Sociologist and professor emerita at UC Berkeley, Arlie Russell Hochschild, talks about her new book Strangers in Their Own Land- Anger and Mourning on the American Right with MTTM host Lisa Kiefer.
TRANSCRIPT
Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:00] Method to the madness is next. You're listening to Method to the Madness. A weekly public affairs show on KALX celebrating Bay Area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer. And today, I'm interviewing award winning author and sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, professor emerita here at UC Berkeley. One of the most innovative and productive feminist sociologists for the last 30 years. Her latest book, Strangers in their Own Land-- Anger and Mourning on the American Right was nominated for National Book in 2016. Welcome to the program.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:00:39] Thank you.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:00:40] You're known or you're called the founder of the Sociology of Emotion. You draw links between private troubles and social and political issues. Since Thomas Frank wrote the book What's the Matter with Kansas, a lot of people have been examining all this, but nobody's looked at it in an emotional way like you have.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:00:57] I had a feeling that underneath all the words that people say about policies and candidates was feeling grounded in their deep experience. I came to wonder it's it's really about feelings. And the only way, best way to get at those feelings is to figure out what I came to call the deep story a story that feels true to you and you take the facts out of it. You take the moral judgments out of it. It's what feels true and that determines where you feel resentful, how you feel envious, how you feel fearful, anxious. It all emanates from that deep story and I think left, right and center, we've all got a deep story.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:01:41] You explore this deep story through what you call a paradox in the bayou country of Louisiana.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:01:48] Yes. In 2011, I already had a feeling that we were in a period of deep political divide and the sides were getting further and further apart. There was kind of a hardening of sides. And it wasn't because the left was getting more left. It was because the right was getting more right. And I also experienced myself as in an enclave here at Berkeley, California, where I have long taught sociology. And I felt in a geographic enclave, a technological enclave and in a media enclave. And I figured I'd have to get out of that enclave and go as far as I could to a place that was as far right as Berkeley, California, is left.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:02:33] What did you use to figure that out?
Arlie Hochschild: [00:02:35] I looked at the 2012 results. Reelection of Barack Obama and the proportion of whites voting for that re-election in California was about half. And in the south as a whole region, it was a third. And in Louisiana, it was 14 percent of whites voted in 2012 for Barack Obama. OK, perfect. Louisiana is the super south. That's where I want to go. And who do I want to talk to there? I want to talk to people who are white, older, religious, evangelical, if possible. But mainly I'm looking for people who are enthusiastic believers in the Tea Party 2011. That's who I was talking to. I interviewed over five year period 60 people, 40 of whom were very enthusiastic Tea Party people who eventually, virtually all voted for Donald Trump. I didn't know that going in. He wasn't on the scene. But at the very end of my research in March of 2016, he came for a primary rally in New Orleans. And I had an epiphany. I realized that over five years I'd been really getting to know some quite wonderful, complex people who were deeply troubled, anxious, afraid, felt scorned, and that I'd been studying the dry kindling. And that at that primary rally when Donald Trump got up there and pumping the sky.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:04:07] about making America great again?
