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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

  Not only have the country's two main political parties split further apart on such issues, but political feeling also runs deeper than it did in the past. In 1960, when a survey asked American adults whether it would "disturb" them if their child married a member of the other political party, no more than 5 percent of either party answered "yes." But in 2010, 33 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Republicans answered "yes." 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. People are segregating themselves into different emotionally toned enclaves—anger here, hopefulness and trust there. A group of libertarian Texans have bought land in the salt flats east of El Paso, named it Paulville, and reserved it for enthusiastic "freedom-loving" followers of Ron Paul. And the more that people confine themselves to like-minded company, the more extreme their views become. According to a 2014 Pew study of over 10,000 Americans, the most politically engaged on each side see those in the "other party" not just as wrong, but as "so misguided that they threaten the nation's well-being." Compared to the past, each side also increasingly gets its news from its own television channel— the right from Fox News, the left from MSNBC. And so the divide widens.

  We live in what the New Yorker has called the "Tea Party era." Some 350,000 people are active members, but, according to another Pew poll, some 20 percent of Americans—45 million people—support it. And the divide cuts through a striking variety of issues. 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. Republican presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford all supported the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1960, the GOP platform embraced "free collective bargaining" between management and labor. Republicans boasted of "extending the minimum wage to several million more workers" and "strengthening the unemployment insurance system and extension of its benefits." Under Dwight Eisenhower, top earners were taxed at 91 percent; in 2015, it was 40 percent. Planned Parenthood has come under serious attack from nearly all Republican presidential candidates running in 2016. Yet a founder of the organization was Peggy Goldwater, wife of the 1968 conservative Republican candidate for president Barry Goldwater. General Eisenhower called for massive investment in infrastructure, and now nearly all congressional Republicans see such a thing as frightening government overreach. Ronald Reagan raised the national debt and favored gun control, and now the Republican state legislature of Texas authorizes citizens to "open carry" loaded guns into churches and banks. Conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or liberal today.

  The far right now calls for cuts in entire segments of the federal government—the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, and Interior, for example. In January 2015, fifty-eight House Republicans voted to abolish the Internal Revenue Service. Some Republican congressional candidates call for abolishing all public schools. In March 2015, the Republican-dominated U.S. Senate voted 51 to 49 in support of an amendment to a budget resolution to sell or give away all non-military federal lands other than national monuments and national parks. This would include forests, wildlife refuges, and wilderness areas. In 1970, not a single U.S. senator opposed the Clean Air Act. Joined by ninety-five Republican congressmen, Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, one of the most polluted states in the union, has called for the end of the Environmental Protection Agency.

  And the Tea Party's turn away from government may signal a broader trend. During the depression of the 1930s, Americans turned to the federal government for aid in their economic recovery. But in response to the Great Recession of 2008, a majority of Americans turned away from it. As the political divide widens and opinions harden, the stakes have grown vastly higher. Neither ordinary citizens nor leaders are talking much "across the aisle," damaging the surprisingly delicate process of governance itself. The United States has been divided before, of course. During the Civil War, a difference in belief led to some 750,000 deaths. During the stormy 1960s, too, clashes arose over the war in Vietnam, civil rights, and women's rights. But in the end, a healthy democracy depends on a collective capacity to hash things out. And to get there, we need to figure out what's going on— especially on the more rapidly shifting and ever stronger right.

  The Great Paradox

  Inspired by Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter with Kansas?, I began my five-year journey to the heart of the American right carrying with me, as if it were a backpack, a great paradox. Back in 2004, when Frank's book appeared, there was a paradox underlying the right-left split. Since then the split has become a gulf.

  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.

  Louisiana is an extreme example of this paradox. The Measure of America, a report of the Social Science Research Council, ranks every state in the United States on its "human development." Each rank, is based on life expectancy, school enrollment, educational degree attainment, and median personal earnings. 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. Only eight out of ten Louisianans have graduated from high school, and only 7 percent have graduate or professional degrees. According to the Kids Count Data Book, compiled by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Louisiana ranked 49th out of 50 states for child well-being. And the problem transcends race; an average black in Maryland lives four years longer, earns twice as much, and is twice as likely to have a college degree as a black in Louisiana. And whites in Louisiana are worse off than whites in Maryland or anywhere else outside Mississippi. Louisiana has suffered many environmental problems too: there are nearly 400 miles of low, flat, subsiding coastline, and the state loses a football field-size patch of wetland every hour. It is threatened by rising sea levels and severe hurricanes, which the world's top scientists connect to climate change.

