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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

  Our home enclaves often reflect special cultures of governance tying politics to geography. This is the thesis of Colin Woodard's American Nations. Rural areas in the Midwest, the South, and Alaska lean right while large cities, New England, and the two coasts lean left, he notes. Bound by a tradition of small-town governance and oriented toward Europe, New Englanders tend to believe in good government for the "common good." Appalachians and Texans tend to be freedom-loving government minimalists.

  Tracing their roots to a caste system, whites in Dixie states treasure local control and resist federal power—linked as that is to the defeat, 150 years ago, of the South by the North. Resistance to federal taxation, the historian Robin Einhorn notes, also originated in the South. Regional traditions are real, of course, but less immutable than Woodard suggests. And while the far right is strongest in the South, most of its members make up a demographic—white, middle to low income, older, married, Christian— that spans the whole nation.

  Others point to the moral values of the right. In The Righteous Mind, for example, Jonathan Haidt argues, unlike Frank, that people are not misled but instead vote in their self-interest—one based on cultural values. While right and left both value caring and fairness, he notes, they place different priorities on obedience to authority (the right) and originality (the left), for example. Surely, this is true. But a person can hold a set of values calmly, or in a state of fury that brings a whole new party into being. What makes the difference between the two? Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson rightly argue that it is a unique coalescence of circumstances—predisposing factors and precipitating ones. Primary among latter were the Great Recession of 2008 and government efforts to forestall it, the presidency of Barack Obama, and Fox News.

  While all these works greatly helped me, I found one thing missing in them all—a full understanding of emotion in politics. What, I wanted to know, do people want to feel, what do they think they should or shouldn't feel, and what do they feel about a range of issues? When we listen to a political leader, we don't simply hear words; we listen predisposed to want to feel certain things. Some broad emotional ideals are shared across the political spectrum but others are not. Some feel proud of a "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses" Statue of Liberty America, while others yearn to feel proud of a Constitution-abiding, work-your-own-way-up America.

  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. And it is to this core that a free-wheeling candidate such as the billionaire entrepreneur Donald Trump, Republican candidate for president in 2016, can appeal, saying, as he gazes upon throngs of supporters, "See all the 'passion."

  We can approach that core, I came to see, through what 1 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. The deep story was to take me to the shoulds and shouldn'ts of feeling, to the management of feeling, and to the core feelings stirred by charismatic leaders. And, as we shall see, everyone has a deep story.

  Visits and Follow-Arounds

  But first, the people. I originally based myself in Lake Charles, a town of 74,000 in southwest Louisiana, some thirty miles north of the Gulf of Mexico. Half were white, half black, many of Cajun ancestry. Three percent were foreign-born. Twenty-three percent of residents had a BA, and the median household income was $36,000 per year. Seated in Calcasieu Parish (Louisiana's French heritage led to the use of "parishes" instead of "counties"), Lake Charles hosts seventy-five festivals in the surrounding area, and its Mardi Gras Museum claims the largest collection of Mardi Gras costumes in the world. It attracts tourists to its three large casinos and workers to its rapidly expanding petrochemical industry.

  Once there, I scouted out members of the far right in a number of ways. To begin with, Sally Cappel and Shirley Slack helped set up four focus groups, two made up of liberals, two of Tea Party advocates. Each group met in Sally's kitchen, and I followed up the Tea Party sessions with interviews of individual Tea Party advocates, sometimes interviewing their spouses and parents too. I say "interview" because I asked people to sign a sheet describing my purpose before we talked. But at the end of two or three hours, they often said it was very nice visiting with you, and in truth, these sessions often turned into a mix of interview and visit.

  An accountant I met through a Tea Party focus group invited me to a series of monthly luncheon meetings of the Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana, playfully quipping, "Maybe we'll change your mind!" There 1 discovered a well-attended, highly-organized gathering of white, middle-aged, professional women, and a special table of teenagers in red T-shirts. At each luncheon I met new people at my table and made dates to follow up with them, often meeting their families and sometimes their neighbors. I was invited to visit two private Christian schools and to attend Baptist, Pentecostal, and Catholic church services and activities, including a 40s-Plus Pentecostal Gumbo Cook-Off. One woman at the Republican women's luncheon was a Pentecostal pastor's wife who introduced me to many in her church and invited me to join her and her friends in a game of Rook (a fifty-seven-card game of so-called "missionary poker," which provides evangelical players a happy alternative to card games associated with gambling). I met a man whose great uncle had been the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (a reason his grandfather had moved to another town) and met a white member of the Tea Party and strong Baptist woman who had adopted an African American baby and a South American child.

  I also followed the campaign trails of a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate and his Tea Party rival, which took me to the Acadian Village Pig Roast in Lafayette, a rice festival and boat parade in New Iberia, a get-out-the-vote event in Crowley, and a union meet-and-greet in Rayne. At each whistle stop, I chatted with my neighbors. A marine biologist and environmental activist, Mike Tritico—a political independent and son of a furniture store owner—told me of right-wing friends who vehemently opposed his activism. A tall man of seventy with a teacherly manner and encyclopedic grasp of local industry, he was seen as a recluse by some (he lived in a disheveled cabin in the woods of Longville), as a saint by others, and as a thorn in their side by state regulatory officials. I asked if I could tag along with him and meet his adversaries. Mike was game.

