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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

  Bill found a part-time job as a bookkeeper at a nearby truck garage for ten dollars an hour—the same wage he had earned summers as a college student in a union-protected factory job forty years earlier. He had applied for a job as a part-time guard at a gated community, which he didn't get. He also spent more time with what had long been a sideline: selling non-FDA-approved magnetic shoe inserts that "get rid of aches and pains," and he had bought stocks in a company that was "about to produce" a medical device he hoped to sell to hospitals. He sold Organo Gold coffee (nongovernment-certified "organic") to friends and acquaintances, which his daughter feared was a scam (you have to buy it before you sell it). But Bill wasn't the type to give up. He could endure pain. "I'm a capitalist," he said. "When they get the medical device out of production and into the market, my wife and I will be millionaires." As with other men I spoke with, the repeated term "millionaire" floated around conversations like a ghost.

  Meanwhile, if men like Bill were being squeezed by automation, outsourcing, and the rising power of multinationals, they were also being squeezed by greater competition from other groups for an ever-scarcer supply of cultural honor. As we shall see, the 1960s and 1970s had opened cultural doors previously closed to blacks and women, even as immigrants and refugees seemed to be sailing past the Statue of Liberty into a diminishing supply of good jobs.

  And the federal government was helping this happen. After Clinton's 1990s claim to "end welfare as we know it," rates of financial aid to the poor fell. But in response to the Great Recession, after 2008, welfare rose— mainly through Medicaid and SNAP—although these rates have peaked and are falling. (On this, see Appendix C.) Given trends in the economy and a more open cultural door, news of more "government giveaways" rang alarm bells. That was the squeeze.

  Not all white middle- and working-class men in this squeeze moved right, of course. But many self-starters, men who'd done well for what they'd been given, those in evangelical churches in right-leaning rural and Southern enclaves, those who had emotionally endured—and the women who were like them or depended on them—were inclining right.

  Catcalls

  "Crazy redneck." "White trash." "Ignorant Southern Bible-thumper." You realize that's you they're talking about. You hear these terms on the radio, on television, read them on blogs. The gall. You're offended. You're angry. And you really hate the endless parade of complainers encouraged by a 1960s culture that seems to have settled over the land.

  On top of that, Hollywood films and popular television either ignore people like you or feature them—as in Buckwild—in unflattering ways. "Two missing front teeth, all raggedy, that's how they show us," one man complained. The stock image of the early twentieth century, the "Negro" minstrel, a rural simpleton, the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich notes, has now been upgraded, whitened, and continued in such television programs as Duck Dynasty and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. "Working class whites are now regularly portrayed as moronic, while blacks are often hyper-articulate, street smart... and rich."

  You are a stranger in your own land. You do not recognize yourself in how others see you. It is a struggle to feel seen and honored. And to feel honored you have to feel—and feel seen as—moving forward. But through no fault of your own, and in ways that are hidden, you are slipping backward.

  You turn to your workplace for respect—but wages are flat and jobs insecure. So you look to other sources of honor. You get no extra points for your race. You look to gender, but if you're a man, you get no extra points for that either. If you are straight you are proud to be a married, heterosexual male, but that pride is now seen as a potential sign of homophobia—a source of dishonor. Regional honor? Not that either. You are often disparaged for the place you call home. As for the church, many look down on it, and the proportion of Americans outside any denomination has risen. You are old, but in America, attention is trained on the young. People like you—white, Christian, working and middle class—suffer this sense of fading honor de-mographically too, as this very group has declined in numbers.

  You have the impulse to call out, "I'm part of a minority too! " But you have criticized just such appeals for sympathy when others have made them on similar grounds. You feel stuck between a strong desire to be recognized for who you really are and all you've really done, and dread at joining the parade of "poor me's." You want to rise up against these downward forces. There is a political movement made up of people such as yourself who share your deep story. It's called the Tea Party.

  Checking Back with My Friends

  I return to my new Louisiana friends and acquaintances to check whether the deep story resonates with them. When I relate the story to him, Mike Schaff writes in an e-mail, "I live your analogy. We pay hundreds of millions of dollars in hard-earned taxes for these bureaucrats at the Department of Environmental Quality and the EPA to do their job and they do nothing of the sort. To add insult to injury, these slackers jump the line to retire before the workers who pay their salaries can. When the tax payer finally gets to retire, he sees the bureaucrats in Washington have raided the fund. And the rest of us are waiting in line."

