In Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, sociologist Arlie Hochschild seeks to understand the social, cultural, and emotional forces driving right-wing politics, in an effort to move past the partisan divide and approach American politics from a position of empathy for those on the right.
People on the opposite sides of the political divide are not just separated by political beliefs. They are also separated by an empathy wall—a barrier that prevents them from achieving a deep understanding of the other side. The empathy wall causes us to feel hostile and dismissive toward those with whom we disagree politically, making it nearly impossible to find common ground and work toward solutions to our society’s pressing problems.
By breaking down this empathy wall, we can come to truly inhabit the emotional world of the right, giving us insight into why these voters believe what they believe—and why those beliefs might make sense given these voters’ experiences.
We’ll make our journey across the empathy wall by exploring:
If we’re going to overcome the empathy wall between liberals and conservatives, we need to first explore what appears to be an inexplicable phenomenon of American politics: that the most conservative, heavily Republican states in the country are enduring immense suffering—often as a result of the anti-government, anti-tax, pro-business policies favored by the politicians who represent them.
Across the conservative South, states and counties lag behind the rest of the country across nearly every measurement of human development—to the great frustration and puzzlement of many on the left.
The conservative state of Louisiana ranks near the very bottom of all 50 states across most quality-of-life measurements, including life expectancy, health outcomes, median income, educational attainment, and pollution.
The GOP’s electoral dominance has resulted in a business climate that enables polluters to operate with a free hand. Despite their political loyalty, ordinary Louisianans have suffered extraordinary abuse at the hands of a largely unregulated corporate sector. Even when the negligence of petrochemical companies results in the wholesale destruction of a community (as happened in 2012 in a Louisiana town called Bayou Corne, when a drilling company accidentally created a massive sinkhole that forced the evacuation of the town) residents denounced government as the culprit. The conservative paradox leads these voters into a self-destructive feedback loop in which:
Next, we’ll explore some of the consequences of the conservative paradox for the lives of everyday Louisiana residents.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and environmental watchdog groups, Louisiana is one of the most polluted states in the country. The state’s wetlands, for example, are in an extremely vulnerable condition. Since 1930, Louisiana has lost an area of its wetlands equal in size to the entire state of Delaware.
With the arrival of companies like Firestone and Pittsburgh Plate Glass (PPG) in the years after World War II, industrial pollution poisoned the land and water. Republican politicians and their pro-business, laissez-faire ideology have given these polluting companies a free hand to poison the drinking water and destroy a once-thriving commercial fishing industry, all in the name of free enterprise.
The petrochemical industry is also well-known for its ruthless exploitation of employees. One former Louisiana petrochemical worker recounts numerous industrial accidents in which he saw coworkers gruesomely maimed or killed. The company for which he worked offered minimal compensation to these workers or their families.
Later, when this man became chronically ill from years of exposure to dangerous chemicals, he was fired by the company for alleged “absenteeism”—but the real reason was their desire to avoid paying his mounting medical bills.
Given these experiences of exploitation, it might seem baffling why Louisiana voters would keep electing politicians who allow oil companies to poison their air and drinking water, expose them to lethal chemicals, and wreak havoc on their state’s budget and social services.
But if we’re going to overcome the empathy wall, we need to delve deeper and understand the deeper story behind why these voters believe what they do. The emotional force that truly animates support for conservatism is a desire on the part of white conservatives to uphold their honor, dignity, and perceived rightful place in the social and racial hierarchy. Even though they would likely benefit from the more pro-worker, pro-regulation policies favored by the Democratic Party, conservative Louisiana voters feel culturally alienated from it.
Tea Party supporters believe that cosmopolitan liberals sneer and look down upon rural conservatives like themselves as racist, sexist, Bible-thumping, bigoted reactionaries. For them, liberal values are an affront to their honor and dignity—and they believe that the Republican Party, for all its faults, better represents their values.
(Shortform note: Although the Tea Party no longer exists as a movement, its values and beliefs are still widely held by the broader conservative movement in the United States. Many candidates who ran explicitly as Tea Party conservatives in the 2010 midterm elections remained powerful figures within the Republican Party a decade later, including U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, U.S. Senator Rand Paul, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.)
Despite the pervasive anti-government, anti-regulation rhetoric, conservative politics is quite accepting of state regulation—when it’s directed at certain social groups.
In conservative states like Louisiana, pursuits and cultural totems associated with a certain form of white male masculinity are indeed lightly regulated. Highly individualistic, risk-taking behavior receives a light regulatory touch. Thus, state laws regarding the consumption and sale of liquor (even open containers in vehicles), the ownership of firearms, and the wearing of motorcycle helmets are indeed quite lax. For many Louisiana white men, being able to drink, own as many guns as you want, and ride your motorcycle without a helmet speak to the heart of what it means to be a man.
On the other hand, Louisiana employs some of the nation’s most heavy-handed and harsh regulation when it comes to the rights and prerogatives of women and minorities, including restrictive anti-abortion laws and a racially biased criminal justice system.
While many Louisiana Tea Party members may lament the loss of the natural environment and the old Cajun way of life at the hands of the petrochemical industry, they insist that they are grateful for the jobs and economic opportunity that these companies bring.
More than environmental concerns, many conservatives claim that their faith in God and their belief in traditional family values are most important to them—and that their commitment to these values is what cements their loyalty to the Republican Party.
For them, the federal government is the far bigger threat to their way of life, with liberal politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton representing a direct affront to their values.
So far, we’ve examined some of the deeper attitudes that underlie the political conservatism of Tea Party supporters.
Now, we need to expand upon that analysis and explore a key theme that runs through much of right-wing politics: honor. By understanding their culture of honor, we can gain deep insight into how members of the right view themselves as losing status and position in the world—critical if we are to overcome the empathy wall and find common ground.
A major driver of the resentment felt by many Tea Party members is the belief that undeserving “others” have cut in front of them in the line to the American Dream. The feeling of having one’s rightful position usurped stands as a tremendous insult to the honor and dignity of people who believe this.
The Tea Party members—predominantly (although not exclusively) older, white, rural, Christian, native-born, and male see an increasingly diverse, unrecognizable, and alien America usurping their rightful place at the front of the line. They see programs such as affirmative action, cash assistance, and higher education subsidies as taking their hard-earned money and giving it away to provide unfair advantages to other social groups—young people, African-Americans and Latin people, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and women.
Although they deny harboring any personal racial animosity toward minorities, many Tea Party attitudes toward government redistribution programs are racially tinged.
The figure of former President Barack Obama looms large in the racially inflected Tea Party narrative of unfair advantage. They see the first African-American president as the line-cutter-in-chief, who gleefully waved ahead the other non-white line cutters through his liberal tax-and-spend programs.
These themes are amplified by conservative media like talk radio and Fox News, which focuses on supposed “welfare queens” living a glamorous lifestyle on the government dime. This further contributes to the feelings of diminished honor. People on the right believe themselves to be suckers for working hard for a living, while others are enjoying the luxurious benefits of government largesse.
They proclaim themselves to have “sympathy fatigue” when they hear about the supposed plight of immigrants and minorities. For them, it is absurd to feel sympathy for people who’ve simply been handed every advantage in life, while they have had to work and struggle for everything—and still find themselves falling behind.
