Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
Page 1
STRANGERS
IN THEIR
OWN LAND
ALSO BY ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD
So Hows the Family? And Other Essays The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy(co-editor)
The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work
The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work
The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home
The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling
The Unexpected Community: Portrait of an Old Age Subculture
Coleen the Question Girl
STRANGERS
IN THEIR
OWN LAND
ANGER AND MOURNING ON THE AMERICAN RIGHT
Arlie Russell Hochschild
THE NEW PRESS
NEW YORK LONDON
© 2016 by Arlie Russell Hochschild
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Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2016
Distributed by Perseus Distribution
ISBN 978-1-62097-225-0 (he)
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Contents
Preface ix
PART ONE: THE GREAT PARADOX
1. Traveling to the Heart 3
2. "One Thing Good" 25
3. The Rememberers 39
4. The Candidates 55
5. The "Least Resistant Personality" 73
PART TWO: THE SOCIAL TERRAIN
6. Industry: "The Buckle in America's Energy Belt" 85
7. The State: Governing the Market 4,000 Feet Below 99
8. The Pulpit and the Press: "The Topic Doesn't Come Up" 117
PART THREE: THE DEEP STORY AND THE PEOPLE IN IT
9. The Deep Story 135
10. The Team Player: Loyalty Above All 153
11. The Worshipper: Invisible Renunciation 169
12. The Cowboy: Stoicism 181
13. The Rebel: A Team Loyalist with a New Cause 193
PART FOUR: GOING NATIONAL
14. The Fires of History: The 1860s and the 1960s 207
15. Strangers No Longer: The Power of Promise 221
16. "They Say There Are Beautiful Trees" 231
Acknowledgments 243
Appendix A: The Research 247
Appendix B: Politics and Pollution:
National Discoveries from ToxMap 251
Appendix C: Fact-Checking Common Impressions 255
Endnotes 263
Bibliography ' 317
Index 339
Preface
When I began this research five years ago, I was becoming alarmed at the increasingly hostile split in our nation between two political camps. To many on the left, the Republican Party and Fox News seemed intent on dismantling much of the federal government, cutting help to the poor, and increasing the power and money of an already powerful and rich top 1 percent. To many on the right, that government itself was a power-amassing elite, creating bogus causes to increase its control and handing out easy money in return for loyal Democratic votes. Since that time both parties have split their seams and Donald Trump has burst onto the scene, quickening the pulse of American political life. I had some understanding of the liberal left camp, 1 thought, but what was happening on the right?
Most people who ask this question come at it from a political perspective. And while I have my views too, as a sociologist I had a keen interest in how life feels to people on the right—that is, in the emotion that underlies politics. To understand their emotions, I had to imagine myself into their shoes. Trying this, I came upon their "deep story," a narrative as felt.
The subject of politics was a big departure for me but my close-up approach was not. In a previous book, The Second Shift, I focused on the abiding question of how parents guard care and time for life at home when both work outside it. I found myself sitting on kitchen floors in the homes of working families, watching to see which parent a child called for, which parent answered the phone, the relative gratitude each partner felt to the other.
In search of a family-friendly workplace, I hung out in parking lots outside industrial plants and corporate headquarters to observe the hour when weary workers headed home (The Time Bind) and explored workers' fantasies of the vacations they'd go on, the guitar they would learn, "if only they had time.' I conducted in-depth interviews with Filipina nannies (Global Woman) and, in a small village in Gujarat, India, interviewed commercial surrogate mothers who carry the genetic babies of Western clients (The Outsourced Self). All this work led me to believe strongly in paid parental leave for working parents of newborns and adoptive babies—a policy offered by all the world's major industrial nations except the United States. Now that most American children live in homes in which all adults work, the idea of paid parental leave seemed to me highly welcome, humane, overdue. But this ideal has come slam up against a new truth—many on the right oppose the very idea of government help for working families. In fact, apart from the military, they don't want much government at all. Other ideals— strengthening environmental protection, averting global warming, ending homelessness—face the same firmly closed door. If we want government help in achieving any of these goals, I realized, we need to understand those who see government more as problem than solution. And so it was that I began my journey to the heart of the American right.
Already in the late 1960s, sensing a split in American culture, my husband Adam and I set off to live for a month in Kings Kauai Garden Apartments— complete with jungle bird and beast sound effects piped into a common jungle decorated patio—in Santa Ana, California, to try to get to know members of the John Birch Society, an earlier right-wing precursor to the Tea Party. We attended meetings of the society and talked to as many people as we could. Many members we met had grown up in small towns in the Midwest and felt deeply disoriented in California's anomic suburbs, an unease they transformed into a belief that American society was at risk of being taken over by communists. Looking around, we could well understand why they felt "taken over"—in a few years, entire orange groves had disappeared into parking lots and shopping malls, a case of wildly unplanned urban sprawl. We too felt taken over by something, but it wasn't communism.
