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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

  The roving strobe light stops. Donald Trump climbs steps to the podium in front of the flag, turns, smiles, and waves to the excited crowd on all sides of him. A cheer breaks out: "Who Dat Say Dey Gonna Beat Dat Trump? Who Dat?" adapting a spectator chant for the New Orleans Saints football team. Trump thanks the crowd and begins by describing his ascent to power. "I started at 7 percent, and they thought I'd wipe out. Then I got 15 percent and then 25..." His talk of "I" moves to "we." "We're on the rise.... America will be dominant, proud, rich. I am just the messenger."

  People hoot and shout. They pump their signs frantically up and down, and wave them sideways.

  "We're not going to let other countries rip us off!" Trump yells.

  Cheers.

  "We're not going to let it happen!"

  Cheers.

  "Our country is going to hell. But we're going to make it great again!"

  Cheers.

  "We're going to build a high wall and Mexico's going to pay for it!"

  Cheers.

  "We're going to build up our military!"

  Roar.

  "We're going to knock the hell out of ISIS!"

  Another roar.

  A wiry older man in a black suit with a red tie holds up a sign, "KKK FOR TRUMP," and flips it over to reveal, "TRUMP, DUKE FOR 2016." At first I think he is a protestor, but looking at his face more closely, surmise he's KKK. He flicks a security guard away with his arms but is finally escorted out.

  Black Lives Matter protestors also appear, having marched in along with other protestors whose signs say things like: "THIS VET IS NOT 4 TRUMP"; "SMALL HANDS, SMALL HEART"; "NO TRUMP, NO KKK, NO FASCIST USA."

  Seeing these, Trump orders security, pointing to a man, "Get that guy out. Get him out." Others in the crowd point to the dissenter. "Out."

  "Why is this taking so long? I can't believe it's taking this long," Trump repeats, pointing to the protestor. Then, drowning out the protestors, the crowd erupts.

  "U.S.A.!"

  "U.S.A.!"

  "U.S.A.!"

  In later sites of protest, Trump himself initiates the U.S.A. chant. Dissent is one thing, the implication is, but being American is another.

  After Trump's speech, the music resumes: Elton John's "Rocket Man."

  Trump lingers to sign posters, hats, shirts, and boots. A small distressed boy with Trump-like moussed blond hair is handed to the candidate by proud parents to be photographed. A short woman in a red hat struggles frantically to see over the heads of taller fans, finally standing on a chair, her arms on the shoulders of a stranger who steadies her. I see a middle-aged man, arms uplifted, as in the rapture, saying to those around him and no one in particular, "To be in the presence of such a man!"

  The next day, Donald Trump wins 41 percent of Louisiana's Republican primary vote, beating his evangelical rival, Ted Cruz.

  In speeches to large, excited crowds, over the days to come, Trump tells his fans what he offers them. "I've been greedy. I'm a businessman... take, take, take. Now I'm going to be greedy for the United States" (wild cheers). He also draws a clear dividing line between Christians, to whom he promises the return of Christian public culture on one hand, and Muslims and protestors holding Black Lives Matter signs on the other. Some protestors he refers to as "bad, bad people.... They do nothing... you hear that weak voice out there? That's a protestor.... They aren't protestors. I call them disruptors." In other speeches Trump said, in reference to a protestor, "I'd like to punch him in the face" (February 23, 2016). "In the good old days they'd have ripped him out of that seat so fast" (February 27, 2016). "Knock the crap out of him, would you? Seriously ... I promise you I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise" (February 1, 2016). "Some are very violent.... Let's ruin... they're going to ruin... the rest of their lives ... if they want to do this, let them have a big arrest mark.... Their lives are going to be ruined.... I'll press charges" (March 13, 2016).

  Later Trump said of a man who tried to rush him on stage, "The man got taken down." Speculating on how he himself would have responded had the man reached him, Trump said, "I would have gone bum, bum, bum" (he imitates pummeling the man).

  And on the issue of pollution that had so plagued the lives of the people of Louisiana? What would Donald Trump do about that? He's said of the EPA, "We're going to get rid of it in almost every form." (Cheers.)

