In the wake of Monday night’s first presidential debate, the establishment Republican Party and conservative newspapers continue to distance themselves from Donald Trump amid increasing accusations of racism, sexism, xenophobia and Islamophobia. Today, former Virginia Republican Senator John Warner is reportedly slated to endorse Hillary Clinton. This comes as Arizona’s largest newspaper, The Arizona Republic, has also endorsed Clinton, making it the paper’s first time ever endorsing a Democrat for president. The editorial board wrote, “Since The Arizona Republic began publication in 1890, we have never endorsed a Democrat over a Republican for president. Never. … This year is different,”.
But Donald Trump has not lost support from some of his key constituents among the far right, sometimes known as the alt-right. During the debate, Trump’s online far-right supporters reportedly bombarded online polls in which the same user could vote multiple times in order to create the illusion Trump had won the unofficial polls. Trump has embraced the alt-right throughout his campaign, including by naming Stephen Bannon to be his campaign chief. Bannon was previously the head of the right-wing website Breitbart Media, which Breitbart’s former editor-in-chief has described as “the alt-right go-to website”.
Arlie Russell Hochschild talking:
five years ago, I felt we were already moving far apart and the right was growing. And I was in an enclave, a geographic enclave, a media enclave, electronic enclave. We’re all in enclaves. And I figured, I want to get as far out of my enclave as I possibly could. I’m Berkeley, California, teach sociology. Where’s the opposite end? I thought, “OK, the right is growing in the South. So, South. It’s growing among whites. OK, whites. Older, evangelical. OK, older, evangelical—although not all were evangelical. And where’s the super South?” And I looked at 2012. How many whites voted for Obama? In California, it was half. In the South as a whole, as a whole region, it was a third. And in Louisiana, it was 16 percent. I thought, “Super South. OK, that’s where I want to go.” So, as luck would have it, I had one contact there, and I took it from there. In the end, over five years, I interviewed 60 people. Forty were tea party enthusiasts. And what I really did was want to climb an empathy wall. I wanted to take my own political alarm system off and actually try and see how it felt to be them.
And actually, you know, I had an interesting experience with one of the first women I met. She was a gospel singer in a Pentecostal church, very friendly, outgoing. I met her at a Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana meeting. She was across the table. She said, “I love Rush Limbaugh.” I thought to myself, “I should talk to her. I don’t know why. I’m interested. I’m curious.” So, at sweet teas the next day, she said, “Oh, I love Rush Limbaugh because he hates feminazis.” OK, took a little while. And I said, “Well, what is a feminazi? What?” And, “Well, it’s those feminists, you know, that are hard and tough and mean and ambitious.” I thought, “Well, I don’t like hard, tough, mean people, either, you know?” thinking that. And then she said, “Has it been hard to hear what I’m saying?” I thought, “Well, she’s looking back at me.” And I told her, “Actually, no, it’s not, because I have my alarm system off, and I’m trying to find out what life feels like to you, so…” And then she said, “You know, I do that sometimes.” And then we had that actually in common. And then she explained, “You know what I really like about Rush Limbaugh? He seems to defend me against all the liberal media that think I’m a redneck, that I’m backward, that I’m Southern, that I’m uneducated, that I’m homophobic, racist, a sexist. And thanks for coming.”
So, it was an amazing experience, and I met some very interesting, complex people that don’t fit the deplorable category, but are complex, each in their own, and that in many ways might have a lot of affinity with the left, if we could only cross that bridge.
– the title Strangers in Their Own Land.
I decided on that title because, in the end, it described how a lot of them felt. I talk about a deep story, because, at the end of the day, I keep asking, “Why do you hate the government, you know, all the things the government does?” And they would say—there were many answers to that, but one was this. It was the deep story. What is a deep story? It’s a story that feels true to you. You take the facts out, you take judgment out. It’s as felt.
You’re on a—waiting in line for something you really want at the end: the American dream. You feel a sense of great deserving. You’ve worked very hard. A lot of these guys were plant workers, pipefitters in the petrochemical—you know, it’s tough work. So you’ve worked really hard. And the line isn’t moving. It’s like a pilgrimage up, up to the top. It’s not moving.
Then you see some people cut in line. Well, who were they? They are affirmative action women who would go for formerly all-men’s jobs, or affirmative action blacks who have been sponsored and now have access to formerly all-white jobs. It’s immigrants. It’s refugees. And from—as felt, the line’s moving back.
Then they see Barack Hussein Obama, who should impartially be monitoring the line, wave to the line cutters. And then you think, “Oh, he’s their president and not mine. And, in fact, he’s a line cutter. How did he get to Harvard? How did he get to Columbia? Where did he get the money? His mom was a single mom. Wait a minute.”
