A common assumption is that
industrial progress and the improved welfare of humanity provides sufficient
benefits that certain geographical areas must be “sacrificed” for the greater
good. The manufacture of products
demanded by the modern economy causes pollution and ill health for both humans
and the environment; therefore both may need to be sacrificed on occasion. Wikipedia provides this definition of a
sacrifice zone.
“A sacrifice zone is a
geographic area that has been permanently impaired by environmental damage or
economic disinvestment. These zones are most commonly found in low-income and
minority communities.”
We are not necessarily discussing minor environmental or
health issues here.
“The concept of sacrifice zones
was first discussed during the Cold War, as a likely result of nuclear
fallout.”
Arlie Russell Hochschild is a sociology professor at the University
of California at Berkeley who was disturbed and puzzled by the increasing
political polarization within the nation.
Being comfortably imbedded in a liberal enclave, 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. She decided she must
meet with red-state people and try to understand where their beliefs came from. Ultimately, she settled on Louisiana as the
place to set up shop. Her findings are
recorded in fascinating detail in Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.
Louisiana seemed like a logical place to study the Tea Party
phenomenon.
“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.”
Louisiana is also a home for the
oil industry and the many associated chemical processing plants. Sections of it
merit the label of sacrifice zone: Yet the state is also the home of people
virulently opposed to government regulation of industry.
Hochschild was particularly interested in learning why
people who were so injured by environmental pollution would be so adamantly
opposed to environmental regulations.
She referred to this contradiction as the “great paradox.”
“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 would be the place to come for understanding. Hochschild’s findings concerning political
leanings were discussed previously here. The present topic will be attitudes relevant
to economic and environmental issues.
It seems that the acceptance of industrial devastation
must require at least tacit acquiescence of both politicians and the affected
inhabitants. The situation in Louisiana
seems to combine a misbegotten political ideology with what Hochschild refers
to as a “least resistant personality” on the part of the residents.
She points out how the political environment has changed
over time.
“In the last Louisiana oil boom,
from 1928 to 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, Louisiana governor
Huey Long, the progressive demagogue—the Kingfish as he was called—taxed oil
companies, using that money to put a ‘chicken in every pot,’ give out free
textbooks to children, create evening literacy courses for adults, and build
roads, bridges, hospitals, and schools.
Long curbed homelessness and poverty.
Before succumbing to the lure of oil money himself, Long embraced the
ideal of an activist government that lifted the poor and added to the common
good….And were he alive today, very few Louisianans would vote for Huey Long.”
Long’s approach is contrasted with that of recent
governor Bobby Jindal who went out of his way to take money away from social
services and education in order to pay for the incentives provided companies to
encourage them to settle in his state.
“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….Given cuts to the state’s judicial branch, in which eight out of ten
of the accused rely on public defenders, lawyers had been laid off, and the
accused languished in jails….their names on waiting lists with thousands of
others, no lawyers to defend them.”
“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 companies would reap taxable profits, and he had
lost.”
“….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.”
Most of the Tea Party supporters Hochschild talked with
had voted twice for Jindal because he “promised to enact their values.” However, they did admit that he had left the
state in a “shambles.” They are against
taxation and regulation and view social assistance as an unnecessary evil. They viewed Jindal’s efforts to bring in new
businesses, even if they provided low-wage jobs and polluted their environment,
as good things. They seemed to have
Hochschild’s “least resistant personality.”
Back in 1984, California wanted to build a waste facility
that would provide a difficult environment for any living nearby. It would be noisy, smelly, generate a large
amount of traffic, lower property values, provide few jobs and would likely
produce unhealthy levels of pollution.
The thought was to learn how to convince any who might dwell in the
neighborhood that they would be enduring something that was worth the
discomfort. A study was commissioned to Cerrell
Associates, a consulting firm, that provided a completely different
perspective. The report was written by
J. Stephen Powell.
“The plant manager’s best course
of action, Powell concluded, would not be to try to change the minds of
residents predisposed to resist. It
would be to find a citizenry unlikely to resist.”
“Based on interviews and
questionnaires, Powell drew up a list of characteristics of the ‘least
resistant personality profile’:”
·
Longtime residents of the South or Midwest
·
High school educated only
·
Catholic
·
Uninvolved in social issues, and without a
culture of activism
·
Involved in mining, farming ranching (what
Cerrell called “nature exploitive occupations”)
·
Conservative
·
Republican
·
Advocates of the free market
Hochschild concluded that most of the people she met in
Louisiana fit “some or all” of these characteristics. Those that would be willing to resist were a
quite different class of individual.
“Those who resisted the oil
industry fit a very different profile—young, college educated, urban, liberal,
strongly interested in social issues, and believers in good government.”
This list of characteristics of the “least resistant” provides
a template with which to evaluate the Louisianans Hochschild encountered and to
try to explain why they acquiesce to the sacrifice of their land.
Louisiana certainly meets the educational requirement for
a candidate sacrifice zone.
