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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) faced an astonishing new task: de-listing coastal postal addresses. Gone is Yellow Cotton Bay, once a prime fishing settlement in Plaquemines Parish. Gone are Little Pass de Wharf and Skipback Bay. The church in Grand Bayou stands on stilts; a small cemetery is accessible only by boat. Thirty-one communities are now listed only in the historical record. Residents of Isle de Jean Charles are the first “climate refugees” to receive federal help moving to dry land.

This was just another excuse to expand, like governments do. As a whole, the federal government was eroding beloved communities such as those he loved. And if the federal government was anything like the Louisiana state government—which he thought it was—it wasn’t worth believing in or paying taxes to. The “federal government” filled a mental space in Mike’s mind—and the minds of all those on the right I came to know—associated with a financial sinkhole.

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.

The liberal upper-middle class saw community as insularity and closed-mindedness rather than as a source of belonging and honor.

With the arrival in 2015 of Syrian refugees to the United States, fleeing the flames of war at home, one more set of faces seemed to my Tea Party informants to be pulling ahead in line—and they were dangerous, besides. Lee Sherman saw the Syrians as potential members of ISIS. “Ninety percent of them are men, and I think we ought to put them in Guantánamo,” he said. “But they aren’t enemy combatants,” I reminded him. “I know, but you can take the fences down, make it less like a prison,” he replied. “If you let them into the U.S. they will have all our rights to things.” Comparing the refugees to Southerners during the Civil War, Mike Schaff, himself a refugee from the Bayou Corne Sinkhole, said, “General Lee led brave Southerners who, though grossly outnumbered and woefully under-armed, refused to flee their country as refugees. They stayed, fought, and many died. Their wives and children, many raped and murdered, also stayed to care for their homes. After their defeat, again, they did not flee. They stayed to eventually reshape our government. The Syrians should stay, take a stand, and fight for what they believe in. If you flee, in my mind, you’re a traitor unto yourself. This is harsh, I know, but sometimes we have to make tough choices.” Jackie Tabor said, “We are protecting Muslims and persecuting Christians. Have you ever seen a Muslim charity event for people in need, or soup kitchen for the homeless? A Muslim Thanksgiving? Where is the Muslim name on the Declaratio...

As strangers in their own land, Lee, Mike, and Jackie wanted their homeland back, and the pledges of the Tea Party offered them that. It offered them financial freedom from taxes, and emotional freedom from the strictures of liberal philosophy and its rules of feeling. 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.

Trump is an “emotions candidate.” More than any other presidential candidate in decades, Trump focuses on eliciting and praising emotional responses from his fans rather than on detailed policy prescriptions. His speeches—evoking dominance, bravado, clarity, national pride, and personal uplift—inspire an emotional transformation. Then he points to that transformation. “We have passion,” he told the Louisiana gathering. “We’re not silent anymore; we’re the loud, noisy majority.” He derides his rivals in both parties for their inability to inspire enthusiasm. “They lack energy.” Not only does Trump evoke emotion, he makes an object of it, presenting it back to his fans as a sign of collective success. His supporters have been in mourning for a lost way of life. Many have become discouraged, others depressed. They yearn to feel pride but instead have felt shame. Their land no longer feels their own. Joined together with others like themselves, they now feel hopeful, joyous, elated. The man who expressed amazement, arms upheld—“to be in the presence of such a man!”—seemed in a state of rapture. As if magically lifted, they are no longer strangers in their own land. “Collective effervescence,” as the French sociologist Emile Durkheim called it in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, is a state of emotional excitation felt by those who join with others they take to be fellow members of a moral or biological tribe. They gather to affirm their unity and, united, they feel secur...

One way of reinforcing this “high” of a united brother- and sisterhood of believers is to revile and expel members of out groups. In his speeches, Trump has spoken of “something within Islam which hates Christians,” and of his intention to ban all Muslims from entering the country. He has spoken of expelling all undocumented people of Mexican origin. And only reluctantly and in truculent tones (“I repudiate, okay?”) did he repudiate the notorious Louisiana KKK grand wizard, David Duke, thus signaling blacks as members of an out group. In nearly every rally, Trump points out a protestor, sometimes demonizing them and calling for their expulsion. (One protestor was even falsely depicted by his campaign as a member of ISIS.) Such scapegoating reinforces the joyous unity of the gathering. The act of casting out the “bad one” helps fans unite in a shared sense of being the “good ones,” the majority, no longer strangers in their own land.

Trump allowed them both to feel like a good moral American and to feel superior to those they considered “other” or beneath them.

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

Trump was the identity politics candidate for white men.

Madonna Massey, the lively gospel singer who took Rush Limbaugh as her “brave heart,” was shocked to discover that her teenage daughter, Chapel, had downloaded “Anaconda” on her iPad—a video of the highly popular, black, scantily clad diva, Nicki Minaj doing buttock-mobilizing “twerking.” When Chapel returned from school, Madonna spanked her, banished her iPad, unhinged her bedroom door, and stored it in the garage for a month. “Minaj is at the top of Billboard Top 100. Look at the culture we’ve got to protect our kids from,” Madonna told me the last time I saw her.