Arlie Hochschild: [00:04:09] I had met the match, the kindling, kindling.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:04:13] That's a great analogy.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:04:14] I talked to a Pentecostal gospel singer at lunch one day at the Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana. She said, I love Rush Limbaugh. She saw Rush Limbaugh as defending her against epithets that she felt were coming from the liberal coasts, that she was ill educated, that she was backward, that she was racist, that she was sexist, that she was homophobic and even a little fat and feeling put down. And that was a feeling I heard a lot-- of defensiveness. Oh, you think we're rednecks? You don't think we're as smart as you are? Well, we are. And they are.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:04:57] There was a story about the sinkhole. I think his name is Mike Schaff.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:05:00] That's right. I met Mike Schaff, at an environmental rally in Baton Rouge. And he got up to speak about what he called the Bayou Corn Sinkhole. He was weeping as he spoke of this. He was holding shoulders of a woman, also a victim of this sinkhole. He said she hasn't been in her house and 364 days. And and he was pointing to her distress. But it was he who was weeping. And I thought I should talk to this man. And I discovered that he was an ardent member of the Louisiana Tea Party. And later, he became an enthusiastic advocate for Donald Trump. And I asked, could I really see where you were born? Can we visit your old school, where are your parents buried. Where did you go to church? Can I get to know your experience and your childhood? And he opened his life to me. My research began in his red truck, going through some sugar cane fields where he's showing me what he called an old shotgun house where he and his six siblings had grown up. The children of a plumber and a homemaker, Cajuns, Catholic, a very rural life. His father had been the plumber for people on the plantation and off. So he was born in the old south. But he grew up working in the new south. The new plantation system. That would be oil.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:06:34] The petrochemical plantation.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:06:35] That's right. I began to understand why he would look at the world the way he did. I visited him many times. We've gone out fishing and he offered me a window into an answer to the red state paradox. How could it be that it's the poorest states, the states with the worst education, the worst health care, the most pollution and the most disrupted families? And those states which receive more financial help from the federal government than they give it in tax dollars were also those states that were suspicious of or reviled the federal government. I found out that Louisiana was an exaggerated version of that paradox because depending on the year, you can pick out a year in which was THE poorest state. And so 44 percent of the state budget came from the federal government. So it was an exaggerated version. And I found that the issue of the environment kind of exaggerated the exaggeration. And this guy, Mike Schaff seemed like the key to me, if I could really understand him, how he had suffered from an environmental disaster and yet could vote for Donald Trump, who wants to abolish the EPA. He lived on a very beautiful bayou, a modest home that overlooked a canal that led into a beautiful swamp area. He knew all his neighbors. They were his community. And he once told me, well, we need to get government down to size, you know, and have people help their neighbors and friends because the government is doing that for us. It's diminishing community. But actually, I was to discover that what really diminished his community was a terrible drilling accident that could have been prevented with stricter environmental regulation. First there were earthquakes. This was an area that there had never been earthquakes before. And then people began to notice bubbles in the lawn, water. It was raining, looked like Alka Seltzer tablets, and that was methane gas. People were evacuated because it was dangerous. If you lit a match, it could be an explosion. And it turned out to be the fault of a company called Texas Brine that drills down into the floor of the bayou to extract concentrated salt from an under lying salt dome. And that is used in fracking and in other industrial purposes. They knew there was a problem and they drilled anyway. And the state of Louisiana let them do that. So the whole place was evacuated. He wanted to stay on. He got a gas meter, put it in his garage.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:09:27] It's a great story. It's unbelievable.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:09:31] It is! It could've blown up. He said, well, I'm just looking after my neighbors property. And then he said, actually, I don't want to leave. It was an abandoned community. So he lost his home. He lost his community not to presence of government, but to the absence of government. And he was fully cognizant of this, very intelligent, very mannerly, kind person. I began to wonder and ask him very gently, why wouldn't the government help you? Why wouldn't you want Texas Brine to be more regulated? I think you have to peel away three kinds of answers and one is layered upon another. The first was he saw federal government as an instrument of the north, there's some history to it that the South has felt conquered by the North first and then in reconstruction, carpetbaggers came down and then civil rights workers came down. Then he wondered whether some outsider environmentalists were coming down, wagging their moral fingers. And the second is that Louisiana state government was actually doing the moral dirty work for the oil companies. Louisiana was a petro-state very heavily controlled by oil and petrochemical industry, which subsidizes the election campaigns of politicians. And some of the politicians are themselves oil owners and do the bidding. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act are national laws, but they're each implemented by state governments. This state government is in the hands of oil. And so what it presents to citizens like Mike Schaff is a promise to protect. There's a language of protection, but not delivery of that protection. So they're disappointed.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:11:22] Disappointed in the state instead of the oil companies.