  Over five years, I accumulated 4,690 pages of transcripts based on interviews with a core of forty Tea Party advocates and twenty others from various walks of life—teachers, social workers, lawyers, and government officials—who enlarged my perspective on my core group. From within that core group, I selected a small number who illustrated particular patterns especially well. With their permission, I followed them around, asking to see where they were born, attended school and church, shopped, and had fun with them, and tried to get a feel for the influences on them. While all supported the Tea Party, they varied greatly among themselves. Some went to church three times a week, others not at all. Some had seven guns, others three, of which some were behind glass, others in a bedside drawer. They differed in how they saw poverty. One man said, "I asked the security guy at our local grocery store what sort of stuff gets stolen from the store. He said it was mainly rice, beans, and baby food. That tells you something." Others thought such reports were "exaggerated." They differed in their fears. One man told me he had bought a secondhand medical book at Goodwill in case the economy "crashed and burned" and he had to set his own broken arm. Another stocked provisions in case we "all have to be self-sufficient," and he had neighbors doing the same. Mo
st were less alarmed. My core group differed in their suspicion of President Obama, too, and in their denigration of him. The Facebook page of one Tea Party advocate showed mug shots of President Obama, front and side, a name plate below his image, while another showed him in "public housing." Most were angry, afraid, some in mourning for real losses, but in their emotional complexion, too, they differed widely among themselves. (For more on my research, see Appendix A.)

  I was definitely not in Berkeley, California. For one thing, the occasional turn of phrase was different: "As fast as a duck can eat a June bug. ... Up to my ass in alligators...." One man referred to unadorned—yep-nope— speech as "talking Yankee." Churches grand and humble studded the landscape, in some towns, one a block. Three aisles in Lake Charles's largest bookstore were dedicated to Bibles of different colors, shapes, and print sizes, and to leather-bound Bible study notebooks. Some restaurants advertised "Lenten Season Specials," appealing to the Catholic French Creole and Cajun residents. Certain absences also reminded me I was not at home: no New York Times at the newsstand, almost no organic produce in grocery stores or farmers' markets, no foreign films in movie houses, few small cars, fewer petite sizes in clothing stores, fewer pedestrians speaking foreign languages into cell phones—indeed, fewer pedestrians. There were fewer yellow Labradors and more pit bulls and bulldogs. Forget bicycle lanes, color-coded recycling bins, or solar panels on roofs. In some cafes, virtually everything on the menu was fried. There were no questions before meals about gluten-free entrees, and dinner generally began with prayer. Farther east from Lake Charles and along the strip of petrochemical companies lining the lower Mississippi, I saw quite a few signs for personal injury lawyers ("Just call Chuck"). 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.

  I compared the student activity groups registered at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge (the alma mater of some I talked with) with those at the University of California, Berkeley, where I have long taught. At Louisiana State (a campus of some 30,000 had some 375 student groups), I found student chapters of the Oilfield Christian Fellowship, the Agribusiness Club, the Air Waste Management Association, the Society of Petro-physics and Well Log Analysts, and a War-gaming and Role Playing Society (WARS)—none of which had analogues at U.C. Berkeley.

  U.C. Berkeley (with 37,000 students and 1,000 student organizations) listed Amnesty International and the Anti-Trafficking Coalition, Building Sustainability at Cal, Environmental Science Student Association, Global Student Embassy at Berkeley (to promote grassroots environmental cooperation)—groups with no analogues at LSU. Mike Schaff had graduated from Louisiana State University in Monroe and had joined the chess club, Circle K (Kiwanis), and a military fraternity called Scabbard and Blade. With an enrollment of 25,000, his university featured some 150 student groups. One group—Cupcakes for a Cause—raised money to help women veterans. Another group, the ULM Fishing Team, held monthly tournaments. At Northeastern Louisiana State, student clubs included College Republicans and Young Americans for Liberty but not College Democrats.

  Driving around Lake Charles, I noticed "Don't Tread on Me" bumper stickers on the back of a few pickup trucks, showing a coiled rattlesnake with an extended tongue. The symbol, first created by a colonial Revolutionary War general in 1775, has been adopted nationally by the Tea Party. Although it came down in 2011, I saw an enormous "Where's the Birth Certificate?" sign on Interstate 49 between Lafayette and Opelousas, publicly questioning President Obama's birthplace. At the edge of a used-truck lot on Route 171 between Longville and DeRidder, an hour's drive north of Lake Charles, a placard on the side of a wooden hut ominously proclaimed it the "Obama Smokehouse."

