Sympathy and the Tea Party

From "Inside the Sacrifice Zone," by Nathaniel Rich, The New York Review of Books, November 10, 2016.

As the country’s major political parties have become foreign countries to each other—with their own languages, press, moral philosophies, realities—a new kind of political literature has emerged… All of the authors approach their subject with a puzzlement lined with despair. How, they ask, can so many people live in an upside-down reality, denouncing everything the writers consider virtuous, embracing everything they consider immoral? As Frank wrote on the first page of his book, “How could so many people get it so wrong?”

…[In Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Arlie Hochschild asks,] “Is it possible, without changing our beliefs, to know others from the inside, to see reality through their eyes, to understand the links between life, feeling, and politics; that is, to cross the empathy wall? I thought it was.”

…Hochschild chooses southwest Louisiana for her “journey into the heart of the right” because it represents the most graphic version of what she calls the Great Paradox: the very people most damaged by conservative policies are most likely to vote for them.

…[For example,] southwestern Louisiana combines some of the nation’s most fervently antiregulatory voters with its most toxic environmental conditions. It is a center of climate change denial despite the fact that its coast faces the highest rate of sea-level rise on the planet.

Hochschild discovers a walking personification of these ironies in a Cajun oil rig engineer named Mike Schaff. …After seeing his house, neighborhood, and way of life destroyed by corporate greed and state-sanctioned contempt for the natural environment, and many of his neighbors diagnosed with cancer, Schaff was forever changed. … Schaff became an environmental activist.

…But he continued to vote Tea Party down the line. He voted for the very politicians who … opposed environmental regulation of any kind. He voted to “abolish” the EPA, believing that it “was grabbing authority and tax money to take on a fictive mission…lessening the impact of global warming.” The violent destruction of everything he held dear was not enough to change his mind.

… When confronted with the contradictions in their political logic, Hochschild’s subjects fall into “long pauses.” Cognitive dissonance reduces them to childlike inanity. …One woman says, “It’s not in the company’s own interest to have a spill or an accident…. So if there’s a spill, it’s probably the best the company could do.” [Anther] Massey says: “Sure, I want clean air and water, but I trust our system to assure it.” [A third] says: “You have to put up with things the way they are…. Pollution is the sacrifice we make for capitalism,” which is a gentler way of saying that premature death is the sacrifice we make for capitalism. [A fourth person] finds comfort in an anthropomorphic analogy: “Just like people have to go to the bathroom, [petrochemical] plants do too.”

…Hochschild…rejects the argument that billionaires and oil companies, through sophisticated and elaborate public relations campaigns, have bamboozled an entire population into voting against government regulation by exploiting religious and cultural anxieties. …She finds incomplete Jonathan Haidt’s view, in The Righteous Mind (2013), that Tea Party voters are not misled, but instead care more deeply about cultural values than economic principles.

…“I found one thing missing in them all—a full understanding of emotion in politics. What, I wanted to know, did people want to feel, think they should or shouldn’t feel, and what do they feel about a range of issues?”

…How, then, do Tea Party voters feel? …Hochschild … develops for them…a story that provides a unifying emotional logic to a set of beliefs. She calls it the “deep story.”

The deep story that Hochschild creates for the Tea Party is a parable of the white American Dream.

It begins with an image of a long line of people marching across a vast landscape. The Tea Partiers…trudge wearily, but with resolve, up a hill. Ahead, beyond the ridge, lies wealth, success, dignity. Far behind them the line is composed of people of color, women, immigrants, refugees. As pensions are reduced and layoffs absorbed, the line slows, then stalls.

An even greater indignity follows: people begin cutting…in line. Many are those who had long stood behind them—blacks, women, immigrants, even…refugees, all now aided by the federal government. Next an even more astonishing figure jumps ahead of them: a brown pelican, “fluttering its long, oil-drenched wings.” Thanks to environmental protections, it is granted higher social status than, say, an oil rig worker. “It’s just an animal and you’re a human being.”

Meanwhile the Tea Partiers are made to feel less than human. They find themselves reviled for their Christian morality and the “traditional” values they have been taught to honor from birth. Many speak of “sympathy fatigue,” the sense that every demographic group but theirs receives sympathy from liberals. “People think we’re not good people if we don’t feel sorry for blacks and immigrants and…refugees,” one Tea Partier tells Hochschild. “But I am a good person and I don’t feel sorry for them.”

…[Hochschild] concludes that…economic despair is the central motivation behind the Tea Partiers’ rage, while admitting that race, gender, and class biases contribute. But it’s difficult not to consider racial fear the formative aspect of this story, given our national history and the repeated expressions of racial disdain by her subjects, all of whom are white. …Either way, race and the economy have for the far right become inseparable. Who’s to blame for lost jobs and opportunities? African-Americans boosted by affirmative action, immigrant laborers, Mexicans, Indians, Chinese.

…Though they hold the notion of victimhood in the deepest contempt, Hochschild writes, they have been forced to brave “the worst of an industrial system, the fruits of which liberals enjoyed from a distance in their highly regulated and cleaner blue states.” The Tea Partiers…may not have it worse than some other demographic groups in America today, but they have fallen the furthest. Hochschild quotes the economist Phillip Longman’s finding that fifty-somethings today are the first generation of Americans who, “at every stage of adult life…have less income and less net wealth than people their age ten years before.” …

…We come to know Hochschild’s subjects intimately: their thoughts, their prejudices, and most of all their fears, which form the foundation of their worldview. But we never get the sense that they know themselves. On the rare occasions in which Hochschild directly challenges their views, they tend to respond with platitudes taken from Fox News or by changing the subject.

…Endurance is the defining quality [of these Tea Party conservatives], and the most tragic. Their suffering is not merely a personal or demographic crisis but a national tragedy. It threatens to capsize the entire republic….