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:11:25] That's right. But we're trying to understand the perspective of Mike Schaff and the many others. The government was an instrument of the north, instrument of oil. It wasn't doing its job when people looked at companies and they looked at the government there. They saw the companies were offering jobs. At least that was the rhetoric I was to discover these are highly automated companies.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:11:54] And more to come.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:11:55] And more to come. They were actually importing Filipino pipefitters. So there were very few permanent jobs, very few. Only 15 percent of the entire Louisiana workforce. And they're also handing out favors. Governor Jindal gave one point six billion dollars to these petrochemical companies as incentive money. They took it from the public coffers to his incentive money. Please come to Louisiana. Don't don't go to Texas or anywhere else. And that incentive money, of course, gave a lot of money to the companies to give out. So there's a donation to the Audubon Society and to a bird sanctuary, football uniforms for the Louisiana State team. So those sort of PR that the company could afford to do. And so people said, oh, well, company kind of generous. And and they looked at the state. I'm paying my taxes for the salary of these officials that are not protecting me. They had allowed this drilling excellent to occur. So the second point was a instrument of oil. And that kind of is the picture of things that goes with that second thing. But I think the biggest of all was that the governments seemed to them an instrument of the line cutters and what I called the deep story. You're standing in line as in a pilgrimage facing the top of the hill where you see the American dream. You've been in that line a long time. Mike Schaff hadn't had a raise in two decades. Your feet are tired. You've worked hard in a tough and dangerous job. Then you see some line cutters, blacks who through affirmative action now have access to jobs that had formerly been reserved for whites. It would be women, who now, through formative action, have access to jobs formerly reserved for men. It would be immigrants, would be refugees. It would even be the endangered brown pelican of Louisiana with its oil soaked wings, because people would say, well, you know, a lot of the liberal environmentalists are putting animals ahead of people. In this deep story, Barack Obama, as they felt it, was waving to the line cutters, supporting them, was sponsoring them, cutting the line waiters out, not representing them. So they felt suddenly strangers in their own land. Wow. I'm here following rules. Worked hard. Can't get there. They didn't look over the brow, the hill of the engine of capitalism at outsourcing, at automation. And so they generalized from that that whatever the government did was now a little suspect. They were white men who were thought of as privileged. And in their heart of hearts, they felt wait a minute, privilege of being white, didn't trickle all the way down. To me, I'm in a tough job. I may not be able to keep it. Families falling apart. And race, the privilege of that also a little questionable. And so for those three reasons, one piled upon another.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:15:07] And nobody's representing.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:15:08] And nobody was representing.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:15:10] And then here comes Trump.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:15:11] That's right .
Lisa Kiefer: [00:15:11] And then Hillary says Trump followers are deplorable.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:15:15] That's right. How could it be that the Democratic Party, the party of the working man and woman, is losing its blue collar, not speaking to it and not making people feel heard or recognized. They have a genuine beef and they didn't see an alternative to Trump.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:15:34] It was more of a vote against rather than for. I think I'm going to hold my nose and vote for Trump that they didn't like him. They want to disrupt.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:15:44] Exactly.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:15:45] You use mourning in the title of your book, and I was curious why you chose that term.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:15:51] Yes. I think it's so much easier for us to see the anger often under that anger masked by that anger is a fear and mourning because their way of life honestly is declining, is going away.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:16:10] And I think they know it, but they don't want handouts. They know that they're on the verge of being in a place where they're going to need them. That's it's a tricky place.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:16:20] It's a very tricky place. In a way, I I want to be their messenger out to say, wait a minute, there are real issues here.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:16:28] And it's not just Louisiana. Next year, half of our country. That's right.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:16:33] And there has to be an alternative to the bad choices that that we've been faced with and an alternative to the one we are stuck with.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:16:41] Now, what are you going to do with the results of this incredible understanding of these people?
Arlie Hochschild: [00:16:47] Yes, I've been giving that a lot of thought. It has made me want to join with someone named Joan Blades, who is a co-founder of MoveOn.org and who has instituted something called living room conversations, getting left and right together to find common ground. I think that's a start.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:17:09] And you did come across three or four things that you found common ground.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:17:13] Yes. Out fishing one day, again with Mike Schaff. He said, you know, we ought to get money out of politics. And I said, you know what? You're Tea Party and you're pro Trump. But you have a lot of friends in Berkeley, California, who agree with you completely about that. Another thing he said was, you know, we ought to reduce prison populations. This is a waste of life and money and we need to get them back to work. You know, give them their dignity. These are nonviolent offense.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:17:43] And you visited a prison there? While, during the study...
