Arlie Russell Hochschild has produced a fascinating and
enlightening volume evaluating the differences between liberals and what might
be generalized as Tea Party conservatives in Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. She is a sociology professor at the
University of California at Berkeley who was disturbed and puzzled by the
increasing political polarization within the nation.
“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.”
“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’.”
Being comfortably imbedded in
the liberal enclave of Berkeley, Hochschild had little opportunity to interact
with the engaged members of the other party, and assumed that those with
opposing political views would be equally isolated from contrary opinions. Her sociological training sent out warning
signals.
“Our
polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don’t know each other,
makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt.”
Hochschild was interested in
understanding the cause of the “great paradox:” why people would support
policies that would cause them great harm.
In particular, why would people oppose environmental policies that would
limit the pollution that put their very lives at risk?
“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 a home for the oil
industry and the many associated chemical processing plants. Sections of it merit the label of “sacrifice
zone:” a region so important to industry that people are willing to harm the
inhabitants and the ecology there in order to produce their product. Yet the state is also the home of people
virulently opposed to government regulation of industry.
Hochschild would choose to study
the people of Louisiana, not only because they were an obvious example of the
great paradox, but also because it was the home of self-proclaimed Tea Party
sympathizers.
“In the
2012 election, in the nation as a whole, 39 percent of the 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 the
Louisianans support the Tea Party.”
She set up shop in Lake Charles,
Louisiana and set about meeting and talking to people. She would come back a number of times to re-interview
Louisianans over a period of about five years.
She was interested more in the why
of their attitudes than the what of
their political beliefs. Others had
tried to explain the mindset of the conservative voter, but Hochschild thought
they had missed an important component.
“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”
Approaching the people she
encountered with this perspective was very fruitful.
“At
play are ‘feeling rules,’ 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….can appeal….”
Hochschild digested what she was
learning and managed to assemble a description that captures and illustrates
the perspective shared by those she encountered in Louisiana. She refers to it as a “deep story,” a concept
that is a bit hard to describe, but is clear once an example is provided.
“The
deep story here, that of the Tea Party, focuses on relationships between social
groups within our national borders. I
constructed this deep story to represent—in metaphorical form—the hopes, fears,
pride, shame, resentment, and anxiety in the lives of those I talked with. Then I tried it out on my Tea Party friends
to see if they thought it fit their experience.
They did.”
This is Hochschild’s deep story.
“You
are patiently standing in a long line leading up a hill, as in a
pilgrimage. You are situated in the
middle of this line, along with others who are also white, older, Christian,
and predominately male, some with college degrees, some not.”
“Just
over the brow of the hill is the American Dream, the goal of everyone waiting
in line. Many in the back of the line
are people of color—poor, young and old, mainly without college degrees. It’s scary to look back; there are so many
behind you, and in principle you wish them well. Still, you’ve waited a long time, worked
hard, and the line is barely moving. You
deserve to move forward a little faster.
You’re patient but weary. You
focus ahead, especially on those at the very top of the hill.”
“The
sun is hot and the line unmoving. In
fact, is it moving backward?”
“Look! You see people cutting in line ahead of
you! You’re following the rules. They aren’t.
As they cut in, it feels like you are being moved back. How can they just do that? Who are they?
Some are black. Through
affirmative action plans, pushed by the federal government, they are being
given preference for places in colleges and universities, apprenticeships,
jobs, welfare payments, and free lunches, and they hold a certain secret place
in people’s minds….Women, immigrants, refugees, public sector workers—where
will it end?”
“Then
you become suspicious. If people are
cutting in line ahead of you, someone must be helping them. Who? A man is monitoring the line, walking up and
down it, ensuring that the line is orderly and that access to the Dream is
fair. His name is President Barack Hussein
Obama. But—hey—you see him waving to the line cutters. He’s helping them. He feels extra sympathy for them that he does
not feel for you. He’s on their side. He’s telling you that these line cutters deserve special treatment and that they’ve
had a harder time than you’ve had.”
The many people that have cut in
line if front of you generates an enormous resentment—a resentment that is fed
by the similar feelings of the people around you and by your source of news
about the world.
“You
resent them, and you feel that it’s right that you do. So do your friends. Fox commentators reflect your feelings, for
your deep story is also the Fox News deep story.”
This story that Hochschild
constructed—and that was endorsed by her Louisianans—is built on a blatantly
racist concept. The southerners who continually
complained about the political correctness imposed on them by liberals,
actually hide behind political correctness in order to try to shield themselves
from being labeled as the racists they are.
“Curiously,
the people of the right that 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.”
“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.”
If these people represent the
Tea Party, then it is no accident that the Tea Party arose with the election of
Barack Obama as president. Hochschild
places Obama prominently in the deep story as the most visible and most
outrageous of those butting in line.
Here she describes the sentiments of her Louisianans.