Closely related to the idea of line cutters is the concept of “makers” and “takers,” in which hardworking “makers” are victimized and exploited by lazy “takers” living off the government. The foundations of this worldview are rooted in a deeply emotional conviction that there are deserving and undeserving recipients of government aid—and that liberals and the federal government have sided with the undeserving at the expense of the deserving.
In this view, hard work is inherently correct and moral. Getting paid without doing work is not just a waste of taxpayer money; it is damaging to the pride and dignity of the individual and a gross moral violation of the natural order.
Conservative notions of honor are also closely linked to traditional ideas around manhood and masculinity. A real man values toughness, endurance, bravery, and honor. It is unmanly and dishonorable to rely on the government or to seek redress for your problems through the legal system.
Thus, for many white male conservatives, state regulations forbidding a company from dumping waste in a bayou or mandating individuals to wear seatbelts make people weak and dependent on the government for their own safety.
A true man doesn’t run to the government for a handout when he gets into an accident on the job or contracts cancer through exposure to chemicals. He recognizes that he is the only one responsible if he gets hurt or sick—not the company and certainly not the government.
This attitude is backed up by sociological data. One 1997 study found that white males engaged in the most risky manual labor professions were significantly less concerned about exposure to dangerous occupational conditions than workers who were less exposed to danger on the job.
These resentments at being cut in front of reflect deeper anxieties about the perceived loss of once-privileged social status. White Christian men in particular (who comprise a disproportionate share of the Republican base) believe that they have lost their dominance in both the economic and cultural spheres.
Many white working-class people have indeed lost ground within the nation’s economic hierarchy. To many, this certainly feels like they are being robbed of their just rewards.
People born after 1950 have, on average, seen their real incomes (wages when adjusted for inflation) steadily decline as they get older, leading to an alarming downward mobility. This is the inverse of the fabled American Dream—people are doing worse than the generation that preceded them.
This trend is especially true for people without a college education, as is the case with many Tea Partiers in southwestern Louisiana. Global economic developments have exacerbated this trend. Globalization has made it easy for large multinational corporations to export low-wage, low-skill manufacturing jobs overseas; moreover, automation greatly reduces the need for human workers.
Once-thriving communities across the United States have been hollowed out and destroyed, leading to economic misery and social decay. For a certain subset of white men, their inability to provide for themselves or their families is a deep source of emasculating shame. This affront to their honor leads them to cast about for someone to blame for their plight—and in their outrage and despair, they are increasingly drawn to far-right politics of resentment.
The events of the 1960s, particularly the Civil Rights Movement, provide a deeper historical context for the political attitudes of conservative Southern whites.
While the successes of the Civil Rights Movement are celebrated as crucial victories for justice in much of the rest of the U.S., white Southerners have a different perspective on them. They deeply resented white northern allies of the Civil Rights Movement (whom they saw as moralizing and condescending) descending on their communities to upend what they believed to be the traditional Southern way of life. In some instances, federal troops were even sent into Southern states to supervise integration efforts.
To many white Southerners, the erosion of the region’s traditional racial order represented a downgrading of their own status. Going back to the antebellum era, their whiteness itself had always protected them from ever being at the bottom of the social hierarchy, regardless of their personal or economic circumstances. Any movement toward Black equality—particularly one imposed and enforced by the hated federal government—represented a deep threat to their status and honor.
This bitterness is reflected in the sentiments expressed by many Southern Tea Party supporters, who resent the portrayal of white Southerners as racist, ignorant, and backward—the villains in the American story of progress.
The backlash to the 1960s continues, as many Tea Party supporters bemoan their loss of cultural dominance, with movies and television shows appearing to cater exclusively to minorities, LGBTQ people, and non-binary people, while portraying non-traditional family units in a positive light.
Adding insult to injury, the castigation of white identity has come as other groups are embracing and celebrating their identities—Black, Latinx, women, LGBTQ, and so on. Tea Party supporters, deeply imbued with an ideology that values hard work and self-reliance, resent what they see as a celebration of marginalization and victimization on the part of such groups.
These long-simmering historical resentments among white voters were a crucial factor in driving support for Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
As we’ve seen, liberals often deride conservative white working-class voters for voting against their own interest—the conservative paradox we explored earlier. But liberals take too narrow a view of what constitutes “interest.” Interests can be non-economic in nature. For blue-collar conservatives, supporting Trump was powerfully in their emotional self-interest. What they admired most about Trump was his willingness to give voice to their grievances and resentments in unvarnished terms.
With his inflammatory rhetoric toward Muslims (whom he proposed outright banning from the country) and the nation of Mexico (along whose border with the U.S. he proposed building a wall to stop illegal immigration), Trump skillfully activated conservative voters’ anger toward line cutters. More than any other Republican candidate, Trump helped to create a new emotional permission structure that enabled white conservatives to express long-simmering anger and defy the cultural elites who they believe look down upon them.
When Trump called Mexican immigrants “rapists” or encouraged his supporters to rough up protesters at his rallies, he was deliberately discarding the emotional rules that many conservatives feel have been imposed upon them by liberals—that they must only speak about marginalized groups in certain ways and be careful to always use whatever politically correct term is in vogue.
To heal America’s growing political divide, liberals and conservatives must find ways to overcome the empathy wall that separates them. Each side is far too busy demonizing the other and reacting to caricatures of their political opponents, rather than substantively engaging with what the other side really believes and why they believe it.
Liberals must recognize that conservatives are not motivated solely by bigotry and hatred, nor are they uneducated or unsophisticated. Their political beliefs and resentments stem from a long history of feeling marginalized and discarded by mainstream American culture—of feeling like strangers in their own land. Moreover, there is much that liberals ought to admire about people on the right—their sense of pride in the dignity of work; their commitment to family and community; and their spirit of entrepreneurship, individualism, and independence.
If progressives wish to remain electorally competitive and to make progress toward their vision of a national common good, they must step outside their left-wing bubble and actually engage with those who disagree with them. Some ways to bridge this division could include:
However we do it, getting past the empathy wall is the only way we can bring civility back to our politics, restore public faith in democratic institutions, and rejuvenate the American Dream.
In Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, sociologist Arlie Hochschild seeks to understand the social, cultural, and emotional forces driving right-wing politics. As a professor at UC Berkeley, famous for its tradition of left-wing activism, Hochschild recognizes the need to step outside of her liberal bubble and understand the world as American conservatives see it.
In an era of rising political polarization, Americans on both the left and the right increasingly see one another not as rivals, but as bitter enemies and even existential threats. By speaking with conservative Tea Party supporters living around Lake Charles in southwestern Louisiana, Hochschild attempts to move past the partisan divide and approach American politics from a position of empathy for those on the right.
It is only by breaking down this empathy wall, that we can come to truly inhabit the emotional world of the right, giving us insight into why these voters believe what they believe—and why those beliefs might make sense given these voters’ experiences. It is only by forging these points of connection and seeing the world from the perspective of those on the other side of the political divide that we can begin to overcome the widening chasm in American politics that threatens the very functioning of our democracy.