And then they begin to feel like strangers in their own land. They feel like the government has become a giant marginalization machine. It’s not theirs. In fact, it’s putting them back. And then someone in front of the line turns around and says, “Oh, you redneck,” you know. And that feels insult to injury. It’s just the tipping point at which they feel not only estranged—I mean, demographically they’re getting smaller. They feel like they’re religious in an increasingly secular culture. Their attitudes are denigrated, and so they’re culturally denigrated. And then the economy begins to shake. And then they feel, “I need another leader.”
There was a man, born actually on a plantation, son of a plumber, a fifth of seven, and he spent most of his adulthood working for the oil industry. Big tea party guy, doesn’t like government. It should be down to 5 percent of what it is, in his view. He loved fishing, loved hunting. He loved nature. And he lived in a place called Bayou Corne.
And what happened was there was a company, Texas Brine, that drilled a hole into the bottom of the bayou and disrupted an underlying salt dome. So, it was like pulling the plug on the bayou. The water went down, down, down, down. Hundred-year-old cypress trees went falling down and were sucked in. And then this methane gas-infused mud came up, started as a small, you know, house lot-sized thing. It’s now 37 acres of toxic mud.
This man, who told me, you know, government got in the way of community, he loved community. And now Texas Brine, this company, unregulated, insufficiently regulated, had caused the loss of his community and his tea party. So I ask him, “Gosh, you know, don’t you—don’t you want a good regulation? And why are you voting for Donald Trump, whose one clear plan is to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency? I don’t get it.” And he said this about the government being a giant marginalization machine, but he said one thing else that I think we—
I kept asking him, “What about Texas Brine? Aren’t you mad at them?” And he said, “Yes, I’m mad at them, but I’m more mad at the state.” And there’s a reason for that, that I didn’t know and discovered.
What’s really happening in Louisiana, which I think may exaggerate what’s happening in a lot of states, is that the oil companies really dominate the state. The state is a servant to oil and petrochemical industry. And the state is saying, “Oh, please come and settle here in Louisiana, not Texas. We will give you $1.5 billion in ‘incentive’ pay, ‘incentive’ benefits.” With that money, these companies make a donation to the Audubon Society and to a bird sanctuary, and so people think, “Oh, the company is so generous. And look what good things the company is doing, plus it’s offering us jobs,” although not too many jobs. These are highly automated plants that import a lot of skilled labor. And so, the company looks good.
Meanwhile, the state is doing the bidding of the companies. It is not a regulated state, but there are regulators who are not doing their job. So, in a way, the state had become like the complaint clerk for the companies. It was doing the dirty work for the companies. It was saying, “Well, we’re—you know, you deserve to be regulated,” but it doesn’t do it. So, the Mike Schaffs of Louisiana were saying, “Why am I paying taxes to a state that’s not doing its job?”
And so, a social logic links together with a personal one, because you’ve got people that, two decades, they haven’t had a raise, their wife is working, they’re working overtime, owe money to the bank. And they’re thinking, “How can I get that American dream, when I’m stalled? Let me get some tax money, since they’re not doing the job any”—that’s a second—it’s another reason he was down on the state.
But what was the attitude toward race of the people that I came to know? Complex. They didn’t think they were racist. They were afraid I would, and avoided the topic, actually. So I had to wait ’til it emerged. And then I discovered that they thought of racism as instances where you hate blacks or where you use the N-word. And they didn’t hate blacks, and they didn’t use the N-word, and so they didn’t feel like racists. They didn’t look at, you know, could you get an apartment in Trump Towers or, you know, government benefits after World War II, that kind of thing. So, complex story. And they shouldn’t be given up on.
People actually feel vulnerable. It’s a—that’s a paradox within a paradox. I think they relate to his dominance, you know, his—and even in the presidential debate, he began edging out, interrupting, taking more space. He actually said more words, I believe, in that debate than Hillary did. Interrupted Hillary Clinton like 29 times.
would he be seen as unmannerly and boorish, or, you know, a guy who takes charge, a guy who dominates? I think, actually, people relate to that dominance, that that’s a plus for them. And yet, you know, when he’s—he does—you could do a choreography of shame, who—he just shames people. He shames the reporter who had a disability. He shames Alicia with her eating disorder. He shames women. He shames, tacitly, blacks and immigrants, even, you know, the children of immigrants—everybody except white, blue-color men. And you can sort of do a little shame picture. And in a way, he’s trying to reverse, I think, what they feel has happened to them, that they feel like a new minority group that doesn’t dare say, “Hey, we’re a minority group, and we’re getting stepped on, and we deserve attention.” They don’t dare say it because of the bravado, sort of what I call a deep story self. But they feel that vulnerability, and he seems to be pushing back and making everybody else vulnerable but them. I think that’s the tacit appeal here.
– conservative, raise doubts about Donald Trump.
It’s like nearly all of them came to him reluctantly. They didn’t say, “Oh, yeah, that’s our guy.” One very wonderful couple, that I’ve actually dedicated the book to, suffered greatly from environmental pollution. They said, “When he imitated the disabled man, you know, no, that’s an immoral thing. He couldn’t be a good person.” Another said, “Woah, he’s going to create an enormous state, great big debt. How are you going to catch every undocumented worker without setting up a giant surveillance state that’s going to cost an arm and a leg? We’re tea party forgetting.” So they had that objection. So, it’s that they didn’t feel spoken to by the Democratic Party. The party of the working man turns out to have pushed away the working people that it, you know, was supposed to attract.