  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.

  But Mike Schaff doesn't welcome that federal money and doubts the science of climate change: "I'll worry about global warming in fifty years," he says. Mike loves his state, and he loves the outdoor life. But instead of looking to government, like others in the Tea Party he turns to the free market. Mike's mother had voted for the Louisiana Democrat Ed Edwards because he was Cajun and for Jack Kennedy because he was Catholic; "Democrat" wasn't a bad word when he was going up. But it is now. 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. Small farmers voting with Monsanto? Corner drugstore owners voting with Wal
mart? The local bookstore owner voting with Amazon? If I were a small business owner, I would welcome lower company taxes, sure, but strengthening the monopolies that could force me out of business? I didn't get it.

  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 "over-regulation." What could be going on?

  Maybe the best way to find out, 1 thought, was to reverse the "Big Sort," to leave my blue neighborhood and state, enter a red state, and try to scale the empathy wall. My neighbors and friends on my side of the wall are more or less like me. They have BA degrees or more and read the New York Times daily. They eat organic food, recycle their garbage, and take BART (the public rail system) when they can. Most have grown up on one or the other coast. Some are churchgoers, but many call themselves "spiritual" and don't regularly go to church. Many work in public or nonprofit sector jobs, and are as puzzled by all this as I am. When I started out, I had no close friend who'd been born in the South, only one who worked in oil, and none in the Tea Party.

  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.

  This "two notches up" thesis gives us part of the answer, but not most. For one thing, as I was to discover, the affluent who vote against government services use them anyway. Virtually every Tea Party advocate I interviewed for this book has personally benefited from a major government service or has close family who have. Several had disabled elderly parents lacking private long-term care insurance, and had them declared indigent in order to enable them to receive Medicaid. Another man, whose wife suffered a severely disabling disease and whose care would have bankrupted him, lovingly divorced her to make her eligible for Medicaid. The able-bodied brother of a disapproving sister—both Tea Party—-received SNAP benefits. The brother of another put in for unemployment during hunting season. Most said, "Since it's there, why not use it?" But many were ashamed and asked me to dissociate their identity from such an act, which I've done. But shame didn't stop those who disapproved of public services from using them.

  MacGillis suggests that voters really act in their self-interest. But do they? The "two notches up" idea doesn't explain why red state voters who were not themselves billionaires opposed taxing billionaires, the money from which might help expand a local library, or add swings to a local park. The best way to test the MacGillis idea, I figured, is to pick out a problem that affluent voters in poor red states do have, and to show they don't want government help for that either. In other words, the two-notch-up voter may say, "Let's cut welfare to the poor because I'm not poor." Or, "Never mind improving public schools. My kid goes to a private one"—although no one I spoke to talked like this. But they do themselves face other problems the government could help with, which brings me to the keyhole issue in this book: environmental pollution. Through a close-up view of this issue, I reasoned, I could uncover the wider perspective that drove people's responses to it and to much else.

  To begin with, I wanted to go to the geographic heart of the right—the South. 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. Between 1952 and 2000, among high school—educated whites in the South, there has been a 20 percent increase in Republican voters, and among college-educated whites, the increase was higher still. In the nation as a whole, whites have moved right: between 1972 and 2014, they shifted from composing 41 percent of all Democrats to 24 percent, and from 24 percent of Republicans to 27. (White independents also grew during this time, most of them leaning right.) So if I wanted to understand the right, I would need to get to know the white South.

  But where in the South should I go? In the 2012 election, in the nation as a whole, 39 percent of white voters voted for Barack Obama. In the South, 29 percent did. And in Louisiana, it was 14 percent—a smaller proportion than in the South as a whole. According to one 2011 poll, half of Louisianans support the Tea Party. Next to South Carolina, Louisiana also held the highest proportion of state representatives in the U.S. House of Representative's Tea Party Caucus.