  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 secure and respected. While Durkheim was studying religious rites among indigenous tribes in Australia and elsewhere, much of what he observed could be applied to the rally at the Lakefront Airport, as well as many others like it. People gather around what Durkheim calls a "totem"—a symbol such as a cross or a flag. Leaders associate themselves with the totem and charismatic leaders can become totems themselves. The function of the totem is to unify worshippers. Seen through Durkheim's eyes, the real function of the excited gathering around Donald Trump is to unify all the white, evangelical enthusiasts who fear that those "cutting ahead in line" are about to become a terrible, strange, new America. The source of the awe and excitement isn't simply Trump himself; it is the unity of the great crowd of strangers gathered around him. If the rally itself could speak, it would say, "We are a majority!" Added to that is a potent promise—to be lifted up from bitterness, despair, depression. The "movement," as Trump has increasingly called his campaign, acts as a great antidepressant. Like other leaders promising rescue, Trump evokes a moral consciousness. But what he gives participants, emotionally speaking, is an ecstatic high.

  The costumes, hats, signs, and symbols reaffirm this new sense of unity. To those who attend his rallies, the event itself symbolizes a larger rising tide. As the crowd exited the hangar, fans were saying to one another, "See how many of us there are." It felt to them that Trump had captured the flag.

  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.r />
  Emotionally speaking, something else very important was going on during the Trump rally. It is another way in which the match strikes dry kindling. Enhancing the elation at the Trump rally was a sense of release from the constrictions of politically correct speech and ideas. "Let's get rid of PC," Trump calls out. He was throwing off not only a set of "politically correct" attitudes, but a set of feeling rules—that is, a set of ideas about the right way to feel regarding blacks, women, immigrants, gays—those alluded to in a sign held by a New Orleans woman protestor that said: "VOTE WITH YOUR HEART, NOT WITH YOUR HATE."

  Those on the far right I came to know felt two things. First, they felt the deep story was true. Second, they felt that liberals were saying it was not true, and that they themselves were not feeling the right feelings. Blacks and women who were beneficiaries of affirmative action, immigrants, refugees, and public employees were not really stealing their place in line, liberals said. So don't feel resentful. Obama's help to these groups was not really a betrayal, liberals said. The success of those who cut ahead was not really at the expense of white men and their wives. In other words, the far right felt that the deep story was their real story and that there was a false PC cover-up of that story. They felt scorned. "People think we're not good people if we don't feel sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees," one man told me. "But I am a good person and I don't feel sorry for them."

  With the cover-up, as my new friends explained to me, came the need to manage the appearance of their real feelings and even, to some extent, the feelings themselves. They didn't have to do this with friends, neighbors, and family. But they realized that the rest of America did not agree. ("I know liberals want us to feel sorry for blacks. I know they think they are so idealistic and we aren't," one woman told me.) My friends on the right felt obliged to try to modify their feelings, and they didn't like having to do that; they felt under the watchful eye of the "PC police." In the realm of emotions, the right felt like they were being treated as the criminals, and the liberals had the guns.

  So it was with joyous relief that many heard a Donald Trump who seemed to be wildly, omnipotently, magically free of all PC constraint. He generalized about all Muslims, all Mexicans, all women—including that all women menstruate, a fact Trump declared "disgusting." (He famously described Fox News newscaster Megyn Kelly as "bleeding from whatever.") Trump jovially imitated a disabled journalist by physically shaking his arm in imitation of palsy—all deeply derogatory actions in the eyes of Trump's detractors but liberating to those who had felt constrained to pretend sympathy. Trump allowed them both to feel like a good moral American and to feel superior to those they considered "other" or beneath them.

  This giddy, validating release produced a kind of "high" that felt good. And of course people wanted to feel good. 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 distain 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.

  Having once experienced the elation—the "high"—of being part of a powerful, like-minded majority, released from politically correct rules of feeling, many wanted to hold on to that elation. To do this, they fended off challenge. They sought affirmation. One woman with whom I spent six hours talked about Trump continually, countering possible criticisms, leaving no interstitial moments when skepticism might emerge. It occurred to me that the reason for this shield of talk was to protect her elation.

  When I returned for my final visit with my new friends on the right, I encountered a variety of responses to Donald Trump, about half for, half not. Janice Areno, the Team Loyalist, had become a stout Trump defender, as were others in her family and office. She remained undisturbed by the controversy he stirred, saying simply, "The country is going to hell in a hand-basket and we need a strong leader to get back on track." A good number in the Sunday gatherings at Cappy and Fay's home in Longville found much to admire in Trump. For Donny McCorquodale, Trump could be the Cowboy in chief. As for Mike Schaff, the Tea Party sinkhole activist, his first choice was Texas senator Ted Cruz, despite the fact that Cruz had received a million dollars in campaign funding from oil and gas since 2011 and had described the EPA as "unbelievably abusive." For Mike the important things were small government, low taxes, guns, and the prohibition of abortion. But if Cruz lost the primary, Mike, like his wife and all but one of his six siblings, would vote for Donald Trump.