In this summary, we’ll make our journey across the empathy wall by exploring:
Blue-collar conservative voters’ support for the pro-corporate agenda of the modern GOP often results in tragic outcomes for them. In this chapter, we’ll explore:
If we’re going to overcome the empathy wall between liberals and conservatives, we need to first explore what appears to be an inexplicable phenomenon of American politics: that the most conservative, heavily Republican states in the country are enduring immense suffering—often as a result of the pro-business, anti-tax policies favored by the politicians who represent them.
This is the central paradox of American politics. Why do economically disadvantaged whites—especially those living in states with poor health, education, and social mobility rankings—enthusiastically support a Republican Party that opposes economic policies (including paid family leave, environmental regulation, and universal healthcare) from which they would clearly benefit?
Particularly in the Deep South, arguably the ideological nerve center of American conservatism and far-right Tea Party activism, states and counties lag behind the rest of the country across nearly every measurement of human development. This seeming disregard for their own economic self-interest on the part of conservative Republican voters seems maddening and incomprehensible to many on the left.
The state of Louisiana, where we’ll focus our analysis, ranks near the very bottom of all 50 states across most quality-of-life measurements, including life expectancy, health outcomes, median income, educational attainment, and pollution. Here, Republican politicians offer minimal public investments in services like healthcare, social insurance, and education, while keeping taxes on businesses and wealthy individuals low.
Meanwhile, their anti-regulatory agenda allows the powerful oil and petrochemical industries to pollute the state’s air and drinking water, leading to some of the nation’s highest cancer rates for residents. It would seem that if any state would stand to benefit from a more activist government committed to investments in public goods and one less friendly to business interests, it would be Louisiana. The paradox runs even deeper when you consider the fact that, for all of the state’s anti-federal rhetoric, it is in fact highly dependent on federal largesse—with a full 44 percent of the state budget coming from Washington.
But this is clearly not how Louisianans see it, particularly those living around Lake Charles in the southwest corner of the state—the epicenter of the state’s sprawling extraction industry. Since 1972, Louisiana has voted Republican in nine out of 12 presidential elections, and it gave President Donald Trump one of his largest margins in 2016.
In Louisiana, the GOP’s electoral dominance has resulted in a business climate that enables polluters to operate with a free hand. Because of the state’s fiercely pro-business, anti-regulatory politics, the petrochemical industry knows that it has little to fear from state regulatory agencies or the pliant and cooperative state legislature.
Because of this, ordinary Louisianans (most of them loyal Republican voters) have suffered extraordinary abuse at the hands of a largely unregulated corporate sector, including:
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and environmental watchdog groups, Louisiana is one of the most polluted states in the country. The state’s wetlands, for example, are in an extremely vulnerable condition. Since 1930, Louisiana has lost an area of its wetlands equal in size to the entire state of Delaware.
This can largely be attributed to the power and influence of the extraction industry, particularly the oil and petrochemical industries. These sectors are notorious for hazardous working conditions where employees are routinely exposed to potentially lethal chemicals. Companies are also known to dump industrial waste into the streams and bayous.
The ravages of Louisiana’s largely unfettered extraction industry have destroyed an entire way of life. Since before the area was even part of the United States, generations of Cajuns (French Creole-speaking people, descended from 18th-century Acadians deported from Canada by the British), had been able to make a living from the land and water. Even today, older residents recall the days when they were able to live a self-sufficient life, growing beans and vegetables on their land and catching fish, turtles, and frogs from the nearby bayous.
But with the arrival of companies like Firestone and Pittsburgh Plate Glass (PPG) in the years after World War II, industrial pollution poisoned the land and water. Instead of aquatic wildlife, the bayous began to yield industrial waste and bits of rubber from the tire plants. Agriculture and husbandry became impossible when farm animals began to die after drinking the fouled water.
Republican politicians and their pro-business, laissez-faire ideology have given these polluting companies a free hand to poison the drinking water and destroy a once-thriving commercial fishing industry, all in the name of free enterprise. Rather than using the power of government to rein in the reckless and dangerous behavior of the private sector, Louisiana Republicans—and the large majority of voters who support them—instead castigate “Big Government” and “overregulation” as the source of the state’s problems.
The petrochemical industry is also well-known for its ruthless exploitation of employees. One longtime Louisiana petrochemical worker-turned-environmental activist named Lee Sherman recounts numerous industrial accidents in which he saw coworkers gruesomely maimed or killed. The company for which he worked offered minimal compensation to these workers or their families.
The exploitation went even further. Sherman was frequently tasked with illegally dumping barrels of chlorinated hydrocarbon into a marsh, which fed into the water supply for wildlife and nearby residents. After he became chronically ill from years of exposure to dangerous chemicals, Sherman was fired by the company for alleged “absenteeism”—but the real reason, according to Sherman, was their desire to avoid paying his mounting medical bills.
Beyond just the loss of fishing and agriculture, Louisiana’s environmental degradation has also brought soaring rates of illness and death to state residents.
A well-documented “cancer cluster,” Louisiana boasts the ignominious distinction of having America’s second-highest cancer rate for men, and the fifth-highest male death rate for cancer. One resident of Bayou D'Inde named Harold Areno (who lives downstream from where Lee Sherman dumped his barrels of chemicals) has seen his sisters, brother-in-law, mother, and neighbors all die of cancer in their forties and fifties (he and his wife are themselves cancer survivors).
Notably, no members of the family from earlier generations developed cancer. The wave of sickness and death began with the arrival of industry.
As one of the most strongly Republican states in the country, Louisiana offers a mix of low-tax, low-regulation, anti-government, and anti-labor policies designed to lure businesses from other parts of the country (and around the world) to the state.
Right-wing politicians claim that these corporations bring much-needed tax revenue, investment, and jobs to the state. One such figure was Republican former Governor Bobby Jindal, who was elected in 2007 and re-elected in 2011, each time by large margins.
Jindal campaigned as an explicitly anti-environment candidate, promising to slash the state’s already meager environmental regulations in order to entice more extraction industry firms to Louisiana. A centerpiece of his administration was a $1.6 billion “incentive” package for industry, consisting of massive tax cuts and direct public subsidies to companies. Unfortunately, Jindal’s showering of state largesse on corporations diverted resources from the state’s health and education systems, resulting in the layoff of 30,000 nurses, teachers, and safety inspectors, among other public servants.
Jindal’s “race-to-the-bottom” approach to economic development, however, may prove to be nothing more than a massive giveaway of public resources to wealthy corporations, for scant returns in long-term growth.
One major study funded in large part by energy industry giant Sasol made the case that towns like those of southwest Louisiana needed to increase public investment in order to attract valuable, permanent white-collar engineering and chemistry jobs to the region.
The study argued that college-educated professionals want to live in places with high-quality public services like schools, hospitals, museums, and strong environmental protection—even if they have to pay higher taxes in order to live in such places. The private sector and public sector are not in competition. It’s more of a symbiotic relationship, and the private sector needs a robust public sector.
Conservative Louisiana politicians argue that the environmental degradation is a necessary price to pay for the jobs that the petrochemical companies bring to the state. If the federal government were to crack down and pass more aggressive anti-pollution regulations, they claim, the companies would desert the state and leave hardworking Louisianans jobless.
This was the rationale behind Jindal’s pro-corporate agenda. It would also have the added benefit of keeping “Big Government” away from Louisiana. After all, if billions of dollars in new corporate investment were set to pour into the state, there would surely be no need for Washington, D.C. and its overspending ways.