Arlie Hochschild: [00:17:46] The large Angola prison, largest maximum security prison in the U.S. and the U.S. is the prison capital of the world. That was another thing that there was common ground on and even the environment. Here's the thing I'm doing next week. I'm going down to visit Mike Schaff in his new home since old home was ruined and he is again living on a bayou. He loves to fish. I'm taking my son because my son is one of the five energy commissioners for the state of California. He's in charge of renewable energy, which he is a passionate believer in. He likes Mike Schaff and Mike likes David. So my thought was to all three of us, go out in a boat, go out fishing. I'll hold the tape recorder and I'll say, OK, you guys, I would like David from Blue State, California, environmentalist. And Mike, grew up on a plantation. Grew up with oil. Tea Party Trump. I'd like the two of you to discuss how could we make sure that there's never another bayou corn sinkhole, common ground or not? Let's just go see. So that kind of thing that through churches, through schools, through labor unions, I think we ought to try.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:19:10] So people to people.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:19:11] People to people underneath this escalating harsh, half true, half not rhetoric at the national level. Let's just see if we can't compare views, notions of truth and do it respectfully.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:19:27] I wanted to ask, speaking of your son going and talking about what he knows and he might enlighten Mike Schaff about things he may not know about. What is the impact of facts to these people after this five years?
Arlie Hochschild: [00:19:41] In a lot of discussions, people said oh a lot of people work for the federal government. It's just bloated. Maybe 30, 40 percent work for the government. I would leave the interview actually not knowing how many people work for the government. So I looked it up. My research assistant and I. And we found that one point nine percent of all workers in the United States work for the federal government, if you add state public employees to that, county employees. If you add the active military a little bit more, but all together, no more than 16 percent of the entire workforce works for the government. So it seemed larger than it was.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:20:28] Right.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:20:28] Again, with the proportion of people who were on welfare, that didn't work. We know most people on welfare do work, in fact. And if you look at a food stamp recipients, half of them work for fast food places at pretty close to minimum wage. And of course, the new secretary of labor runs Carl's Junior and doesn't believe in the minimum wage, but they're on food stamps because they can't earn enough. This is not a living wage. In a sense, this is corporate welfare, because the federal government is chipping in to keep people out of poverty because wages are too low.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:21:06] General Honoré kept talking about the psychology of the jobs that are provided by the oil industry.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:21:12] That's right. The talk, the rhetoric was jobs when it came down to it. There were very few permanent jobs. In fact, Sasol, the largest petrochemical company in Lake Charles, Louisiana. It's developing it's, it's adding to itself and in its material it says two thirds of the new workers being added to Sasol are coming from outside Louisiana. And that's because to run these things, you need chemist with a PhD from M.I.T. that's on the one hand. And you have Filipino pipefitters coming in who are cheaper, actually, and you may have more trained pipefitters or workers from Texas. Only a third of the new jobs are going to anybody that's born and living in Louisiana.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:22:03] That's significant.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:22:04] It's a little bit more like a third world country because there's something also called leakage. If you look at the money that the companies in Louisiana make, the profits aren't going back into Louisiana. One hundred percent of profits would be going back to Louisiana if we're talking about small businesses. They are people who live there. Gas station owner. And it goes back into the state of Louisiana. But these big multinationals, the heads of them, are not living in Louisiana.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:22:37] They're sometimes not even in the United States.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:22:40] Absolutely. Most of them not in the United States. British Petroleum. OK. That's London. I'm talking Sasol. OK. That's Johannesburg. Magnolia. OK. That's in Australia.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:22:53] The reaction when people are faced with the truth of the facts. What has been your experience?
Arlie Hochschild: [00:22:59] Well, I'm not sure I can answer that. I have to go gently back to that. When people responded to the book and I sent them all copies and then invited them to a dinner after the book came out. They mainly checked how I talked about them personally.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:23:17] And how important you feel that is that they understand the facts behind this.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:23:23] Yes. Yes, I know. But I do think that we have to turn the same self inspection on ourselves.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:23:29] Why are no conservative academicians coming in and embedding themselves in the Berkeley enclave and trying to figure out who we are and what we think? It's always the liberal progressives who try to understand everyone.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:23:42] I don't think we have been trying to understand. You know, I was looking around in sociology. How much how many other studies there were? There were some, a few. Very, very good ones, but not that many and not many the other way, I think, where we're both stuck in our enclaves. I suspect there will be some right wing person. And I think that that would be a very good thing. Actually, next week in February, we're hosting a Tea Party Trump family from Louisiana where the mother, very involved in the Tea Party and she voted for Trump, but her 17 year old son is a Bernie fan. And so I said to her, why don't you come over to Berkeley and stay with us from us and we'll show him around the Berkeley campus.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:24:27] You know, it's great with these living room conversations and the people to people kind of thing. But do we really have that kind of time? I worry about the time factor.