“When the big oil companies
first came to Louisiana in the 1940s, 40 percent of adults in Louisiana had no
more than a fifth-grade education, and its citizens were the least likely in
the nation to move out of state.”
The building of oil and chemical plants has done little
for the state.
“The Measure of America, a report of the Social Science Research
Council, ranks every state in the United States on its ‘human development.’ Each rank is based on life expectancy, school
enrollment, educational degree attainment, and median personal earnings. Out of the 50 states, Louisiana ranked 49th
and in overall health ranked last.
According to the 2015 National Report Card, Louisiana ranked 48th out of
50 in eighth-grade reading and 49th out of 50 in eighth-grade math. Only eight out of ten Louisianans have
graduated from high school, and only 7 percent have graduate or professional
degrees.”
It would seem that being a sacrifice zone is not a onetime
thing. The conditions that allowed the
corporations to take over the land must be maintained. The poor, undereducated, least resistant
people must continue to be poor and undereducated, and unresisting for
corporate prosperity to continue.
The federal government rushes in trying to help—for which
it receives no credit—but merely ends up providing a tacit subsidy to the
corporate owners.
“Given such an array of
challenges, one might expect people to welcome federal help. In truth, a very large proportion of the
yearly budgets of red states—in the case of Louisiana, 44 percent—do come from
federal funds; $2,400 is given by the federal government per Louisianan per
year.”
Next, consider the first entry: longtime residents of the
South or Midwest. Many of the people
Hochschild talked to had been residents of small towns where generations of
family members had resided in the same area.
This produces a community with entangled relations, both familial and
social. Some will find such an environment
comforting and supportive; others will find a place “where everyone knows your
name” to be stifling and wish to escape.
Most of her Louisianans fell in the first category.
If you live in a city, you soon realize that a city
cannot function without a strong and effective government. The trash must be picked up on time; traffic
must move on schedule; there is only the government to rely on for the care of
the homeless and misfortunate. In a
small town, many of these functions either lose their significance or can be
handled through social networks. Government
can be seen as an intruder—especially if it is incompetent government, the kind
Louisiana seems determined to produce.
Consider the attitude of “Mike.”
“Even if the government helped
people—and he didn’t think it did much—government should never, Mike felt,
erode the spirit of community. He had
grown up in a dense circle of aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, all
within walking distance from each other….Now in his sixties, Mike felt happy to
live in a community as close and cooperative as the one he had known as a boy.”
“It wasn’t the simple absence of
government Mike wanted, it was the feeling of being inside a warm, cooperative
group. He thought the government
replaced that.”
This feeling for the place in which they live is
emotionally powerful. Small towns can be
difficult to maintain in a changing economy.
The promise of a factory bringing in jobs to help keep the place going
can be a much stronger motivator than the inconvenience of a little pollution—especially
when everyone you listen to tells you not to worry about it.
It seems a candidate place for a sacrifice zone requires
people who are unlikely to move no matter how bad it gets.
It is interesting that when Hochschild chose to write a
section about the effect religion had in forming attitudes in Louisiana she
chose to also consider the effect of media.
Both their churches and their sources of news contribute to a narrative
that must be recognized if the Louisianans are to be understood.
It can be difficult to understand how important church is
in the lives of the people Hochschild met.
“People speak of children not as
‘going to church’ but as being churched. And this is said with the same pride as
others might say ‘highly educated’ or ‘well mannered.’ Church in Louisiana—usually Baptist,
Catholic, Methodist, or Pentecostal—is a pillar of social life.”
Churches in other circumstances have been sites of social
revolution. In the world Hochschild
entered, they were the place to go to gain the strength to endure what had
befallen you, not to make you angry enough to fight back.
“Word from the….pulpits seemed
to focus more on a person’s moral strength to endure than on the will to change
the circumstances that called on that strength.
The service offered a collective, supportive arena, it seemed, within
which it was safe to feel helpless, sad, or lost. As in an hour of therapy, the individual drew
strength from support to endure what had to be endured….Another grief-stricken parishioner,
mother of an ill child living in the highly polluted town of Mossville, told
me, ‘I don’t know how I could have gotten through this without my church.’ As for altering the pollution, poverty, ill
health, and other things that had to be endured, for many that lay beyond the
doors of the church.”
It is difficult to worry about things like climate change
and ecological damage to the earth when you hope—and expect—that the present
earth will no longer exist. She shares
with us the beliefs of one Louisianan named Madonna.
“….Madonna believes in the
rapture. According to the Bible, ‘The
earth will groan,’ she tells me, ‘and earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, rain,
blizzards, strife will occur, and the earth is
groaning.’ Drawing from the books of
Revelation and Daniel, Madonna believes that within the next thousand years,
gravity will release the feet of believers as they ascend to heaven, while
non-believers will remain on an earth that will become ‘as Hell’….After the
rapture, the world will end for a time before Christ creates it anew and begins
a new thousand-year period of peace, Madonna explains.”