But the numbers cast doubt on this approach and raise the possibility that the jobs vs. environment tradeoff is a myth. For all the rhetoric about oil jobs and investments, the industry only accounts for approximately 10 percent of all jobs statewide. As a result of automation, oil and petrochemical companies simply don’t require as many workers as they once did. One Oxford University study from 2013 shows that fully 91 percent of petroleum technician jobs are vulnerable to automation, a trend widely seen across the broader manufacturing industry.
The job-creation pattern in the extraction industry is often marked by an initial influx of construction jobs to build the plants (which are often filled by low-wage migrant workers), followed by a relative handful of permanent jobs once the project is complete. Often, these permanent jobs are for highly skilled engineers and technicians, not blue-collar workers.
A common right-wing claim is that low taxes on corporations will lead to a trickle-down effect, in which bigger corporate profits are shared throughout the economy in the form of dividends, jobs, higher wages, and increased state tax revenue.
But this appears to be another myth. Taxes on oil company revenues have failed to fill the state’s coffers, belying the promises of politicians like Jindal that their generous tax subsidies for these companies would pay for themselves. In reality, taxes on oil companies only account for 14 percent of state revenue.
Because the industry is dominated by a handful of international companies (who invest their revenues overseas) and migrant workers (who remit their wages to families in their home countries), very little of the money generated through petrochemicals actually finds its way into Louisiana’s economy.
Instead of trickling down, Louisiana’s oil wealth leaks out. Louisianans get the pollution, but not the profits.
It might seem baffling why Louisiana voters would keep electing politicians who allow oil companies to poison their air and drinking water, expose them to lethal chemicals, and wreak havoc on their state’s budget and social services.
But if we’re going to overcome the empathy wall, we need to delve deeper and understand the deeper story behind why these voters believe what they do. The ire that conservative Louisiana politicians and voters reserve for regulation and “Big Government” is about more than fiscal policy and spending priorities.
The emotional force that truly animates support for conservatism is a desire on the part of white conservatives to uphold their honor, dignity, and perceived rightful place in the social hierarchy. Even though they would likely benefit from the more pro-worker, pro-regulation policies favored by the Democratic Party, conservative Louisiana voters feel culturally alienated from it.
Hochschild interviews voters in southwestern Louisiana who share their resentment toward urban, secular liberals who they believe sneer and look down upon rural conservatives like themselves as racist, sexist, Bible-thumping, bigoted reactionaries. For them, liberal values are an affront to their honor and dignity—and they believe that the Republican Party, for all its faults, better represents their values.
In conservative states like Louisiana, pursuits and cultural totems associated with a certain form of white male masculinity are indeed lightly regulated.
Highly individualistic, risk-taking behavior receives a light regulatory touch. Thus, state laws regarding the consumption and sale of liquor (even open containers in vehicles), the ownership of firearms, and the wearing of motorcycle helmets are indeed quite lax. For many Louisiana white men, being able to drink, own as many guns as you want, and ride your motorcycle without a helmet speak to the heart of what it means to be a man. They are near-sacred privileges and birthrights and any perceived infringement upon them represents a deep affront to their masculinity, pride, and honor.
While the white conservatives who champion these policies claim to be doing so in the name of freedom, it is a very specific type of freedom they have in mind. It is freedom to rather than freedom from. Louisianans may be free to buy and openly carry firearms or not wear seatbelts. But they are not free from environmental catastrophe, poverty, and poor health.
On the other hand, Louisiana employs some of the nation’s most heavy-handed and harsh regulation when it comes to the rights and prerogatives of women and minorities. For example, the state has some of the most restrictive anti-abortion laws in the country, with access to abortion practically unavailable for poor women (who are disproportionately Black). The state also incarcerates a larger share of its population than any other state—and those prisoners are also disproportionately Black.
When we look at these deeper underlying attitudes, blue-collar conservative voting behavior begins to make more sense.
Despite Lee Sherman’s ordeal (which we discussed earlier in the chapter) and his outrage at his treatment by the petrochemical industry, he remains a living embodiment of the conservative paradox. Although he is a direct victim of the unregulated capitalism that he so vehemently champions, he refuses to see himself or his life story in such terms.
Instead, he is an ardent Tea Party supporter who canvasses for right-wing Republican politicians and rails against high taxes and a Democratic Party that he believes exists to steal his hard-earned money and give it to the undeserving and lazy poor.
Like Lee Sherman, Harold Areno (who, as we saw, has witnessed nearly his entire family succumb to pollution-related cancer) remains trapped in the conservative paradox. While he dislikes big business and laments the loss of the natural environment and the old Cajun way of life at the hands of the petrochemical industry, he insists that he is grateful for the jobs and economic opportunity that these companies bring.
He and his wife say that their faith in God and their belief in traditional family values are most important to them—and that their commitment to these values is what cements their loyalty to the Republican Party.
Instead of big business, Areno sees the federal government as the far bigger threat to his way of life. To him, liberal politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton represent a direct affront to his values, representing urban elites, secular ideals, and abortion on demand. For Areno, “Big Government” is not, and can never be, the solution. God—and only God—is the source of salvation.
In the last chapter, we saw how the GOP’s commitment to unregulated industrial capitalism has delivered environmental and economic havoc to its most loyal voters. We also saw how that political loyalty comes from those voters’ commitment to traditional values and their resentment toward a Democratic Party that they believe is disrespectful and hostile to their way of life.
In this chapter, we’ll move our analysis forward and approach the empathy barrier by examining the institutions that order and shape the emotional world of the Tea Party right in Louisiana, specifically:
As we saw in Chapter 1, the energy industry has emerged as the most powerful player in
Louisiana politics, despite its underwhelming performance in creating jobs for state residents.
The rise of fracking technology, in which high-pressure water is injected into underground rocks to extract natural gas, has been a boon for energy companies like Sasol, which maintains a significant presence in southwest Louisiana.
These companies are lured to the state by its pro-business, anti-regulatory conservative politics and by the well-documented willingness of local residents to support high levels of pollution in their communities. These residents and voters justify the environmental degradation in the name of job creation and reducing dependence on government.
The fracking boom, while yielding big profits to large energy companies, has mostly been an experience of false promises and dashed hopes for residents.
Local governments across Louisiana have rolled out the welcome mat for the energy industry, giving private interests a blank check to exploit public natural resources.
In the small town of Westlake, where Sasol has committed to investing $21 billion in a new energy complex, Mayor Bob Hardey (an enthusiastic Tea Party supporter) has given the multinational corporation an essentially free hand to dump waste into the town’s rivers and streams and emit greenhouse gases. He is loyal to the energy industry and believes that it—not the government—represents the best way to bring prosperity to the community he loves.
As mayor, he’s used the eminent domain power (through which the government seizes private land for public use after compensating the owner) to help Sasol acquire land for its complex, even using the power of his office to pressure private landowners to sell to the energy giant.
The land acquisitions undermine the social fabric and character of the community, as energy companies like Sasol acquire land in order to raze churches, historic homes, and even cemeteries that stand in the way of their construction plans.
Although he claims to harbor no racial animosity, Hardey, like many Tea Party conservatives, describes his opposition to the welfare state in highly racialized terms. In attacking affirmative action, he says that no one should be hired for a job simply to fill racial quotas, and that there are plenty of jobs available for those willing to work.