  Not everyone planned to. Jackie Tabor, the Worshipper, said in an e-mail, "Trump scares me, which is too bad because he's obviously an amazing business man, which would be pretty great considering the current state of the nation's finances." Harold and Annette Areno, the deeply committed Pentecostal couple living on Bayou d'Inde, recoiled at Trump's ridicule of a disabled man. Sharon Galicia, once president of Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana and an aspirant for a position in the state Republican Party, told me, "I think he's mean. But the plant workers I sell insurance to all think he's great." And if he becomes the Republican nominee, Trump has her reluctant vote too. One relocated refugee from Bayou Corne agreed, "I like what Trump says but I'm afraid of what he'd do," and was unsure how he would vote.

  What many admired about Trump was his success as a businessman. He was a champion of private enterprise, they felt, and that fact had great appeal. During the depression of the 1930s, a number of Americans turned to a belief in socialism and communism, idealizing the central government and believing in leaders who represented their—elation-inspired—faith in it. During the current economic downturn, some on the far right have placed a parallel faith in capitalism.

  Implicitly Trump promised to make men "great again" too, both fist-pounding, gun-toting guy-guys and high-flying entrepreneurs. To white, native-born, heterosexual men, he offered a solution to the dilemma they had long faced as the "left-behinds" of the 1960s and 1970s celebration of other identities. Trump was the identity politics candidate for white men. And he didn't actively oppose medical care for those in need. If he got elected, you could sign up for Trumpcare and feel manly too.

  Around the world in the early twenty-first century, as the multinational companies that roam the globe become more powerful than the political states vying for their favor, it is the right wing that is on the move. Right-wing regimes—focused on national sentiment, strong central rule, and intolerance for minorities or dissent—have come to power in Russia, where President Putin has declared dissident voices as a sign of weakness and "Western influence"; in India, where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has declared India a "Hindu" nation; in Hungary, where anti-Soviet monuments are being replaced by anti-German ones; and in Poland, which is cracking down on a free press. It is becoming more vocal in France (the National Front), Germany (the National Democratic Party), and the United Kingdom (the Independence Party).

  Versions of the deep story seem to have gone global.

  16

  "They Say There Are Beautiful Trees"

  During the eight years Bobby Jindal was governor of Louisiana, he fired 30,000 state employees and furloughed many others. Social workers increased their caseloads. Child abuse victims were for the first time spending nights at government offices. Since 2007—2008, in the nation's second poorest state, Governor Jindal had cut funding for higher education by 44 percent. At the historically black Southern University, General Russel Honoré's alma mater, mold spread on building walls and rats scurried through dormitories. Most campus offices would operate two or three days a week. Given cuts to the state's judicial bra
nch, in which eight out of ten of the accused rely on public defenders, lawyers had been laid off, and the accused languished in jails—sixty in New Orleans alone—their names on waiting lists with thousands of others, no lawyers to defend them. At the same time, the state faced a projected shortfall of $1.6 billion. Now even more cuts to the public budget were looming; Jindal's successor, Democratic governor John Bel Edwards, reluctantly announced in March of 2016 that in order to address the "historic fiscal crisis," the state would need nearly $3 billion— almost $650 per resident—just to keep up regular services during the next sixteen months. Jindal had cut corporate taxes as well as individual taxes and he had spent $1.6 billion in "incentives" to lure industry to the state, offering companies ten-year tax exemptions. Jindal had sold state-owned parking lots and farmland, potential sources of revenue. He put the state's hospitals in "business-friendly" hands for which costs proceeded to rise. He had gambled that oil prices would rise and that companies would reap taxable profits, and he had lost. The entire state of Louisiana had been placed into a sinkhole.

  Nearly every Tea Party advocate I talked to had voted for Jindal twice, because he promised to enact their values. But after eight years of his governance, they hated the result. He had done what he promised—reduced taxes and cut the public sector—but he left the state in shambles. Still, Jindal already seemed forgotten. Speaking of Edwards trying to pick up the pieces, many echoed a comment by Mike Schaff: "Now we have a Democratic governor, and the first thing he does is raise taxes."