  Reminders of the racial divide were everywhere. In the Westlake cemetery, for example, a roadway divided the graves of whites and blacks. The grass around the whites' graves had been recently trimmed while that around the black graves had not. Another example was a granite statue of a young Confederate soldier in front of the old Calcasieu Parish Courthouse, above a plaque thanking those who "defended the South." No parallel sites commemorated slave heroes or victims of lynching. On my 2016 visit to Lake Charles, 1 noticed a small flag of the early confederacy—thirteen stars in the upper left, and red, white, and red bands to the right—at the base of this monument. Three of the five parishes of southwest Louisiana, not to mention the Jefferson Davis Bank and freeway, are named after Confederate officials of the Civil War, and the state has ninety Confederate monuments, some unveiled as recently as 2010. Only fifteen years ago, a cross was burned near a trailer in Longville, where one of my guides, Mike Tritico, and friends of his I came to know lived—the last known burned cross in the state. Six men were charged and sentenced by federal prosecutors. Race seemed everywhere in the physical surroundings, but almost nowhere in spontaneous direct talk.

  A Keyhole Issue

  I wanted to get up close. The best way to do that, I thought, was to come to know one group of people in one place, focusing on a single issue. This issue was not a case, as mentioned earlier, of well-to-do voters voting down government measures they themselves didn't need. Everyone I talked to wanted a clean environment. But in Louisiana, the Great Paradox was staring me in the face—great pollution and great resistance to regulating polluters. If I could truly enter the minds and hearts of people on the far right on the issue of the water they drink, the animals they hunt, the lakes they swim in, the streams they fish in, the air they breathe, I could get to know them up close. Through their views on this keyhole issue—how much, if at all, should government regulate industrial polluters?—I hoped to learn about the right's perspective on a wider range of issues. I could learn about how— emotionally speaking—politics works in us all.

  As an oil state with a record of going light on regulation, Louisiana has suffered decades of severe environmental damage. During the time I was doing my research, the fracking boom also hit Lake Charles, and the town rapidly became the center of a stunning $84 billion planned investment in southwest Louisiana—one of the biggest investments in American industry. Lake Charles had become ground zero for production of American petrochemicals.

  I brought industrial growth into view through interviews with public officials—the mayor of nearby Westlake and the head of the Southwest Louisiana Task Force for Growth and Opportunity (which had just been given the assignment of planning for the arrival of 18,000 workers to be housed in "man camps"; 13,000 of these workers were from out of state, including Filipino pipefitters).

  While in Lake Charles, I stayed at Aunt Ruby's Bed and Breakfast. By the edge of the bathtub in my quarters, I discovered a moisturizing body wash, on the back side of which were listed in small print the ingredients: petroleum, ammonium laureth sulfate, sodium lauroamphoacetate, ammonium lauryl sulfate, lauric acid, sodium chloride, hydroxypropyltimonium chloride. The same ingredients, it occurred to me, could be found in the plastic in my sunglasses, my watch band, my computer, my moisturizer. Lake Charles produced the airplane fuel that brought me there and the gasoline I was getting around on, and much of this was produced by companies close by.

  To prepare for my journey, I re-read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, a Tea Party bible lauded by the conservative radio pundit Rush Limbaugh and former Fox News television commentator Glenn Beck. Rand describes serving the needy as a "monstrous idea." Charity, she says, is bad. Greed is good. If Ayn Rand appealed to them, I imagined, they're probably pretty selfish, tough, cold people, and I prepared for the worst. But I was thankful to discover many warm, open people who were deeply charitable to those around them, including an older, white liberal stranger writing a book.

  Given its liberal reputation, I worried about telling people I taught at U.C. Berkeley. I secretly hoped my Louisiana acquaintances would respectfully recall its seventy-two Nobel Laureates, its proud academic standing. But no. When I tol
d one man that I lived in Berkeley, he immediately replied: "Oh, you got hippies." Another had seen a Fox News report of Berkeley students protesting fee hikes. They had linked themselves together with iron chains and stood before TV cameras on the edge of the roof of a campus building. If one fell, so would they all, which was, I guess, their point. "Did you say Berkeley students need an A average to get in?" someone asked me, incredulous. "The chain thing seems pretty stupid to me."

  From across the table at a meeting of the Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana, Madonna Massey, a gospel singer, declared that she "loved Rush Limbaugh." In the past, I'd found Limbaugh harshly opinionated, and, incurious and offended, I'd routinely switched the dial. But now I told Madonna, "I'd love to talk about what you love about him." When we sat down a week later to sweet teas at a local Starbucks, I asked Madonna what she loved about Limbaugh. "His criticism of 'femi-nazis,' you know, feminists, women who want to be equal to men." I absorbed that for a moment. Then she asked what I thought, and after I answered, she remarked, "But you're nice ...." From there, we went through Limbaugh's epithets ("commie libs," "environmental wackos"). 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 throwrt 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? The next time I saw Madonna, she was interested to know if it had been hard for me to hear what she'd said. I told her it wasn't. "I do that too sometimes," she said, "try to get myself out of the way to see what another person feels."