Deep personal stories often inform people’s political views, and it’s no different for those on the right like Mayor Hardey. He claims that he was able to work his way up from relative poverty because his job at the Phillips 66 manufacturing plant gave him an opportunity to prove himself and take personal responsibility for his life—and that immigrants and racial minorities face no barriers that prevent them from doing the same, without government handouts.
Hardey’s belief in his own deep story and the role that he believes industry played in his own success are what shapes his anti-government politics. Decrying what he describes as a culture of “poor me,” he views all programs designed to ameliorate poverty and redress economic inequality as unjust handouts to the lazy and undeserving.
Louisiana has been beset by high-profile environmental disasters caused by a weakly regulated energy industry. One of the most devastating occurred in 2012 at a place called Bayou Corne in Assumption Parish.
There, a drilling company called Texas Brine accidentally caused the collapse of a massive cave over 5,000 feet below the bayou in the course of drilling for concentrated salt. The collapse of the cave caused oil and methane gas from the underground to rise, appearing as visible bubbles on the surface of the water. Residents reported seeing methane gas bubbles appear in puddles for weeks after the incident.
The cave’s destruction sucked in massive amounts of water, opening up a 37-acre sinkhole that destroyed trees, boats, and homes. The industrial catastrophe disrupted the geology of the local area to such an extent that small earthquakes and other seismic events rocked the community for months after the cave collapse.
Eventually, even the staunchly pro-energy industry Governor Bobby Jindal had no choice but to issue an evacuation order for Bayou Corne.
Despite the obvious negligence, incompetence, and irresponsibility of Texas Brine, most residents of Bayou Corne did not direct their anger at the company that was directly responsible for the destruction of their community. Instead, they trained their rhetorical fire on the government.
It was the conservative paradox in action—people who’d been directly harmed by the consequences of anti-regulation politics (Texas Brine was later shown to have blithely ignored federal and state safety regulations) were lining up to denounce government as the culprit. In reality, the Bayou Corne Sinkhole disaster was a result of under-regulation, not overregulation, as well as regulatory capture, in which state agencies become dominated by industry lobbyists and representatives.
The conservative paradox leads these voters into a self-destructive feedback loop in which:
One enthusiastic, college-educated Tea Partier from Bayou Corne named Mike Schaff sees government as the source of all his community’s problems. While he disapproves of how Texas Brine handled the aftermath of the sinkhole, his emotions toward them are more based in hurt and disappointment than anger. He had genuinely believed that the company cared about the community and was surprised to see how little they did for displaced residents.
But he rationalizes their actions on the grounds that they are a profit-maximizing corporation that has to answer to shareholders. Of course they’re going to try to cut costs by evading safety regulations and fighting the payment of legal claims to residents.
But it’s the job of government officials to protect everyone, and on this score, according to Schaff, they failed miserably—only confirming his deep-seated belief in government’s essential worthlessness.
This is despite the fact that the devastating consequences of his worldview are on display all around him. For example, Schaff’s wife and grandchildren had to move away from the town, because the presence of methane gas leaks made it unsafe for them to stay. Many of his neighbors have also left under the evacuation order, decimating what was once a tight-knit and vibrant community. He is unable to even light a match in his own garage, out of concern that doing so would spark a methane explosion. His beloved community has simply been erased.
Schaff’s ideology is grounded in his belief that hardworking “makers” like himself are victimized by lazy “takers” living off the government. He claims (falsely) that half of Medicaid recipients in the state are not working or even attempting to find work. The foundations of this worldview are rooted in a deeply emotional conviction that there are deserving and undeserving recipients of government aid—and that liberals have sided with the undeserving at the expense of the deserving.
We see these attitudes on display in Mike’s own deep story. He admits to having personally used government programs such as federal hurricane relief, unemployment insurance, the interstate highway system, and the United States Postal Service. The difference, as he sees it, is that he is a deserving recipient of these programs because he paid for them with his tax dollars. It is those undeserving “others” who didn’t pay in and are taking advantage of hardworking people like himself.
This same right-wing notion of the deserving and the undeserving is reinforced in the region’s churches—along with industry, another key pillar of the Tea Party worldview. Indeed, Louisiana is extremely pious, with some of the highest church attendance figures in the country.
People refer to themselves as “being churched,” in the same way that you might describe yourself as being well-educated or well-mannered. Church is not simply a physical place where you go—it’s a way of being.
In the small towns and rural communities that dot the southwestern corner of the state, churches provide many of the services that municipal governments do in more cosmopolitan cities. Churches offer fitness centers, recreational facilities, childcare services, and even addiction treatment programs. Here, religion is community, therapy, welfare, and meditation all rolled into one.
Whether the church service is Catholic, Pentecostal, or Baptist, the message from the pulpit stresses personal endurance over difficult circumstances through a one-on-one relationship with Jesus. Notably, it does not preach the need to improve external circumstances in your community or perform good works.
The implication is that salvation is a matter of personal responsibility—and that your problems are yours and yours alone to deal with. This regional variation of Christianity also teaches that it is unwise to wish or dream for things beyond your means. If Jesus wants you to have your dream house, it will be provided for you. If He doesn’t, then it won’t.
The important thing is to accept your station in life, set aside your envy and striving, be happy with what you have, and cheerfully endure any hardship that might come your way. This religious orientation fits well with conservative political ideology, which downplays the role that external forces (government in particular) can play in improving one’s circumstances. It is a message that accords well with right-wing ideas regarding traditional social, racial, and gender hierarchies.
Some churches in Louisiana go a step beyond this and preach explicit anti-environmentalism, arguing that the Earth and everything beneath it is God’s bounty to humankind—and that people have a duty to accept this bounty and utilize it to the maximum extent possible.
For one woman named Madonna Massey, fervent Pentecostal faith and steadfast commitment to free-market capitalism go hand-in-hand. Massey is the wife of a Pentecostal pastor, and the couple has ambitious plans to build a megachurch to spread the word of God to more believers.
As a talented gospel singer, she has accomplished more than she ever dreamed she would. But she stands opposed to any attempts by the government to ameliorate inequality in society—or to help others rise above the circumstances of their birth and grab their slice of the American Dream as she has. She attributes her own success to her work ethic and her unwavering faith in God, who has rewarded her with earthly blessings.
Massey’s moral world is ordered by her church. Government only exists to perform a few limited functions, such as protecting private property and guaranteeing national security. God is the only entity that can provide everything else in life, from healthcare to education to access to food. For Massey, any attempt by the government to provide these goods to people is an infringement upon the American Dream and a perversion of God’s will.
But if there’s any institution more trusted by conservative Louisianans than big business or church, it might be Fox News. One faithful viewer interviewed by Hochschild described Fox News stars like Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Bill O’Reilly as being more akin to family for her than distant television personalities.
By devoting inordinate coverage to highly racialized topics like the 2014 Ebola outbreak, crime in urban centers like Chicago, and the “birther” conspiracy theory regarding President Barack Obama’s place of birth, Fox News serves up race-infused fear and paranoia to its older, conservative, and overwhelmingly white viewership.
The right-wing news network powerfully shapes the emotional world of its viewers, providing them with a deep story or master narrative of the world, in which they are the brave, right-thinking heroes fending off the forces of liberalism, secularism, and political correctness.