I have lived most of my life in the progressive camp but in recent years I began to want to better understand those on the right. How did they come to hold
their views? Could we make common cause on some issues? These questions led me to drive, one day, from plant to plant in the bleak industrial outskirts of Lake Charles, Louisiana, with Sharon Galicia, a warm, petite, white single mother, a blond beauty, on her rounds selling medical insurance. Unfazed by a deafening buzz saw cutting vast sheets of steel, she bantered with workmen, their protective gear lifted to their brows, their arms folded. She was an appealing and persuasive fast-talker. ("What if you have an accident, can't pay bills or can't wait a month for your insurance to kick in? We insure you within twenty-four hours.") As they reached for a pen to sign up, Sharon talked to them about deer hunting, about the amount of alligator meat in boudin—a beloved spicy Louisiana sausage—and about the latest LSU Tigers game.
As her story unfolded while we drove between plants, Sharon recounted how her dad, a taciturn plant worker, had divorced her troubled mother, remarried, and moved into a trailer a thirty-minute drive away, all without telling her brother or her. I left alive with questions. What had happened to her father? How had the fate of his marriage affected her as a little girl, then as a wife and now as a single mother? What were the lives of the young men she talked to? Why was this bright, thoughtful, determined young woman—one who could have benefited from paid parental leave—an enthusiastic member of the Tea Party, to whom the idea was unthinkable?
I thanked Sharon directly, of course, for allowing me to follow her in her rounds, but later in my mind I thanked her again for her gift of trust and outreach. And after a while it occurred to me that the kind of connection she offered me was more precious than I'd first imagined. It built the scaffolding of an empathy bridge. We, on both sides, wrongly imagine that empathy with the "other" side brings an end to clearheaded analysis when, in truth, it's on the other side of that bridge that the most important analysis can begin.
The English language doesn't give us many words to describe the feeling of reaching out to someone from another world, and of having that interest welcomed. Something of its own kind, mutual, is created. What a gift. Gratitude, awe, appreciation; for me, all those words apply and I don't know which to use. But I think we need a special word, and should hold a place of honor for it, so as to restore what might be a missing key on the English-speaking world's cultural piano. Our polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don't know each other, makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt.
I first experienced reaching out and being reached out to as the child of a Foreign Service officer. In my child's mind, I had been given a personal mission, parallel to my father's, to befriend the people of all the foreign countries my father's job took us to. I was instructed to reach out, I imagined, to people who spoke, dressed, walked, looked, and worshipped differently than we did. Had my father really asked me to do this? I don't think so. Why do it? I had no idea. That understanding came later. Curiously, I felt that same gratitude for connection when, many decades later, I drove from plant to plant with Sharon, and when I talked with the many others I've met in the course of researching this book. I felt I was in a foreign country again, only this time it was my own.
STRANGERS
IN THEIR
OWN LAND
PART ONE
The Great Paradox
1
Traveling to the Heart
Along the clay road, Mike's red truck cuts slowly between tall rows of sugarcane, sassy, silvery tassels waving in the October sun, extending across an alluvial plain as far as the eye can see. We are on the grounds of the Armelise Plantation, as it was once called. A few miles west lies the mighty Mississippi River, pressing the soils and waste of the Midwest southward, past New Orleans, into the Gulf of Mexico. "We used to walk barefoot between the rows," Mike says. A tall, kindly white man of sixty-four, Mike removes his sunglasses to study an area of the sugarcane, and comes to a near stop. He points his arm out the truck window to the far left, "My grandma would have lived over... there." Moving his arm rightward, he adds, "My great uncle Tain's carpentry shop was about... there." Nearby was the home of another great uncle Henry, a mechanic nicknamed "Pook." A man called "Pirogue" ran the blacksmith shop where Mike and a friend hunted scraps of metal that shone, through his boyhood eyes, "like gold." His grandfather Bill oversaw the cane fields. Miss Ernestine's, Mike continued, was to the side of... that. A slim black woman, hair in a white bandana, Mike recalls, "She loved to cook raccoon and opossum for her gumbo, and we brought her what we had from a day's hunt, and Choupique fish too. I can hear her calling out the window when her husband couldn't start their car, 'Something's ailing that car.'" Then Mike points to what he remembers of a dirt driveway to his own childhood home. "It was a shotgun house," he muses. "You could aim right through it. But it held the nine of us okay." The house had been renovated slave quarters on the Armelise Plantation and Mike's father had been a plumber who serviced homes on and off it. Looking out the window of the truck, it's clear that Mike and I see different things. Mike sees a busy, beloved, bygone world. I see a field of green.