  As luck would have it, I had one contact in Louisiana—Sally Cappel, the mother-in-law of a former graduate student of mine. It was Sally who would introduce me to the white South and, through a friend, to the right within it. A Lake Charles-based artist, Sally was a progressive Democrat who in the 2016 primary favored Bernie Sanders. Sally's very dear friend and a world-traveling flight attendant from Opelousas, Louisiana, Shirley Slack was an enthusiast for the Tea Party and Donald Trump. Both women had joined sororities (although different ones) at Louisiana State University. Each had married, had three children, lived in homes walking distance apart in Lake Charles, and had keys to each other's houses. Each loved the other's children. Shirley knew Sally's parents and even consulted Sally's mother when the two got to "fussing too much." They exchanged birthday and Christmas gifts and jointly scoured the newspaper for notices of upcoming cultural events they had, when they were neighbors in Lake Charles, attended together. One day when I was staying as Shirley's overnight guest in Opelousas, I noticed a watercolor picture hanging on the guestroom wall, which Sally had painted as a gift for Shirley's eleven-year-old daughter, who aspired to become a ballerina. With one pointed toe on a pudgy, pastel cloud, the other lifted high, the ballerina's head was encircled by yellow star-like butterflies. It was a loving picture of a child's dream—one that came true. Both women followed the news on TV—Sally through MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, and Shirley via Fox News's Charles Krauthammer, and each talked these different reports over with a like-minded husband. The two women talk by phone two or three times a week, and their grown children keep in touch, partly across the same political divide. While this book is not about the personal lives of these two women, it couldn't have been written without them both, and I believe that their friendship models what our country itself needs to forge: the capacity to connect across difference.

  To begin with, I read what other thinkers had to say about the rise of the right. At one extreme, some argued that a band of the very rich, wanting to guard their money, had hired "movement entrepreneurs" to create an "astro-turf grassroots following." In The Billionaires' Tea Party, for example, the Australian filmmaker Taki Oldham had found that home-grown "citizen groups" challenging climate change were funded by oil companies, and argued that populist anti-government rage was orchestrated by corporate strategy. Others argued that extremely rich people had stirred the movement to life, without arguing that grassroots support was fake. The New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer describes the strategy of billionaire oil baron brothers Charles and David Koch to direct $889,000,000 to help right-wing candidates and causes in 2016 alone. "To bring about social change," Charles Koch says, "requires a strategy" that uses "vertically and horizontally integrated" planning "from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action." It was like a vast, sprawling company that owns the forest, the pulp mill, the publishing house, and pays authors to write slanted books. Such a political "company" could wield astonishing influence. Particularly in the years after Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 Supreme Court decision permitting unlimited anonymous corporate gifts to political candidates, this influence is, indeed, at work. Just 158 rich families contributed nearly half of the $176 million given to candidates in the first phase of the presiden
tial election of 2016—$138 million to Republicans and $20 million to Democrats. Through Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers have circulated a pledge in Congress to curb the authority of the EPA.

  Armelise Plantation, where Mike Schaff was born, and Bayou Corne, where he lived and had hoped to die, were a few miles from a strip of the Mississippi now studded with petrochemical plants and popularly called, with good reason, "Cancer Alley." Was concern about this issue in Mike Schaff's interest? He thought so. No one was paying him to attend local meetings of the Tea Party, nor were they paying his neighbors, many of whom shared his views.

  In What's the Matter With Kansas? Frank argues that people like Mike are being greatly misled. A rich man's "economic agenda" is paired with the "bait" of social issues. Through appeal to abortion bans, gun rights, and school prayer, Mike and his like-minded friends are persuaded to embrace economic policies that hurt them. As Frank writes, "Vote to stop abortion: receive a rollback in capital gains taxes.... Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meat packing. Vote to strike a blow against elitism, receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes." His beloved fellow Kansans, Frank argues, are being terribly misled.

  So how does it work to be misled? Can we be smart, inquiring, well-informed, and still misled? Mike was highly intelligent, consulted a number of news sources—although his main source was Fox News—and he talked politics endlessly with family, neighbors, and friends. Like me, he also lived in an enclave of like-minded people. Mike didn't think the Koch-funded idea-machine was duping him. In fact, Mike wondered whether a Soros-funded machine was duping me. Purchased political influence is real, powerful, and at play, I think, but as an explanation for why any of us believe what we do, duping—and the presumption of gullibility—is too simple an idea.