Friday, September 2, 2016

Meeting Trump's Louisiana Supporters

Arlie Russell Hochschild wanted to understand the other half of America's great divide, so she left Berkeley and spent years among white Tea Party supporters in Louisiana, visiting their homes and talking to them about their problems. This is her summary of their worldview:
What the people I interviewed were drawn to was not necessarily the particulars of these theories. It was the deep story underlying them—an account of life as it feels to them. Some such account underlies all beliefs, right or left, I think. The deep story of the right goes like this:

You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you're being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He's on their side. In fact, isn't he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It's not your government anymore; it's theirs.


I checked this distillation with those I interviewed to see if this version of the deep story rang true. Some altered it a bit ("the line-waiters form a new line") or emphasized a particular point (those in back are paying for the line-cutters). But all of them agreed it was their story. One man said, "I live your analogy." Another said, "You read my mind."
I think that is part of the story, but far from all of it. The sort of  white solidarity politics Trump has perfected is only partly about economics. Another big part is the sense of violence and disorder that pervades America; Trump talks more about immigrants as criminals than about immigrants taking jobs. To his followers the country is in danger of falling into violent chaos, and that can't be our fault so it must be someone else's.

Another part is basic tribalism vis-a-vis the rest of the world. One thing about Trump that confuses mainstream observers is his foreign policy; is he for more foreign wars and interventions or less? Neither, actually. What bugs Trump and his fans about American foreign policy is a sense that we are losing, and what they want is to feel like winners again. His basic position about for example the Islamic State is that they are winning and we need to turn that around; ditto his position on trade with China, which is not based on an economic analysis of trade's effects but a raw sense that they are beating us.

People who praise the strength of old-fashioned communities, such as small white towns in the South, usually ignore the extent to which their strong senses of togetherness are based on violent opposition to outsiders: Indians, Yankees, Nazis, Commies, liberals, uppity blacks. Trump taps into a sense of economic unfairness, yes, but he is also making a more primitive call to rally the home team against threats from the outside.

2 comments:

G. Verloren said...

What strikes me about the "standing in line" viewpoint is that it leaves out crucial details and makes pretty simplistic and wrongheaded assumptions.

First, cutting in line isn't an apt analogy. When you cut in line, you not only move ahead, but you also move other people backwards. Lines have positions which are mutually exclusive - only one person can ever be tenth in line at a time, for example.

But life isn't like a line. We're not ranked in endless numbers of incrementing value. Multiple people can all be in the same spot at once, and people can "move forward" without forcing other people to move backwards.

Second, even if we stick with the flawed line analogy, we have to consider placement. In this line, whites start out placed ahead of minorities. Why is that? If people are upset about perceptions of "cutting in line", why aren't they even more upset about by the obvious degree of "stacking the deck" going on, where certain people are given positions ahead of others for no apparent reason?

There's also the problem of false proximity. In a real line, space is constant and you can't very well see what's happening far behind or far ahead of you. But in the imagination of the reality, space and distance has no meaning. From most any vantage point you can easily "see" a minority who "cuts" forward twenty spaces - but at the same time, the fact that they started out 100 spaces behind you may not be readily apparent.

Why was this individual so far back in the line to begin with? And why is their being "moved forward" (by the government or by their own actions) seen as an upheaval of the "correct" line ordering, rather than a delayed correction of a flawed one?

Many whites will argue that immigrants should go to the back of the line, and that those who have been here longest deserve to be in the front. But what would they say if you pointed out that the majority of Native Americans are just as far back in line as they are, or even further? (Well, probably they'd point out that the government is letting Native Americans "cut" in line through various assistance programs - going right back to that notion that such people are "supposed" to be in the back of the line, despite the fact [or perhaps oblivious to it] that the whites forcibly put them there.)

Overall, the line analogy stinks and has pretty huge logic holes riddled through it. But as has been pointed out time and again, many Americans today care very little for logic or fact, and much more for feelings, no matter how ignorant or misguided.

pithom said...

"In this line, whites start out placed ahead of minorities. Why is that?"

-Genes.

"why aren't they even more upset about by the obvious degree of "stacking the deck" going on, where certain people are given positions ahead of others for no apparent reason?"

-Disdain for Manhattanite Clinton/Kasich voters is common in Louisiana.

"but at the same time, the fact that they started out 100 spaces behind you may not be readily apparent."

-Due to Blacks being, on average, less intelligent than Whites of the same income level, it's primarily children of higher-income Blacks who are the largest beneficiaries of affirmative action. #RedPill

"despite the fact [or perhaps oblivious to it] that the whites forcibly put them there."

-Maybe they did, but after they were allowed citizenship in the 1920s, many didn't dig themselves out of their hole. Bolivia has been independent for quite some time, as has Peru.

"And why is their being "moved forward" (by the government or by their own actions) seen as an upheaval of the "correct" line ordering, rather than a delayed correction of a flawed one?"

-Because it obviously is.

"But as has been pointed out time and again, many Americans today care very little for logic or fact, and much more for feelings, no matter how ignorant or misguided."

-And you are a prime example of this.

Institutional racism has been a persistent argument in explaining poor average Black outcomes in the aftermath of slavery. It was wrong in the 1880s (Chinese), it was wrong in the 1920s (Jews), and it is even more wrong today (Vietnamese).

What do West Virginia, Arkansas, and Louisiana all have in common?

Majorities in all of them went for Clinton 20 years ago and will go for Trump this year. Also, all these went for Trump in the primary.