Perhaps most importantly, it validates viewers’ emotional orientations, confirming their ideas about what’s right and wrong and what’s important or unimportant. One viewer said that she likes Fox News because it doesn’t try to manipulate her emotions and make her feel guilty the way other news sources do—a source of great resentment for her.
She says that the liberal media implicitly try to blame the world’s humanitarian problems on America—and, specifically, conservative white Americans like her. They are trying to impose liberal emotional rules on her, dictating to her what she ought to care about.
Fox News is comforting because it validates her deep emotional belief that the world’s problems are not her problems, and that she doesn’t have to feel guilty about them.
In the last chapter, we discussed some of the core institutions that shape the right’s worldview and explored some of the deep stories—individual personal narratives that they feel to be true—that underlie these voters’ political conservatism.
In this chapter, we’ll expand upon that analysis and explore a key theme that runs through much of right-wing politics: honor. By understanding their culture of honor, we can gain deep insight into how members of the right view themselves as losing status and position in the world—critical if we are to overcome the empathy wall and find common ground.
Specifically, we’ll explore:
A major driver of the resentment felt by many Tea Party members is the belief that undeserving “others” have cut in front of them in the line to the American Dream. The feeling of having one’s rightful position usurped stands as a tremendous insult to the honor and dignity of people who believe this.
These conservatives see themselves as having worked hard, sacrificed, and played by the rules their entire lives, only to be rewarded with stagnating wages, blocked opportunities, frustrated dreams, and, in the case of southwestern Louisiana, poisoned air and drinking water.
The Tea Party members—predominantly (although not exclusively) older, white, rural, Christian, native-born, and male—see an increasingly diverse, unrecognizable, and alien America usurping their rightful place at the front of the line. They see programs such as affirmative action, cash assistance, and higher education subsidies as taking their hard-earned money and giving it away to provide unfair advantages to other social groups—young people, African-Americans and Latin people, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and women.
They feel left behind, isolated, and marginalized in a country that they believed was created by their hard work and sacrifice—in other words, they are strangers in their own land, robbed of their deserved rewards.
Although they deny harboring any personal racial animosity toward minorities, many Tea Party attitudes toward government redistribution programs are racially tinged.
In her conversations with conservative Louisianans, Hochschild observes that, despite their professed innocence on racial matters, Tea Partiers do believe in a racial hierarchy—one in which white people (and white men, in particular) belong at the top. Their resentment at the “line cutting” phenomenon stems from their belief that this rightful position has been unfairly usurped. They see a media landscape that celebrates the glamorous lives and exploits of Black celebrities like Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and Serena Williams, while ignoring (when not downright denigrating) white working-class people.
The figure of former President Barack Obama looms large in the racially inflected Tea Party narrative of unfair advantage. They see the first African-American president as the line-cutter-in-chief, gleefully waving ahead the other non-white line cutters in his political coalition through his liberal tax-and-spend programs.
To Tea Partiers in Louisiana, Obama prioritized the takers over the makers (we discussed the “makers and takers” trope in Chapter 2).
These themes are amplified by conservative media like talk radio and Fox News, which focus on supposed “welfare queens” living a glamorous lifestyle on the government dime. This further contributes to the feelings of diminished honor. People on the right believe themselves to be suckers for working hard for a living, while others are enjoying the luxurious benefits of government largesse.
They proclaim “sympathy fatigue” when they hear about the supposed plight of immigrants and minorities. For them, it is absurd to feel sympathy for people who’ve simply been handed every advantage in life, while they have had to work and struggle for everything—and still find themselves falling behind.
Of course, these views are a distortion of reality, as Hochschild points out. Historically, Black people have been at the back of the proverbial line, being “cut” in front of repeatedly by white people through the institutions of slavery, segregation, lynching, and discrimination, which stole their labor, dignity, and even their lives over the course of centuries. This legacy persists today when we look at the racial wealth gap—on average, Black households earn only 55 percent of what white households earn.
(Shortform note: To learn more about the Black wealth gap, read our summary of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article “The Case for Reparations.”)
Closely tied to the idea that they are being displaced by line jumpers is the notion, popular among those on the right, that they are losing their once-privileged social status. White Christian men in particular (who comprise a disproportionate share of the Republican base) believe that they have lost their dominance in both the economic and cultural spheres.
While you may disagree with the political views espoused by Tea Party members, it is impossible to deny that many white working-class people have indeed lost ground within the nation’s economic hierarchy. To many, this certainly feels like they are being robbed of their just rewards.
People born after 1950 have, on average, seen their real incomes (wages when adjusted for inflation) steadily decline as they get older, leading to an alarming downward mobility. This is the inverse of the fabled American Dream—people are doing worse than the generation that preceded them.
This trend is especially true for people without a college education, as is the case with many Tea Partiers in southwestern Louisiana. Global economic developments have exacerbated this trend. Globalization has made it easy for large multinational corporations to export low-wage, low-skill manufacturing jobs overseas; moreover, automation greatly reduces the need for human workers.
Once-thriving communities across the United States have been hollowed out and destroyed, leading to economic misery and social decay. For a certain subset of white men, their inability to provide for themselves or their families is a deep source of emasculating shame. This affront to their honor leads them to cast about for someone to blame for their plight—and in their outrage and despair, they are increasingly drawn to far-right politics of resentment.
(Shortform note: To learn more about how the economic decline of America’s manufacturing sector has impacted white working-class communities, read our summary of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis.)
Many Tea Party supporters also bemoan their loss of cultural dominance, with movies and television shows now appearing to cater exclusively to minorities, LGBTQ people, and non-binary people, while portraying non-traditional families in a positive light.
For them, there appears to be no more room in American pop culture for the traditional, white family. As rural white Southerners, people on the right in the Lake Charles area of Louisiana deeply resent demeaning media depictions of their communities as being filled with ignorant and racist “hicks” or “rednecks.”
Distressingly, they find that the values and norms they hold dear—being heterosexual, married, churchgoing, and traditional—are scorned by the media and Hollywood as being backward, out of touch, and even inherently bigoted. In other words, their cherished values and norms are now sources of cultural shame.
For many on the right, these shifting cultural norms and celebrations of diversity and non-traditional family structures in movies and television represent a personal affront. They see the broader culture’s caricature of their way of life as an assault on their honor and dignity.
(Shortform note: For a deeper discussion of this narrative of cultural decline, read our summary of Robert P. Jones’s article “We’ve Reached the End of White Christian America.”)
The commitment to honor and endurance through struggle finds its expression in different ways. Although people on the right are bound by common political loyalty and shared negative attitudes toward government, they arrive at these positions differently and find different emotional rationales for their political attitudes.
These conservative expressions of endurance fall into three broad character types:
But all are based in a shared ethos of endurance, sacrifice, work, and honor.
Team players in the conservative world are defined by their loyalty to their “team”—in this case, the Republican Party. To be a Team Player is to unflinchingly support the party, its leading political figures, and its affiliated cultural institutions. This finds expression in a celebration of the hallmarks of right-wing American political culture: rural and small-town life, church, and industry.
One woman interviewed by Hochschild named Janice Areno (niece of Harold Areno, whom we met in Chapter 1) embodies loyalty to the GOP and a belief in its commitment to the value of hard work. As a “self-made” woman who worked her way up from poverty to affluence through effort and sacrifice, celebrating work for its own sake defines her moral world.
