feels. “We only need it to handle military and diplomatic matters and to build roads and dredge waterways,” she says. As for government ownership of public lands, “We should hold on to the Grand Canyon, part of Yellowstone, a few others, but sell the rest of the national parks for development and jobs.” The government also controls too much—guns, for example. Without imagining her view would surprise me, Janice argues that handing out guns is the best way to create democracy in the Middle East. “If everybody had a gun and ammunition, they could solve their own differences. There are dictators because the dictators have all the guns and people have none. So they can’t stand up for themselves. If the government takes our guns away, the same thing will happen here,” she predicts darkly.

The number of federal workers also seems to her “plumb out of whack.” She doesn’t venture a guess, but many I interviewed estimated that a third to a half of all U.S. workers were employed by the federal government—a common estimate was 40 percent. (Not knowing the figures myself, I looked them up. In 2013, 1.9 percent of American workers were civilian federal employees, and that percentage has declined over the last ten years.

She had made it out of the structural squeeze—aiming high on one side, facing a flat wage, uncertainty, competitors, and government aid on the other. Maybe her salary hadn’t advanced in leaps and bounds, but she’d gotten to the head of the line. And man, oh man, that had been hard. You couldn’t be some wilting violet. Along the way, it hadn’t been so easy enduring surprise explosions, noisy machinery, and strange odors. To live with it, Janice managed anxiety nearly hidden to her, anxiety that now felt like second nature; it kept her steady and brave. It kept her focused on the good news of Citgo for her dad, Lacassane for herself, the “buckle in the energy belt,” the free market. She felt loyal to capitalism as it worked through the petrochemical plants of Sulphur, Louisiana, the system that produced the miracle of her father’s wage and her own. She wanted others to want to feel loyal to it. Wasn’t it obvious? What else, besides family and church, was there worth feeling loyal to? Such devotion wasn’t respected, she felt. Indeed, she had to defend that devotion from a liberal perspective, which she associated with a morally lax, secular, coastal-based culture. It was one thing for certain categories of people to cut in line, but it was another to have false notions of the good and the true gain popularity and edge out her truer ones. Instead of the country agreeing with her community on the natural rightness of heterosexual marriage as the center of family life, she was n...

...ow obligated to defend herself against the idea that these views were sexist, homophobic, old-fashioned, and backward. She also needed to defend her notion of the line itself. She didn't want to appear to critics as hard-hearted regarding the poor, immigrants, Syrian refugees. They simply shouldn't be ahead of her in line.

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 enthusiastic members of the Calcasieu Rod and Gun Club and lovers of wildlife, they feel remorse about pollution, but as employees, they felt obliged to keep quiet about it. And so, out of deference, did Jackie and Heath. One consultant told me he saw “a notice in the men’s room, ‘Don’t drink the water,’ in Axiall [this being the former PPG]. . . . But you don’t hear much talk about why that sign was there.”

Jackie’s impulse to clean up the environment had also been tempered by her faith: “I’m probably less an activist than I would be because of my faith today,” she says. “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.”

On hearing this story, a man hired as a corporate industrial hygienist, tasked with sampling acid mist in the battery-charging area in a Ford battery plant, recounted this: “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.”

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.