  When I relate it to Lee Sherman, he tells me, "You've read my mind. Janice Areno tells me, "You have it right, but you've left out the fact that the people being cut in on are paying taxes that go to the people cutting in line!" Another comments, "You didn't finish the story. After a while, the people who were waiting have had it and they get in their own line." And yet another adds, "That's it, but the American Dream is more than having money. It's feeling proud to be an American, and to say 'under God' when you salute the flag, and feel good about that. And it's about living in a society that believes in clean, normal family life. But if you add that, then yes, this's my story."

  In his interviews with Tea Party members in New York, Jersey City, Newark, and elsewhere in New Jersey, the sociologist Nils Kumkar found spontaneous mention of the idea of annoyance at others cutting in line. In their interviews with Tea Party advocates in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Arizona and in their 2011 examination of nearly a thousand Tea Party websites, the sociologists Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson also reported attitudes toward blacks, immigrants, public sector workers, and others parallel to those I found here.

  Many spoke of sympathy fatigue. "Liberals want us to feel sympathy for blacks, women, the poor, and of course I do up to a point," one kindly restaurant proprietor explained. "I hear stories and they break my heart. But then sometimes, 1 don't know if I'm being had. I get men applying for a job. I give them a job and they don't show up. Is it just to put on their record that they applied and can continue on unemployment insurance? A woman came up to me at Wendy's saying she had two children and was looking to pay for a hotel because she was homeless. I asked her where her children were. 'Oh they're with mama.' Well, then aren't you living with mama? A man from the Red Cross came asking for food for Sunday dinner for the homeless. I gave it to him because it's food. But I don't even want to go over there to see. Maybe they're not trying to be independent. I don't want to change my mind about giving the food. I want to give." But he wanted to do it on the understanding his recipients were trying to better themselves, a requirement he worried liberals left out.

  Behind the Deep Story: Race

  The deep story of the right, the feels-as-if story, corresponds to a real structural squeeze. People want to achieve the American Dream, but for a mixture of reasons feel they are being held back, and this leads people of the right to feel frustrated, angry, and betrayed by the government. Race is an essential part of this story.

  Curiously, the people of the right I came to know spoke freely about Mexicans (4 percent of Louisianans were Hispanic in 2011) and Muslims (who accounted for 1 percent) but were generally silent about blacks, who, at 26 percent, were the state's largest minority. When the topic of blacks did arise, many explained that they felt accused by "the North" of being racist— which, by their own definition, they clearly were not. They defined as racist a person who
used the "N" word or who "hates" blacks. Mike Schaff did neither. Born on the Armelise sugarcane plantation, grandson of the overseer, he describes himself as a "former bigot ... I used to use the 'N' word, and a lot of black kids I played with did too. But I stopped that back in 1968. I remember yelling from the stands of my college football stadium in 1968, rooting for our best player. 'Run! Nigger! Run!' And the next year in 1969 I was yelling, 'Run! Joe! Run!' I haven't used the word since. I look forward to a day when color just won't matter at all. I think we're halfway there."

  As I and others use the term, however, racism refers to the belief in a natural hierarchy that places blacks at the bottom, and the tendency of whites to judge their own worth by distance from that bottom. By that definition, many Americans, north and south, are racist. And racism appears not simply in personal attitudes but in structural arrangements—as when polluting industries move closer to black neighborhoods than to white.

  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—Beyonce, 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.

  Behind the Deep Story: Gender

  Gender, too, lay behind the disorientation, fear, and resentment evoked by the deep story. All the women I talked to worked, used to work, or were about to return to work. But their political feelings seemed based on their role as wives and mothers—and they wanted to be wives to high-earning men and to enjoy the luxury, as one woman put it, of being a homemaker. According to national polls, more men than women are Republican, or Tea Party, and more men (12 percent in 2012) are members or supporters of the Tea Party than women (9 percent). And even within these conservative groups, women are more likely than men to appreciate the government's role in helping the disadvantaged, in making contraception available, in equal pay for equal work. It was this range of issues—especially the need for parental leave—that had led me, as I note in the preface, on this journey in the first place. The women I spoke to seemed to sense that if we chop away large parts of the government, women stand to lose far more than men, for women outnumber men as government workers and as beneficiaries.