In a way, the plantation system set up a tiny elite, a great big traumatized bottom of slaves, planters’ slaves, and really not much in the middle. So, that was kind of the normal thing. And there was no public sphere, you know, of government services for everybody. That didn’t exist. And if you look at the history of poor whites in the plantation system, they were shoved aside. The best land was taken by the plantation owners. So the poor whites ended up in the swamps and hinterlands, and even the forest took game away from their dinner table, and their labor wasn’t needed, because the planters had slaves. So, they were marginalized, and yet the planters appealed to the poor whites and tried to forge an alliance—you know, we whites together.
And, in essence, the oil companies and the petrochemical companies, historians have said, are the new plantation. And again, it seems like you don’t need a middle class, you don’t need a public sector that is available to everyone. And so, I think, actually, many people, in the back of their mind, think of the federal government as the North, wagging its moral finger, telling us what to do. And they have this model of the plantation, so that where is good government in that model?
And then come the ’60s, as you say, where all these other groups come up to fill the middle class, and they seem like they’re getting ahead. I many times heard, “Oh, all the poor mes”—you know, black poor mes, women poor mes, immigrant poor mes, you know? And we’re tough. We’re stoical. We haven’t said, “Poor me.” But they find themselves in a contradiction now. They’re facing contradiction because, in their heart of hearts, they feel like poor mes, and yet they feel too proud to say it.
The way Trump disavowed Duke says everything. He said, “I disavow, OK?” That’s how he said it, as if “I’m being forced to,” wink-wink, to people that understand that the liberals have pressed him to this position. I thought that was actually, from his point of view, very canny kind of winking. So, how—I think this is his covert way of appealing to people who are blaming blacks for their problems. But these conservative people say, “Well, he’s racist.”
The former Klan leader, they disavow. And that was their saying to me: “Look, I’m—I don’t hate blacks. I don’t use the N-word. I’m not a racist. And we don’t need David Duke. No.” So, Hillary is wrong to say “deplorable” for half of Trump’s—she’s given up on them. I haven’t. I think what I’m looking at is all of the crossover issues that are possible. And one of them actually is, paradoxically, I think, coming to terms with the race issue.
So, for example, I just gave a reading in New Orleans, and this guy, Mike Schaff, who I interviewed and profiled in the book, was in the audience. And I’m reading about him to him—wasn’t a great talk, but I—because I—and he’s listening and is moved, actually, by that reading. Later, a professor of African-American studies asked me, “Well, how does race play into this?” And I begin a kind of—to go into that, answer that question. Later, Mike comes up with this woman, whose name is Nikki, begin talking and agree to meet to continue the conversation. And we need more of that. I think it can happen. And people feel insulted to be called racist, but they don’t understand racism in a structural way.
– in Monday night’s debate, was when Trump referred to President Obama at one point as “your president.” If any president has tried to be a president for the entire people, I’d say you’d have to say it’s President Obama.
folks in Louisiana, did they feel that way, that this was—this was a president of someone else, not of them?
That’s part of the deep story. It’s how it felt to them. “He’s sponsoring people unlike me. He’s pushing me back in line. He’s not waving to me. He’s not saying, ‘Oh, you, too.'” And so, they did feel—that’s how they’ve came to feel stangers in their own land. And I felt as you do: “But isn’t he trying to reach across? If anybody has, he has.” But they didn’t experience it that way.
We see the anger, but we don’t see the mourning. I think these people are in mourning for a lost way of life, for a lost identity. This man has lost his community, his home, so even the air isn’t his. It belongs to the petrochemical plants. And the water isn’t.
And who he doesn’t blame. Although when I put it to him that the companies were taking tax money and giving gifts so as to cultivate gratitude, and that—forcing the state to be the bad guy, and that’s why he hated the state, he nodded his head yes. So not only are there crossover issues, there’s crossover thinking. If you—if you have two beers and you go fishing for a while, it’s not that you agree on everything. And this book isn’t saying that we can, but it’s saying we can find common ground on certain issues and start there, and that a lot of people who think liberals are the enemy, and are insulting them and calling them reprehensible, are actually agreeing on a lot of things. A lot of people I talked to love Bernie Sanders. They said, “Oh, Uncle Bernie. Oh, well, he’s pie-in-the-sky socialist, but good ol’ Uncle Bernie.” It’s Hillary they couldn’t—didn’t feel represented by. So, there are possibilities—that’s what I’m saying—long-term possibilities, that I think the shoe is on our foot to reach across.
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Arlie Russell Hochschild
author of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. The book has been long-listed for the 2016 National Book Award. She is a professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.
— source democracynow.org