Strangers in Their Own Land

Given our different deep stories, left and right are focused on different conflicts and the respective ideas of unfairness linked to them. The left looks to the private sector, the 1 percent who are in the over-class, and the 99 percent among whom are an emerging under-class. This is the flashpoint for liberals. The right looks to the public sector as a service desk for a growing class of idle “takers.” Robert Reich has argued that a more essential point of conflict is in yet a third location—between main street capitalism and global capitalism, between competitive and monopoly capitalism. “The major fault line in American politics,” Reich predicts, “will shift from Democrat versus Republican to anti-establishment versus establishment.” The line will divide those who “see the game as rigged and those who don’t.”

Victim” is the last word my Louisiana Tea Party friends would apply to themselves. They didn’t want to be “poor me’s.” As Team Loyalists, Worshippers, and Cowboys, they are proud to endure the difficulties they face. But in the loss of their homes, their drinking water, and even their jobs in non-oil sectors of the economy, there is no other word for it: they are victims. Indeed, Louisianans are sacrificial lambs to the entire American industrial system. Left or right, we all happily use plastic combs, toothbrushes, cell phones, and cars, but we don’t all pay for it with high pollution. As research for this book shows, red states pay for it more—partly through their own votes for easier regulation and partly through their exposure to a social terrain of politics, industry, television channels, and a pulpit that invites them to do so. In one way, people in blue states have their cake and eat it too, while many in red states have neither. Paradoxically, politicians on the right appeal to this sense of victimhood, even when policies such as those of former governor Jindal exacerbate the problem.

Looking back at my previous research, I see that the scene had been set for Trump’s rise, like kindling before a match is lit. Three elements had come together. Since 1980, virtually all those I talked with felt on shaky economic ground, a fact that made them brace at the very idea of “redistribution.” They also felt culturally marginalized: their views about abortion, gay marriage, gender roles, race, guns, and the Confederate flag all were held up to ridicule in the national media as backward. And they felt part of a demographic decline; “there are fewer and fewer white Christians like us,” Madonna had told me. They’d begun to feel like a besieged minority. And to these feelings they added the cultural tendency—described by W.J. Cash in The Mind of the South, though shared in milder form outside the South—to identify “up” the social ladder with the planter, the oil magnate, and to feel detached from those further down the ladder.

The people I came to know had sacrificed a great deal and found honor in sacrifice. It had been hard for Janice Areno’s father to drop out of school to help his dad raise a family of ten. Although nearly everyone I spoke to had two children, three at most and some none at all, a few honored their mothers or grandfathers for having raised very large families. It was a hard thing to do. They took pride in giving to local community—Mike Schaff’s two-beer sandbagging against flood, Janice’s friend’s one-touch pillows for American troops, Jackie Tabor’s work at Abraham’s Tent.

strangers in their own land, Lee, Mike, and Jackie wanted their homeland back, and the pledges of the Tea Party offered them that. It offered them financial freedom from taxes, and emotional freedom from the strictures of liberal philosophy and its rules of feeling. Liberals were asking them to feel compassion for the downtrodden in the back of the line, the “slaves” of society. They didn’t want to; they felt downtrodden themselves and wanted only to look “up” to the elite. What was wrong with aspiring high? That was the bigger virtue, they thought.

If they stood up to declare themselves proud to be male—unless they were part of a men’s group trying to unlearn traditional ways—they risked being seen as male chauvinists. If they called for recognition for their lifetime of experience, their age, they risked seeming like old fools in a culture focused on youth.

How, again, could the white male openly want to cut in line himself when he objected in principle to cutting in line? He was in conflict and responded to it by seeking honor in other ways. First, he would claim pride in work. But work had become less and less secure, and again, wages for the bottom 90 percent remained flat. Word was out that some workers at Toys “R” Us and Disneyland were being asked to train other workers destined to replace them for less pay. And the federal government was giving money to people who did no work, undercutting the honor accorded work itself. (But see Appendix C.)

This was followed by an executive order for government contractors instituting affirmative action for minorities in employment.

Identity politics was born. Identities based on surviving cancer, rape, childhood sexual abuse, addiction to alcohol, drugs, sex work—these and more came to the media’s attention. It became a race “for the crown of thorns,” the critic Todd Gitlin, a former 1960s activist, lamented in his book, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars. On the heels of these movements for social change, a certain culture of victimization had crept in. And where did that leave the older white male? As an ideal, fairness seemed to stop before it got to him.

From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the great sugarcane plantations border both sides of the river all the way . . . standing so close together, for long distances,” Mark Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi, “that the broad river lying between the two rows, becomes a sort of spacious street.” Along the seventy-mile strip, some four hundred graceful mansions, with two- or three-story white Grecian pillars, oak-canopied walkways, manicured gardens and ponds, are the ancient castles of America. They were built with profits from cotton.
The new cotton is oil, but the plantation culture continues. Indeed, a number of the white-pillared mansions of the great plantations have now been bought by oil and petrochemical companies