  I also noticed a curious gender gap within the right. When the conversation got around, as it inevitably did, to nonworking people getting "handouts" paid for by workers further back "in line," a gender divide emerged. When I asked one couple what proportion of people on welfare were gaming the system, the woman estimated 30 percent while her husband estimated 80 percent. There, inside the Tea Party, was the gender gap. Despite this difference, women and men of the right voted in similar ways, and more than gender—those affirmative action women cutting ahead in line—they jointly focused on race and class.

  Behind the Deep Story: Class, the Federal Government,

  and Free Market as Proxy Allies

  One can see the experience of being "cut in on" by one group after another as an expression of class conflict. This is perhaps a curious term to use. Certainly it is a term avoided by the right, and it is applied elsewhere by the left. But throughout American history such conflicts have appeared in different theaters of life, with different actors and different moral vocabularies in play. Each called for deep feelings about fairness. In the industrial nineteenth century, the classic form of class conflict took place on the factory floor, between owner and worker, and the issue was one of fair recompense for work. In 1892, a general strike took place in New Orleans. Railroad conductors struck against management for the ten-hour day, overtime pay, and the right to unionize. Other unions joined in sympathy, white workers standing with blacks despite attempts to divide them. The Chicago garment workers' strike in 1910 against a management cut in the piece rate, or the 1934 West Coast Longshore strike—all these took place between managers and workers, in a workplace, over pay, hours, or working conditions.

  Today, although many such strikes continue—the Walmart strike of 2012, for example—many industrial work sites have been moved offshore to Mexico, China, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Other forms of social conflict have arisen in different theaters. One theater animates the politics of the left. It focuses on conflict in the private sector between the very richest 1 percent and the rest of America. Occupy Wall Street has such a focus. It is not between owner and worker over a higher wage or shorter hours of work. It is between haves and have-nots, the ever-more-wealthy 1 percent and the other 99 percent of Americans. What feels unfair to Occupy activists is not simply unfair recompense for work (the multi-million dollar bonuses to hedge fund managers alongside the $8.25 hourly rate for Walmart clerks) but the absence of tax policies that could help restore America as a middle-class society.

  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. Ironically, both call for an honest day's pay for an honest day's work.

  Left and right also seemed to ally with different sectors of society. It is almost as if those I talked with thought about the government and the market in the same way others think of separate nations. Just as various nations back different sides in a foreign war, fighting each other on a "proxy" battlefront, in the same way those I spoke with seemed to talk about the federal government and the free market. The free market was the unwavering ally of the good citizens waiting in line for the American Dream. The federal government was on the side of those unjustly "cutting in."

  Feeling betrayed by the federal government and turning wholeheartedly to the free market, the right is faced with realities the deep story makes it hard to see or focus on. Giant companies have grown vastly larger, more automated, more global, and more powerful. For them, productivity is increasingly based on cheap labor in offshore plants abroad, imported cheap foreign labor, and automation, and less on American labor. The more powerful they've become, the less resistance they have encountered from unions and government. Thus, they have felt more free to allocate more profits to top executives and stockholders, and less to workers. But this is the "wrong" theater to look in for the conflict that absorbs the right—except when a company like Texas Brine causes a sinkhole like the one in Bayou Corne.

  And this may explain why much of the right isn't bothered by something else—the unaligned interests between big and small business. Many members of the Tea Party run or work in a small business—oil company suppliers, trailer parks, restaurants, small banks, and shops. Small businesses are vulnerable to the growth of big monopolies. What is transpiring today, Robert Reich argues in Saving Capitalism, is that big monopolies support policies that help them compete against smaller businesses by rewriting property bankruptcy and contract laws that favor big business over small. Under recently revised bankruptcy laws, the billionaire Donald Trump can freely declare bankruptcy while insulating himself from risks to in
vestment, while smaller businesses cannot. The choice is not, Reich argues, between a governed and an ungoverned market, but between a market governed by laws favoring monopolistic companies and one governed by those favoring small business. Ironically, the economic sector that stands to suffer most from big monopolies is small business, many of which are run by those who favor the Tea Party. It might not be too much to say that the embrace of the 1 percent by mom-and-pop store owners is a bit like the natural seed—using small farmers' embrace of Monsanto, the corner grocery store's embrace of Walmart, the local bookstore owner's embrace of Amazon. Under the same banner of the "free market," the big are free to dominate the small.

  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.

  But that kind of extraordinary determination takes a certain kind of person—a deep story self.