“And
President Obama: how did he rise so
high? The biracial son of a low-income
single mother becomes president of the most powerful country of the world; you
didn’t see that coming. And if he’s
there, what kind of a slouch does his rise make you feel like, you who are supposed
to be so much more privileged? Or did
Obama get there fairly? How did he get into an expensive place like Columbia University? How did Michelle Obama get enough money to go
to Princeton? And then Harvard
Law School, with a father who was a city water plant employee? You’ve never seen anything like it, not up
close. The federal government must have
given them money. And Michelle should feel grateful for all she has but
sometimes she seems mad. She has no
right to feel mad.”
One should note that among those
butting ahead of the mostly white men are women. These people focus on the feelings of their
men. Their religion and their traditions
place men first.
“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.”
If the attitudes of the women
seemed those of a bygone era, those of the men were more so.
“….the
federal government was not on the side of men being manly. Liberals were certainly on the wrong side of
that one. It wasn’t easy being a
man. It was an era of numerous subtle
challenges to masculinity, it seemed.
These days a woman didn’t need a man for financial support, for
procreation, even for the status of being married. And now with talk of transgender people,
what, really, was a man? It was
unsettling, wrong. At the core, to be a
man you had to be willing to lose your life in battle, willing to use your
strength to protect the weak. Who today
was remembering all that? Marriage was truly
between a man and a woman….Clarity about one’s identity was a good thing, and
the military had offered that clarity….even as it offered gifted men of modest
backgrounds a pathway to honor.
Meanwhile, the nearly all-male areas of life—the police, the fire
department, parts of the U.S. military, and the oil rigs—needed defending
against this cultural erosion of manhood.”
Part of the answer to Hochschild’s
great paradox was that men considered environmental regulations as being
unmanly. She provided this anecdote as
an example.
“….a
man hired as a corporate industrial hygienist, tasked with sampling acid mist
in the battery charging area in a Ford battery plant recounted this: ‘To set up
the air monitors, I had to wear a respirator.
Staff asked me to take it off since it might make workers who saw me
with it on worry about the ill effect of the air on them. But they needn’t have worried. Some of the guys started to taunt me, the
corporate sissy who couldn’t tough it out like they [did]. But when they laughed at me, I could see
their teeth were visibly eroded by exposure to sulfuric acid mist’.”
Hochschild has sympathy and
affection for many of the people she has met.
She describes them as friendly and generous. However, most of their generosity seems to be
reserved for their own communities and their social equals. Embedded in her deep story is the notion that
the poor and unfortunate should take care of themselves and not bother them as
they look towards reaching their American Dream.
Whereas people on the left see
conflict between a tiny wealthy elite and the rest of the nation, the right
admires the elite and wishes they could join them. For the right, the conflict is between the
middle class and the poor.
“For
the right today, the main theater of conflict is neither a 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.”
Hochschild sees the Tea Party as
an emergence of southern attitudes that has taken hold in conservative minds in
the North as well. She provides this
assessment of what that means for our nation and its future.
“So in
the Tea Party idea, North and South would unite, but a new cleavage would open
wide; the rich would divorce the poor—for so many of them were ‘cutting in line.’ In the 1970s there was much talk of President
Richard Nixon’s ‘Southern strategy,’ which appealed to white fear of black
rise, and drove whites from the Democratic Party to the Republican. But in the twenty-first century, a ‘Northern
strategy’ has unfolded, one in which conservatives of the North are following
those of the South—in a movement of the rich and those associated with them, to
lift off the burden of help for the underprivileged. Across the whole land, the idea is, handouts
should stop. The richer around the
nation will become free of the poorer.”
So the Democrats, the left, had
the temerity to put forward a black candidate for president, and then follow that
with a female candidate. The female was
defeated. The left has been criticized
for pandering to the multiple minorities who are continually put at risk by the
white-dominated right. The left has also
been criticized for not doing more to pander to the lower middle class whites
who were so angry about their status. It
is difficult to see how one could win the hearts of these angry whites and
still save one’s political soul. Not all
dissatisfied whites are racists and misogynists, but enough of them voted for a
candidate who did pander to those sentiments to elect him president.
So stay the course, liberals! History is still on your side.
If reinforcement of your beliefs
is necessary, consider Hochschild’s version of the deep story shared by
liberals.
“In it,
people stand around a large public square inside of which are creative science
museums for kids, public art and theater programs, libraries, schools—a
state-of-the-art public infrastructure available for use by all. They are fiercely proud of it. Some of them built it. Outsiders can join those standing around the
square, since a lot of people who are insiders now were outsiders in the past;
incorporation and acceptance of difference feel like American values
represented in the Statue of Liberty.
But in the liberal deep story, an alarming event occurs; marauders
invade the public square, recklessly dismantle it, and selfishly steal away
bricks and concrete chunks from the public buildings at its center. Seeing insult added to injury, those guarding
the public square watch helplessly as those who’ve dismantled it construct
private McMansions with the same bricks and pieces of concrete, privatizing the
public realm. That’s the gist of the
liberal deep story, and the right can’t understand the deep pride liberals take
in their creatively designed, hard-won public sphere as a powerful integrative
force in American life.”
The interested reader might find
the following articles informative:
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