In this view, hard work is inherently correct and moral. Getting paid without doing work is not just a waste of taxpayer money; it is damaging to the pride and dignity of the individual and a gross moral violation of the natural order.
Accordingly, Areno believes that people should not be rewarded for their moral failure in shirking work. She is fiercely opposed to any form of welfare, believing that those who do not work should be left to starve and that mothers on cash assistance should undergo forced sterilization, lest they create more mouths for the state to feed.
Her unwavering loyalty to conservative principles also makes Areno a staunch defender of free-market capitalism. Instead of calling for stricter state regulation of the energy industry, the proper response to environmental disasters is to endure them and be grateful for the bounty of private industry—environmental degradation is just the price of prosperity.
For someone like Areno, it is impossible to accept any alternative. To accept the necessity of some state oversight of the free market would be to concede ground to the other side of the political divide—in effect, to betray her team.
In the context of conservative Louisiana politics, the Worshipper accepts pollution and its resultant negative health outcomes in the name of jobs and material wealth. Even tragedies like the Bayou Corne sinkhole are justifiable, because they are a small price to pay for the wealth and prosperity that the free market brings. While pollution may be regrettable, it is something to be endured. In life, sometimes you must sacrifice things you want for the greater good.
One Louisiana woman named Jackie Tabor is a quintessential Worshipper. In detailing her life story, she discusses the series of houses she’s lived in with her husband, each a step above the previous one. But she reminds herself that she couldn’t live in nicer homes or have a better standard of living until she had truly earned it. Striving for too much too fast would have run counter to God’s plan for her and her husband.
There is a deeper lesson here: You shouldn’t grab too quickly for your slice of the dream. Sometimes things aren’t meant to be, and your role is to be happy and accept whatever fate delivers. This ties in nicely with anti-welfare conservative politics. Taxing the “makers” to give to the “takers” runs counter to this ethic of sacrifice and renunciation and represents an unnatural interference with God’s plan. In this worldview, there is an inviolable hierarchy—and some people are simply meant to be at the bottom of it.
Conservative Cowboys are motivated by their fierce pride in their independence and belief that risk and danger are necessary parts of life.
For Cowboys, state regulations forbidding a company from dumping waste in a bayou or mandating individuals to wear seatbelts make people weak and dependent on the government for their own safety. The only way the United States was able to develop into an advanced economy and society, they claim, was because entrepreneurs had the freedom to take risks. And risks are essential to progress.
A Cowboy doesn’t run to the government for a handout when he gets into an accident on the job or contracts cancer through exposure to chemicals. He recognizes that he is the only one responsible if he gets hurt or sick—not the company and certainly not the government.
This worldview is closely tied to traditional notions of masculinity. A real man values toughness, endurance, bravery, and honor. It is unmanly and dishonorable to rely on the government or to seek redress for your problems through the legal system. A real man instead sucks it up, grits his teeth, and solves his own problems.
This attitude is backed up by sociological data. One 1997 study found that white males engaged in the most risky manual labor professions were significantly less concerned about exposure to dangerous occupational conditions than workers who were less exposed to danger on the job.
One Louisiana man named Donny McCorquodale embodies the conservative cowboy archetype. He believes that even the most basic safety regulations are unnecessary and harmful. When discussing the possibility that an old petrochemical leak from 1994 might threaten the structural integrity of a nearby bridge—one that happens to carry an average of 50,000 vehicles per day—McCorquodale insists that it is not the government’s role to guarantee public safety.
He does so on explicitly “cowboy” grounds, arguing that risk is an important and necessary part of progress. Regulation, he says, threatens to stifle innovation and entrepreneurship. It’s impossible to make an entirely safe world—and any attempt to do so is an inversion of the “natural order.” As for those unfortunate souls who happen to contract cancer because they drank poisoned water or died in a bridge collapse caused by chemical leaks that undermined the piling supporting the bridge? They are just collateral damage, their lives the price of freedom and progress.
Explore how insults to your status might impact your worldview.
What are the things in your life that provide you with a sense of honor or status?
Have you ever been in a situation, either in your personal or professional life, where you believed that your rightful status was threatened or where someone else was given an unfair advantage over you? Describe what happened.
Did the experience make you feel embittered or resentful toward the person you believed was unfairly being waved ahead of you? Describe why or why not.
So far, we’ve talked about how conservatives’ narratives about their own lives, communities, and their place in a changing society shape their political orientation. In particular, we’ve explored how deeply held notions of honor and hierarchy order the right-wing worldview and are the true animating force behind their fierce opposition to government and the welfare state.
But while conservative attitudes may be driven by a reaction against changing economic, social, and racial systems, they have very deep roots in American history. In this chapter, we’ll explore:
We’ve analyzed the deep stories of several members of the Tea Party, giving us a glimpse into how they’ve arrived at their political positions—through their personal histories, their ingrained attitudes toward work, their feelings of honor and shame, and their religion.
But in discussing the political right in a place like Lake Charles, it’s important to acknowledge the unique history of the American South and how an awareness of that regional history shapes today’s political identities.
Before the American Civil War, the South was defined by the institution of Black chattel slavery, which infused the region’s political, economic, and social character.
The poor white yeomen farmers of the South (who themselves owned few, if any slaves) saw an extraordinarily vivid gap between rich and poor on display in their daily lives. After all, they only needed to contrast the rich and opulent lives of the planters with the miserable and exploited existence of the Black slaves.
The presence of the planters provided an example of what a poor white farmer could become if he applied himself; meanwhile, slavery reminded them of the region’s racial hierarchy—and, as white people (especially white men), of their relatively privileged place within that hierarchy. Their status as white men became an innate source of honor, contrasted as it was with the powerless condition of the Black slaves.
The inherent advantages of whiteness and the wealth opportunities afforded by slavery in such a society led even non-slaveholding whites to identify with and defend the institution of slavery and the wealthy planters who dominated the region.
The legacy of slavery and the racial politics of the region created a cultural framework in which white Southerners would be less receptive to populist, anti-rich political appeals and more receptive to pro-business messages.
This was despite the fact that poor whites were frequently economically exploited by the planters, who used their wealth to purchase the region’s best land, in the process pushing poorer whites onto more remote and less-productive land.
The events of the 1960s, particularly the Civil Rights Movement, further shaped the political attitudes of conservative Southern whites.
During this era, Black people—the South’s traditional underclass—marched, demonstrated, and organized boycotts, strikes, and sit-ins as part of a massive and ultimately successful effort to desegregate the region’s public and private accommodations. Meanwhile, landmark legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 helped Black people achieve some measure of political, social, and economic parity with whites for the first time in Southern history.
While these advances are celebrated as crucial victories for justice in much of the rest of the U.S., white Southerners have a different perspective on them. They deeply resented white northern allies of the Civil Rights Movement (whom they saw as moralizing and condescending) descending on their communities to upend what they believed to be the traditional Southern way of life. In some instances, federal troops were even sent into Southern states to supervise integration efforts.
To many white Southerners, the erosion of the region’s traditional racial order represented a downgrading of their own status. Their whiteness itself had always protected them from ever being at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Any movement toward Black equality—particularly one imposed and enforced by the hated federal government—was a deep threat to their status and honor.