“Madonna attended two years of
Bible College in Mississippi and explains, ‘This is not what you would learn at
your university, but mine is a true belief.’
This belief offered her a graphic image of the creation of the earth in
seven days. It put the age of the earth
at six thousand years. The City of
Heaven, she told me, was a cube 1,500 miles square, divided into 12 bejeweled
stories, each 120 miles high with gates, the largest one of pearls.”
Environmentalists believe that what humans are doing to
the earth is a long-term problem. To the
religious who expect the earth to end—perhaps in their lifetime—what humans are
doing is a short-term issue that is rather irrelevant.
“Across the nation, many share
these beliefs with Madonna. According to
a 2010 Pew Research Center report, 41 percent of all Americans believe the ‘Second
Coming’ ‘probably’ or ‘definitely’ will happen by the year 2050.”
Hochschild’s experience in Louisiana also makes clear
that we cannot begin to understand the residents of that state without taking into
account the effect of Fox News.
“As a powerful influence over
the views of the people I came to know, Fox News stands next to industry, state
government, church, and the regular media as an extra pillar of political
culture all its own. Madonna tunes into
Fox on the radio, television, and internet….Fox gives to Madonna and others the
news. It suggests what the issues
are. It tells her what to feel afraid,
angry, and anxious about.”
“All news programs address our
emotional alarm systems, of course. But
with talk of a ‘terror mosque’ at Ground Zero, of the ‘left’s secret
immigration plan’ to wipe traditional America off the face of the earth, of
Obama’s supposed release of the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, of his
supposed masterminding the massacre at Fort Hood, Fox News stokes fear. And the fear seems to reflect that of the
audience it most serves—white middle- and working-class people. During the series of police killings of young
black men, Fox reporters tended to defend white police officers and criticize
black rioters. It defended the right to
own guns and restrict voter registration, and it continually derided the
federal government.”
And, of course, Fox News leads the pack in condemning
those who they claim would kill jobs by worrying about the environment.
“None of the people I talked to
one-on-one, off and on, over five years used the extreme language I heard on
Fox. George Russell, a Fox commentator,
spoke of the ‘green energy tyranny.’
Business anchor Eric Bolling referred to the EPA as ‘job terrorists’ who
are ‘strangling America.’ Fox News
Business Network commentator Lou Dobbs commented in 2011 that ’as it’s being
run now, [the EPA] could be part of the apparat of the Soviet Union.’ One woman’s favorite commentator, Charles
Krauthammer, compared the rise in EPA air quality standards to an ‘enemy attack’
on America.”
We come now to the final requirements that are necessary
to make people willing to allow their region to become a sacrifice zone:
conservative Republican advocates of the free market. In order to appreciate the zest with which
whites in the South switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party,
one must understand the degree to which whites in the South maintain, however
tacitly, their racist traditions.
Hochschild makes it clear that her Louisianans support the notion that
whites occupy a privileged place in this country. Their fury is aroused not by political or
financial manipulation, but by the notion that their place of privilege is
being eroded by a federal government that encourages people with different
colored skin to succeed when they themselves are not getting ahead. This is the narrative that the Republican Party
encourages using Fox News to spew incendiary content to its viewers. While the left views conflict as being between
a small wealthy elite and everyone else, the right views the main conflict to
be between middle class whites 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 recognized that the political logic involved
in governing a red state generated a trend in which poverty, lack of education,
and ill health were inevitable consequences.
“[In Louisiana] The logic was
this. The more oil, the more jobs. The more jobs, the more prosperity, and the
less need for government aid. And the
less the people depend on government—local, state, or federal—the better off
they will be. So to attract more oil
jobs, the state has to offer financial ‘incentives’ to oil companies to get
them to come. That incentive money will
have to be drawn from the state budget, which may lead to the firing of public
sector workers, which, painful as it might seem, reduces reliance on government
and lowers taxes. It is a red state
tactic. But the paradox is that it goes
with being a poor state with a lot of problems.”
Low wages are inherent in and necessary to the red state
logic. When that is combined with low
public spending you end up with Louisiana and states like it.
When a plant moves to Louisiana it generates a large
number of jobs—temporarily. Skilled craftsmen
are required for the building of the plant, but because Louisiana does not
provide those skilled workers, most of the workers are imported from outside
the state, or outside the country. Most
of the earnings of these workers leaves the state as well as most of the profit
made eventually from the facility. What
are left when the plant operates are a few highly skilled positions, often held
by workers from outside, and a few lower skilled jobs. Louisiana gains some in turns of income
distributed, but not enough to overcome the lower property values inherent in
sacrificing one’s land and the decrease in public services provided—such as
education and health maintenance.
The goal of southern politicians has not changed for
hundreds of years. It is to allow the
process described above to continue. It
is necessary to keep wages low and keep workers fixated on their place within
the social landscape. As long as the
system has kept whites ahead of people with darker skin the system has remained
stable.
The interested reader might find the following article
informative:
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