[00:24:35] You are right. You are completely right. I don't mean the empathic outreach to the people the Democratic Party has lost because of its disregard of the issues. I think it's one part of a larger program that I would like to see in place. We don't have at this moment something like a loyal opposition that's coherent. Where there's a leadership,.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:25:05] A respectful opposition.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:25:06] A respectful opposition. We're a bunch of very different separate social movements, each with our own cause. We haven't quite cohered I think. We're going to have to learn to do that.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:25:19] Do you think there are other people in these, let's call them red states that feel the same way you do about wanting to get to know what we think better? Is it equal?
Arlie Hochschild: [00:25:29] No, I don't think so.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:25:31] OK.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:25:31] I think they they want recognition of them. I'm not sure how curious they are about us, but they have felt put upon by us. The line cutters have turned around and started to insult the people stuck. In this moment, this political moment, it's no time to sit back and just talk to yourself. I think this is the most important election, certainly in my lifetime, maybe in American history. I think the shoe is on our foot to become activists as much as people were in the 1960s. There needs to be a discussion of the fear that is felt by people who feel like they're at the at the tail end of globalization and that that has been covered over and not addressed. There should be three pillars and facing forward. There's defending the values and the institutions that are already there because they're going to soon be under attack and we should prepare for that. And the other thing is to put forward values that actually aren't on the table. What's the agenda? What what are the core beliefs? Let's let's put those forward. So first to defend that's pillar 1. Second, to assert, that's pillar 2. And third, to reach out to Trump's supporters, not to Trump himself, but to his supporters to see if we can't get common ground or I think.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:27:00] and that's what you're working on.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:27:01] And I think we'll be surprised at how much is possible.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:27:04] Did you ever just feel like the elephant in the room was the lack of good education?
Arlie Hochschild: [00:27:08] Education in respect and civility, education in respecting the people that make the world turn round?
Lisa Kiefer: [00:27:19] True. But I mean, more in terms of critical thinking, like the ability to, you know, enough not to be voting against yourself to understand that the facts like your son going to visit once they understand and someone takes the time to educate, then it's a different story.
Arlie Hochschild: [00:27:37] I think if our colleges and universities became supportive places, it might be easier for people to open up their minds to critical thinking.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:27:50] What do you mean by that support?
Arlie Hochschild: [00:27:52] Well, I think about many of the churches preach that evolution is false doctrine, but those are places that people go to for solace, their community and support. It was the one place they could be dependent and could feel their fear and despair and mourning. And that's the very place where you learned that evolution was not true. And I don't think the solution is simply to get facts out there. I think the solution is to create social support in the projects in universities and colleges where critical thinking goes on. If you understand what I mean, there is an emotional dimension to learning. There is an emotional dimension to politics and everything else. It has to be an atmosphere of respect and support when you are doing this exploration. So that could be a common ground issue. Let's get to know each other, respect each other and do some critical thinking along the way.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:28:50] What is the liberal deep story? We are all arranged around a public square inside of which are institutions, a fiercely proud of, a science museum, and there are libraries and fantastic public schools. There is a nature preserve. All of this is public. People who have made it are proud of it, happy to pay taxes for it. It means we're all able to enjoy this together and that that's what the Statue of Liberty stands for. Then, some marauders come in with a steam shovel and they gouge out big chunks of concrete from this. And they take that concrete out of the public realm and they start building a McMansion just for themselves. They're the 1 percent and we're incensed. But wait a minute, you're taking from the public and you're just giving to this selfish 1 percent. There's indignation. There's bafflement and fury at that.
Lisa Kiefer: [00:29:59] Arlie Russell Hochschild, sociology professor emerita at UC Berkeley. You've been listening to Method to the Madness. You can find all of our podcast on iTunes University. Tune in again next week at the same time.
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