We pull over, climb down, and walk into the nearest row. Mike cuts us a stalk, head and tails it, and whittles two sticks of the fibrous sugarcane. We chew it and suck the sweetness from it. Back in the truck, Mike continues his reverie about the tiny bygone settlement of Banderville, finally dismantled only in the 1970s. About three quarters had been black and a quarter white, and they had lived, as he recalls it, in close, unequal, harmony. Mike had passed his boyhood in an era of sugar, cotton, and mule-drawn plows and his adulthood in the era of oil. As a teenager earning money over the summer for college, he had laid wooden boards through mosquito-infested bayous to set up oil-drill platforms. As a grown, college-educated man, he had trained himself as an "estimator"—calculating the size, strength, and cost of materials needed to construct large platforms that held oil-drilling rigs in the Gulf, and to create the giant white spherical tanks that stored vast quantities of chemicals and oil. "When I was a kid, you stuck a thumb out by the side of the road, you got a ride. Or if you had a car, you gave a ride. If someone was hungry, you fed him. You had community. You know what's undercut all that?" He pauses. "Big government."
We climb back in his red truck, take a swig of water (he has brought plastic bottles for us both), and continue edging forward through the cane as our conversation shifts to politics. "Most folks around here are Cajun, Catholic, conservative," he explains, adding with gusto, "I'm for the Tea Party!"
I'd first seen Mike Schaff months earlier standing at the microphone at an environmental rally on the steps of the Louisiana state capital in Baton Rouge, his voice cracking with emotion. He had been a victim of one of the strangest, literally earth-shaking environmental disasters in the nation, one that robbed him of his home and community—a sinkhole that devoured hundred-foot-tall trees and turned forty acres of swamp upside down, as I shall describe. That raised a big question in my mind. The disaster had been caused by a lightly regulated drilling company. But as a Tea Party advocate, Mike had hailed government deregulation of all sorts, as well as drastic cuts in government spending—including that for environmental protection. How could he be both near tears to recall his lost home and also call for a world stripped of most government beyond the military and hurricane relief? I was puzzled. I sensed a wall between us.
Empathy Walls
You might say I'd come to Louisiana with an interest in walls. Not visible, physical walls such as those separating Catholics from Protestants in Belfast, Americans from Mexicans on the Texas border, or, once, residents of East and West Berlin. It was empathy walls that interested me. An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances. In a period of political tumult, we grasp for quick certainties. We shoehorn new information into ways we already think. We settle for knowing our opposite numbers from the outside. But is it possible, without changing our beliefs, to know
others from the inside, to see reality through their eyes, to understand the links between life, feeling, and politics; that is, to cross the empathy wall? I thought it was.
I'd asked Mike Schaff to show me where he'd grown up because I wanted to understand, if I could, how he saw the world. By way of introduction, I'd told him, "I'm from Berkeley California, a sociologist, and I am trying to understand the deepening divide in our country. So I'm trying to get out of my political bubble and get to know people in yours." Mike nodded at the word "divide," then quipped, "Berkeley? So y'all must be communist!" He grinned as if to say, "We Cajuns can laugh, hope you can."
He wasn't making it hard. A tall, strongly built man in tan-rimmed glasses, he spoke succinctly, in a low near mumble, and was given both to soulful, sometimes self-deprecating, reflection and stalwart Facebook proclamations. Explaining his background, he said, "My mom was Cajun and my dad was German. We Cajuns call ourselves coon asses. So since I was half Cajun, and half German, my mom called me half-ass." We laughed. Mike was one of seven children his dad had raised on a plumber's wage. "We didn't know we were poor," he said, a refrain I would hear often among those I came to know on the far right, speaking of their own or their parents' childhoods. Mike had an engineer's eye, a sportsman's love of fish and game, and a naturalist's ear for the call of a tree frog. I didn't know any members of the Tea Party, not to really talk to, and he didn't know many people like me. "I'm pro-life, pro-gun, pro-freedom to live our own lives as we see fit so long as we don't hurt others. And I'm anti-big government," Mike said. "Our government is way too big, too greedy, tod incompetent, too bought, and it's not ours anymore. We need to get back to our local communities, like we had at Armelise. Honestly, we'd be better off."