To white Southerners, it was a historical replay of the military occupation of the South by northern Union troops after the Civil War.
This bitterness is reflected in the sentiments expressed by many Southern Tea Party supporters today, who resent the portrayal of white Southerners as racist, ignorant, and backward—the villains in the American story of progress.
Their identity as white and Southern, once a source of great pride, was now something that the wider culture was denigrating. Celebrating your whiteness, they were now being told, made you no better than a Klansman or a Neo-Nazi. What was a source of honor seemed now to be a source of shame.
The economic trends only intensified the feelings of alienation and loss of status. As automation and competition from foreign labor undermined domestic manufacturing, blue-collar conservative Southerners found they could no longer find pride and status in their occupations either. Now, when they are able to find jobs at all, they are increasingly finding work only in the service industry as retail clerks or healthcare workers—“unmanly” jobs traditionally reserved for minorities and women.
Feeling disrespected, undermined, and unable to celebrate their white Southern identity, conservative Southerners seek other sources of identity and honor—through their celebration of traditional values, their commitment to their local communities, their deep religious faith, and their pride in their region.
Adding insult to injury, the castigation of white identity has come as other groups are embracing and celebrating their identities—Black, Latinx, women, LGBTQ, and so on. Tea Party supporters, deeply imbued with an ideology that values hard work and self-reliance, resent what they see as a celebration of marginalization and victimization on the part of such groups.
If we recall Mayor Hardey’s phrase from Chapter 2, it seems to people on the right that the U.S. has become a “poor me” nation.
These long-simmering historical resentments among white voters were a crucial factor in driving support for Donald Trump. Indeed, when Hochschild returned to Lake Charles both before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, she found that Tea Partiers were nearly unanimous in their support for Trump.
At first glance, the enthusiasm of these rural, religious conservatives for the brash, crude, and famously philanderous New York City businessman/celebrity might seem strange. But the source of Trump’s appeal to cultural conservatives runs far deeper than their surface differences with him.
Liberals often deride conservative white working-class voters for voting against their own interest. Why would non-rich people vote for a party committed to tax cuts for the wealthy, slashing regulation of big business, and the gutting of environmental oversight that results in their communities suffering from contaminated air and water? This is what we categorized in Chapter 1 as the conservative paradox that lies at the heart of American politics.
But liberals take too narrow a view of what constitutes “interest.” Interests can be non-economic in nature. For blue-collar conservatives, supporting Trump was powerfully in their emotional self-interest. What they admired most about Trump was his willingness to give voice to their grievances and resentments in unvarnished terms.
With his inflammatory rhetoric toward Muslims (whom he proposed outright banning from the country) and the nation of Mexico (along whose border with the U.S. he proposed building a wall to stop illegal immigration), Trump skillfully activated conservative voters’ anger toward line cutters who they believed had usurped their rightful place in line for the American Dream.
Their support for Trump was not in spite of his crudeness; it was because of it. By being more willing than any other Republican candidate to antagonize and enrage through inflammatory rhetoric those whom Tea Partiers saw as their line cutters and enemies—liberals, environmentalists, immigrants, minorities—Trump helped to create a new emotional permission structure that enabled white conservatives to express long-simmering anger and thumb their noses at liberal “feeling rules” (the resentment toward which we explored in Chapter 2).
When Trump called Mexican immigrants “rapists” or encouraged his supporters to rough up protesters at his rallies, he was deliberately discarding the emotional rules that many conservatives feel have been imposed upon them by liberals—that they must only speak about marginalized groups in certain ways and be careful to always use whatever politically correct term is in vogue at the moment.
Trump’s refusal to abide by liberal norms felt like the lifting of a great emotional burden for Tea Party conservatives—and an affirmation that there was nothing shameful about their commitment to traditional values and identities. Trump has restored pride and honor to white conservative America once more.
For the Tea Partiers of southwestern Louisiana, Trump’s status as a businessman—instead of a politician—also made him all the more appealing. To them, he was a great American entrepreneur who had made himself rich through his own hard work and relentless pursuit of success. Now, they believed, he would bring those same skills to bear on behalf of America; and, specifically, on behalf of Americans like themselves.
To heal America’s growing political divide, liberals and conservatives must find ways to overcome the empathy wall that separates them. Each side is far too busy demonizing the other and reacting to caricatures of their political opponents, rather than substantively engaging with what the other side really believes and why they believe it.
Conservatives like the ones profiled in this summary must recognize that liberals do not wish to impose their values on them or judge them for how they live their lives. Instead, American liberalism is premised on a vision of the common good, one in which traditionally marginalized groups are empowered to chart the course of the nation’s future and economic gains are shared more equitably. And, sometimes, the federal government is the only entity with the resources and direction to bring such a vision to life.
Liberals must recognize that conservatives are not motivated solely by bigotry and hatred, nor are they uneducated or unsophisticated. Their political beliefs and resentments stem from a long history of feeling marginalized and discarded by mainstream American culture—of feeling like strangers in their own land. Moreover, there is much that liberals ought to admire about people on the right—their sense of pride in the dignity of work; their commitment to family and community; and their spirit of entrepreneurship, individualism, and independence.
By speaking more honestly with one another on an individual level and breaking out of their respective bubbles, liberal and conservative Americans would find that there is much that they actually have in common. On some level, both groups believe that the American economy has become unfair and rigged, with liberals believing that wealthy and powerful corporations are taking up too large a share of national income, and conservatives believing that the government is unfairly rewarding the indolent and lazy over the thrifty and industrious.
And there is indeed room for compromise and movement on a shared agenda between liberals and conservatives. For example, although he remains a member of the Tea Party and retains staunchly conservative positions on taxes, welfare, and abortion, Mike Schaff, whom we met in Chapter 2, has become a committed environmental activist (even if he still dislikes that label). While he is still generally hostile to government, he has come to recognize that there is a role for government oversight of business, especially when corporations destroy communities through their environmental mismanagement, as Texas Brine did to his beloved Bayou Corne.
Mike has been able to turn his right-wing values regarding honor and community toward progressive ends—he feels outraged, dishonored, and disrespected by Texas Brine’s indifference to the community that he loves. Now, he is working to get the Tea Party to embrace environmentalism as an important issue for conservatives as well.
If progressives wish to remain electorally competitive and to make progress toward their vision of a national common good, they must step outside their left-wing bubble and actually engage with those who disagree with them. Mike’s story shows that cooperation is possible. Some ways to bridge this division could include:
However we do it, getting past the empathy wall is the only way we can bring civility back to our politics, restore public faith in democratic institutions, and rejuvenate the American Dream.
Explore the main takeaways from Strangers in Their Own Land.
Why do you think working-class conservatives support the Republican Party despite its policies being against their economic interest?
Why do you think right-wing politics opposes regulation of business, but is in favor of stricter regulation when it comes to things like abortion or private sexual behavior?
Think of a family member or friend whose political view is the opposite of yours. What was your last political conversation with them like? Next time you talk, what can you do to gain a better understanding of where they're coming from? Where might you find common ground?
Do you think there is any possibility for working-class conservatives to collaborate with members of historically marginalized groups on the left on shared political goals? Explain how this might happen and which issues might provide some common ground.