Arlie Hochschild - How the ‘Great Paradox’ of American politics holds the secret to Trump’s success
In the heartland of the American right,
people harmed by polluting industries have instead come to hate the government
whose environmental regulations protect them. Now they’re voting for Donald
Trump
A deep story is a story that feels as if it
were true. It removes judgment. It removes fact. It tells us how things feel. Such
a story permits those on both sides of the political spectrum to stand back and
explore the subjective prism through which the party on the other side sees the
world. And I do not believe that we understand anyone’s politics, right or
left, without it. For we all have a deep story.
... As a result of the
things he suffered, saw, and was ordered to do as a pipefitter in the
petrochemical plant, Sherman became an ardent environmentalist. Calcasieu
Parish, in which he worked for 15 years at PPG, is among the 2% of American
counties with the highest toxic emissions per capita. According to the American
Cancer Society, Louisiana has the second-highest
incidence of cancer for men and the fifth-highest male death rate from
cancer in the nation.
But Sherman has
recently volunteered to post lawn signs for the Tea Party congressman John Fleming, who favours
cutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), weakening the Clean Air
Act, and oil drilling on the outer continental shelf of the US, as well as opposing
the regulation of greenhouse gases and backing less regulation of Wall Street.
Sherman is a regular at meetings of the DeRidder Tea
Party, wearing his red, white and blue party T-shirt, which features an
eagle sharpening its talons. So why was Sherman the environmentalist eager to
plant lawn signs for a politician calling for cuts in the EPA? If I could answer this
question, maybe I could unlock the door to what I came to call the Great
Paradox.
I had begun my
five-year journey to the
heart of the American right carrying with me, as if it were a backpack, a great
paradox. Back in 2004, there was a paradox underlying the right–left split.
Since then the split has become a gulf.
Across the country,
conservative “red states” are poorer and have more teenage mothers, more
divorce, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more
low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrolment. On average, people in red
states die five years earlier than people in liberal “blue states”. Indeed, the
gap in life expectancy between Louisiana (75.7) and Connecticut (80.8) is the
same as that between Nicaragua and the United States. Red states suffer more in
another important but little-known way, one that speaks to the very biological
self-interest in health and life: industrial pollution.
The right now calls
for cuts in entire segments of the federal government – the
Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, and Interior, for example. In
January 2015, 58 Republicans in the House of Representatives voted
to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, which is responsible for the
collection of taxes. Some Republican congressional candidates call for
abolishing all state schools. In March 2015, the Republican-dominated Senate
voted 51 to 49 in support of an amendment to a budget resolution to sell or
give away all non-military federal lands other than national monuments and
national parks. This would include forests, wildlife refuges, and wilderness
areas. Joined by 95 Republican congressmen, Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, one of the most polluted
states in the union, has called for the end of the EPA.
The Tea Party’s turn
away from government may signal a broader trend. During the depression of the
1930s, Americans turned to the federal government for aid in their economic
recovery. But in response to the great recession of 2008, the majority turned
away from it. As the political divide widens and opinions harden, the stakes
have grown vastly higher. Neither ordinary citizens nor leaders are talking
much “across the aisle”, damaging the surprisingly delicate process of
governance itself. The United States has been divided before, of course.
During
the civil war, a difference in belief led to some 750,000 deaths. During the
stormy 1960s, too, clashes arose over the war in Vietnam, civil rights, and
women’s rights. But in the end, a healthy democracy depends on a collective
capacity to hash things out. And to get there, we need to figure out what’s
going on – especially on the rapidly shifting and ever-stronger right.
Lee Sherman’s work at
PPG was a source of personal pride, but he clearly did not feel particularly
loyal to the company. Still, he did as he was told. And one day in the late
1960s, after his acid bath, he was told to take on another ominous job. It
was to be done twice a day, usually after dusk, and always in secret. In order
to do this job, Sherman had to wield an 8ft-long “tar buggy”, propelled
forwards on four wheels. Loaded on this buggy was an enormous steel tank that
held “heavy bottoms” – the highly viscous tar residue of chlorinated
hydrocarbon that had sunk to the bottom of kitchen-sized steel vessels. A layer
of asbestos surrounded the tank, to retain heat generated by a heater beneath
the buggy. Copper coils were wound around its base. The hotter the tar, the
less likely it was to solidify before it was dumped.
Working overtime in
the evenings, under cover of dark, his respirator on, Sherman would tow the tar
buggy down a path that led towards the Calcasieu Ship Channel in one direction
and towards Bayou d’Inde in another… read more:
