Tea Party whites, Trumpism and neo-Confederate pseudohistory

In yesterday's post on Arlie Russell Hochschild and her study on Louisiana Tea Party supporters, I mentioned an article of hers that appears in the current (10:1917) Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, Weiß und stolz und abgehängt.Donald Trump und der Südstaaten-Rassismus (behind subscription at this writing).

Part of her point in this article is that Southern Tea Party adherents - it would be redundant to say "white" adherents - focus on the government as the image and main instrument of the groups they see as the enemy: Yankees, coastal elites, Hollywood, black people, professional women, the mainstream media. In part, this is because of the eternal complaint against alleged freeloaders: "Und zudem gab der Staat Leuten Geld, die nicht arbeiteten, und untergrub damit die mit der Arbeit verknüpfte Anerkennung und Ehre." ("On top of it all, the government gave money to people who don't work and thereby undermined the recognition and honor tied up with work.")

The article notes that it is a translation into German from English, so I'm reverse-translating here without having the English original available.

But Tea Partiers do not view the government as a whole as their enemy. On the contrary, they worship the military and the police, worship in the Christian theological sense of idolatry even. The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE agents terrorizing Latino parents picking up their children and school - those actual coercive agents of the state, they ones that are charged with using physical violence on behalf of law-and-order, they are big fans of those!

No, it's the civilian government that raises their hatred. And particularly those aspects of civilian government that they imagine to benefit people less fortunate and/or less white than they are.

Hochschild describes a related aspect of Tea Partiers' admiration for Donald Trump's demagoguery and his rejection of "political correctness":

Daher hörten viele mit freudiger Erleichterung einen Donald Trump reden, der offenbar hemmungslos, omnipotent und wunderbar frei von jeglichen Einschränkungen durch politische Korrektheit war. Er äußerte sich verallgemeinernd über alle Muslime, alle Mexikaner, alle Frauen – unter anderem auch darüber, dass Frauen menstruierten, was er „ekelhaft” fand. (So sagte er über Megyn Kelly, die Nachrichtenmoderatorin von „Fox News“, sie „blute aus was auch immer”). Munter imitierte er einen behinderten Journalisten, indem er seine Arme schüttelte und so eine Zerebralparese nachahmte – in den Augen seiner Gegner alles zutiefst abfällige Äußerungen, die jedoch befreiend auf all jene wirkten, die sich durch die Mitleidsverpflichtung geknebelt fühlten. Trump ermöglichte es ihnen, sich als gute, moralische Amerikaner zu empfinden und zugleich überlegen gegenüber Menschen zu fühlen, die sie für „anders” oder unter ihnen stehend hielten.

[From that viewpoint, many listen to Donald Trump speak with happy relief, he being clearly unrestrained, omnipotent and miraculously free from any limitations from political correctness. He made sweeping declarations sweepingly about all Muslims, all Mexicans, all women - including even about women menstruating, which he finds "disgusting." (So he said about Megyn Kelly, the news moderator for Fox News, that she "had blood coming out of her wherever.") He jauntily imitated a disabled journalist by shaking his arms in order mimic cerebral palsy - in the eyes of his opponents, all the most deeply derogatory expressions, which nevertheless had a liberating effect on all those who felt themselves gagged by the obligation to feel pity. Trump made it possible for them to experience themselves as good, moral Americans and at the same time to feel superior to people that they regarded as "other" or beneath them.]

Or, to put it more succinctly, they got a thrill by identifying with Trump's meanness. This is a typical characteristic of authoritarian followers. Trying to understand this in terms of their "deep story," a Hochschild term that is otherwise useful, complicatres rather than clarifies understanding of how this attitude translates into the politics of Trumpism.

We could say that a normative issue imposes itself here. At what point does explaining this kind of collective joy in meanness cross over from understanding it to justifying it?

And this is not jsut a matter of show business. We see in Trump's callous and irresponsible response to Puerto Rico's hurricane disaster right now that this kind of meanness has ugly, real-world consequences. No matter how "liberating" Trump-adoring white people in Louisiana might feel it is to see Puerto Ricans suffer and die due to the kind of meanness Trump practices as President or how much "happy relief" it may give the Louisiana Tea Partiers.

Not to defend Donald Trump, but I couldn't find a report in which Trump used the word "disgusting" specifically in relation to his own genuinely disgusting comment about Kelly; he did use it about Hillary Clinton going to the bathroom during a break in one of the debates. (See: Kayla Epstein, Trump responds to Megyn Kelly's questions on misogyny – with more misogyny The Guardian 08/06/2015; Jacob Sugarman, Donald Trump’s disgusting new attack on Megyn Kelly: She had “blood coming out of her wherever” Salon 08/08/2015

If the reference above to white conservatives' complaints about welfare loafers seems like a throwback to the 1960s, Hochschild is also aware that the throwback goes even further.

In explaining the historical and sociological background of Southern whites, Hochschild relies heavily on the classic by W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941). Cash's book is a standard work and often quoted. But it was published in 1941. It has historical value. But it doesn't directly address the political of white Republicans in the Deep South in 2017. And even her historical accounts rely on confusingly wide descriptions. It likely wouldn't be clear to readers who weren't history with the history of sharecropping, for example, that this system was a post-Civil war institution, not an antebellum one.

But her historical account in this article recounts the neo-Confederate pseudohistory:

Dann brach der Bürgerkrieg aus, und der Norden schlug den Süden vernichtend. Städte wurden niedergebrannt, Felder verwüstet – teils von konföderierten Truppen auf dem Rückzug. Nach dem Bürgerkrieg ersetzte der Norden die Regierungen der Südstaaten durch eigene, handverlesene Gouverneure. Profitgierige Glücksritter kamen als Agenten des dominierenden Nordens. Ausbeuter aus dem Norden, eine wütende, traumatisierte schwarze Bevölkerung zu Hause und von allen Seiten moralische Verurteilung – das war das Bild, das mir die wütenden Südstaatler zeichneten.

[Then the Civil War broke out, and the North pulverized the South. Cities were burned down, fields wasted - partially by retreating Confederate troops. After the war, the North replaced the governments of the Southern state with its own hand-picked Governors. Profit-seeking adventurers came as agents of the domineering North. Exploiters from the North, an angry, traumatized black population at home and moral judgments from all sides - that was the picture that the furious Southerners drew.]

That's my translation from the German. And this is my supplemental translation out of Neo-Confederate-Speak:

Then the Civil War broke out when Southern slaveowners insisted on seceeding to defend slavery when they rejected the democratic results of the Presidential election of 1860. The North pulverized the South in four years of bloody warfare initiated by the white southern planters to defend their "right" to own other human beings as property. Cities were burned down, fields wasted - partially by retreating Confederate troops. And when the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the Confederate states, mass abandonment of the plantations by black ex-slaves, most of them native Southerners by birth, played a massive part in the "pulverizing" of the traitor Rebel government. After the war, the North replaced the governments of the Southern state with its own hand-picked Governors. (That one is too much of a fiction to even qualify.) Profit-hungry adventurers came as agents of the domineering North, according to the WATB grumbling of many former Confederates, even though massive capital investment from the hated North was desperately needed. Many Northern whites also came to act in such roles as schoolteachers, motivated by a patriotic and Christian desire to create a better future for the South that had been wrecked due to the treason of the slaveholding planter class. Exploiters from the North, as Southern white supremacists were wont to call any of their fellow Americans from the North, an angry, traumatized black population eager to become responsible free citizens, voters and full participants in civil life, and moral judgments from all sides - except from that of white supremacists who still hated democracy and Constitutional government, judgments that came because even Northerners who had previously been indifferent to slavery had been confronted with the true horror and destructiveness of the slave system - that was the picture that the furious white Southerners who rejected the American form of government and the American way of life drew, even though a significant number of Southern whites also supported the new democratic governments established during Reconstruction.

A very similar passage appears in her book Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), although she includes a couple of phrases there to slightly distance herself from the narrative, indicating that she's describing the version her Tea Party subjects gave her.

As a native-born white Mississippian, I'm tempted to say that only a Yankee would swallow that white Southerners actually believe that Lost Cause, neo-Confederate version of history. Yankees in my experience tend to be generous-minded in that way.

But for the most part, for any adult white Southerners that present the view of the Civil War and its aftermath that she describes there, one of three things is going on: (1) they are shooting off their mouths without putting their brains in gear; or, (2) they've made no effort to fact-check even the most superficial aspects of that story, even though the information is readily available; or, (3) they know it's hogwash and they are just repeating it because they see it as the White Man's tribal narrative and they identify with it and doing give a flying flip if it's actually true.

All of this points to a basic problem in trying to understand and explain a political phenomenon like the Tea Party or Trumpism in terms of a "deep story" that is heavily based on long-established ideological constructs. And deeply dishonest ones, at that.

Arlie Russell Hochschild, the "Tea Party" and the problem of empathy

I attended a lecture yesterday at UC-Berkeley by Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of the much-discussed Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016). Her book has been widely reviewed and a number of her articles and interviews derived from it published, including:

• I Spent 5 Years With Some of Trump’s Biggest Fans. Here’s What They Won’t Tell You. Mother Jones Sept-Oct 2016
• Eric Miller, Rising to Heaven in a Secular Rapture: Trump's Golden Promises Religion Dispatches 11/15/2016
• What Drives Trump Supporters?: Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild on Anger & Mourning of the Right Democracy Now! Interview 09/28/2016
• Donald Trump in the Bayou TomDispatch.com 08/28/2016
• Arlie Hochschild explains the deep story behind right-wing sympathies - November 25, 2015 Centeral European University/You Tube 01/26/2016
• Weiß und stolz und abgehängt. Donald Trump und der Südstaaten-Rassismus Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 10:2017 (behind subscription as of this writing)
• From Berkeley to Louisiana: Sociologist Arlie Hochschild Seeks to Understand Conservative America KQED Radio 09/02/2016
• Jessica Zack, Interview with Arlie Russell Hochschild SFGate.com 10/14/2016

In the lecture, she recounted the basics of her project, which as the event announcement summarizes it involved "five years of research in Louisiana’s oil and petrochemical belt where she interviewed Tea Party enthusiasts." This is the area around Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Her findings are interesting and underwhelming at the same time. She did in-depth interviews with self-identified Tea Party supporters in which she deliberately selected as a particularly conservative, pro-Tea Party, pro-Trump area. After five years of research, she determined that a lot of white people there don't like black people very much. And lots of them are dubious about equal rights for women. And those people tend to vote Republican and conservative and love Trump.

These are hardly surprising discoveries.

That's not to say her work and her observations are without value. She's a leading sociologist. She describes her conclusions in terms of a "red state paradox" and a "Deep Story" around which Tea Party supporters coalesce. The red state paradox has to do with the fact that many areas like Louisiana compared to other US states are poorer, with lower life expectancy, with lower quality schools and hospitals, have more serious pollution problems, and receive more funds from the federal government than they contribute. And yet they also tend to vote for Republicans who favor cutting back the income support and most other federal programs on which they are so dependent, oppose national health insurance programs and want to let polluting industries left free to poison the air and water in the name of "freedom."

Hochschild describes thge Deep Story that she formulated to describe the Tea Party view of the world this way in the Mother Jones article linked above (italics in original):

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.

The problem I see with her approach is that she is addressing a political question - why do poor and middle-income whites vote for politicians who favor policies that can rationally be described as further disadvantaging them - by developing a description of the ideological way the most hardcore white conservatives formulate their worldview. Her Deep Story is a narrative. And narratives are extremely important in politics as in other areas of life. But whether those narrative are true in an empirical sense also matters. And as politicians since forever have been aware, there are overt aspects to political appeals and their are symbolic appeals that speak to emotional attachments that may not be overt in the dominant narrative.

In her lecture yesterday, she stressed the importance of what she calls climbing the barrier wall. And she specifically addressed how people on the left and center-left of the political spectrum can learn to have empathy for people like her Louisiana subjects. Or, to put it another way, for white people for whom racial hatreds and repressive notions of "traditional values" are more urgent political priorities than than their own physical and economic well-being.

She talked about three pillars of what she sees as valuable approaches to developing such empathy in the current context. One is talk about values with broad appeal, like the importance of the President operating within the laws. Another is to advocate for the kind of programs that the left to advocate and explain the kind of programs and priorities they favor. Both of those, she noted, don't require any direct engagement with Tea Party types. Her third pillar was to think through the kind of engagement with the right with whom people want to have a dialogue.

In her advice to those broadly on the left for climbing the empathy barrier wall, in yesterday's lecture and in other contexts, she gives special emphasis to those on the left/center-left making an effort to empathize with Tea Partiers. But, as in other aspects, her descriptions of groups is other frustratingly fuzzy. If the context is politics, then empathy becomes a matter of perceiving what kind of issues and what sort of political framing will appeal the Other Sides votes. Which puts us in the special territory of another UC-Berkeley prof, George Lakoff.

In her lecture, she elaborated on the ways to think about direct engagement. She suggested that attempts direct engagement or empathetic dialogue are probably not very promising. But she talked about how people on the left might be interested in such a dialogue with former Obama voters who switched to Trump in 2016. Or to people who voted for Trump who also expressed some sympathy or admiration for Bernie Sanders.

But those groups are not typical of the kind of people who identify with the Tea Party outlook, and those are the people on whom her Louisiana study centered. Also, I'm dubious about how firm the data are in those polls that show significant numbers of Trump 2016 voters would have voted for Bernie Sanders. I'm sure they were some of them. But those would also tend to be people who didn't feel particularly identified with the Tea Party.

Also, after decades of "bipartisan" Democrats in Congress trying to make nice with Republicans who had no intention of compromising with them - think Merrick Garland - is good reason to wonder to what extent sympathetic empathy on the part of the left to hardcore Tea Partiers can have any significant political effect. After all, with every national disaster Donald Trump illustrates that his own capacity for normal human empathy is severely lacking. So it's more than doubtful that genuine empathy for white workers in poor states played any significant role in his appeal. Empathy can be feigned, of course. But this strikes me as another case where "authenticity" or "sincerity" tend to be highly overrated in politics.

On the level of sociological analysis, I also think its problematic to take the overt narratives provided by people at face value, even in the sense of assuming they truly believe them or emotionally identify with them, without some meaningful fact-checking. In her Tea Party "Deep Story," for instance, is there some kind of objective evidence that black people or women are getting some kind of artificial or unfair advantage over white men in hiring in the area she studied? Facts do matter.

And there is the fact that in America generally, and in the Deep South in particular, that white people define themselves collectively in significant part by ideological images of minorities, and of black people especially. I don't see that Hochschild gave that fact the weight in needed in analyzing the self-descriptions of her white Louisiana subjects.

In her lecture yesterday, Hochschild mentioned a couple of critics on the left, Katha Pollitt and Frank Rich, saying of both that their criticism was respectful, though she disagrees with them.

Pollitt asks these questions critical of Hochschild's approach in Lack of Empathy Is Not the Problem The Nation 06/09/2017:

But here’s my question: Who is telling the Tea Partiers and Trump voters to empathize with the rest of us? Why is it all one way? Hochschild’s subjects have plenty of demeaning preconceptions about liberals and blue-staters—that distant land of hippies, feminazis, and freeloaders of all kinds. Nor do they seem to have much interest in climbing the empathy wall, given that they voted for a racist misogynist who wants to throw 11 million people out of the country and ban people from our shores on the basis of religion (as he keeps admitting on Twitter, even as his administration argues in court that Islam has nothing to do with it). Furthermore, they are the ones who won, despite having almost 3 million fewer votes. Thanks to the founding fathers, red-staters have outsize power in both the Senate and the Electoral College, and with great power comes great responsibility. So shouldn’t they be trying to figure out the strange polyglot population they now dominate from their strongholds in the South and Midwest? What about their stereotypes? How respectful or empathetic is the belief of millions of Trump voters, as established in polls and surveys, that women are more privileged than men, that increasing racial diversity in America is bad for the country, that the travel ban is necessary for national security?

Frank Rich (No Sympathy for the Hillbilly New York 03/19/2017) warns against the empathy-for-the-white-Tea-Partiers approach as a political strategy for the Democrats:

But it’s one thing for the Democratic Party to drain its own swamp of special interests and another for it to waste time and energy chasing unreachable voters in the base of Trump’s electorate. ...

In a presidential election, a revamped economic program and a new generation of un-Clinton leaders may well win back the genuine swing voters who voted for Trump, whether Democratic defectors in the Rust Belt or upscale suburbanites who just couldn’t abide Hillary. But that’s a small minority of Trump’s electorate. Otherwise, the Trump vote is overwhelmingly synonymous with the Republican Party as a whole.

That makes it all the more a fool’s errand for Democrats to fudge or abandon their own values to cater to the white-identity politics of the hard-core, often self-sabotaging Trump voters who helped drive the country into a ditch on Election Day. They will stick with him even though the numbers say that they will take a bigger financial hit than Clinton voters under the Republican health-care plan. As Trump himself has said, in a rare instance of accuracy, they won’t waver even if he stands in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoots somebody. While you can’t blame our new president for loving “the poorly educated” who gave him that blank check, the rest of us are entitled to abstain. If we are free to loathe Trump, we are free to loathe his most loyal voters, who have put the rest of us at risk.

Obviously, politicians are going to be careful about who they claim to loathe.

But that's part of the problem of trying to address the "red state paradox" in terms of reconciliation between the left/center-left, on the one hand, and the hard right on the other. Politics is about fighting out differences, not erasing them. Yes, that requires compromise. But compromise isn't a principle in itself. The notion that we should all get beyond substantive differences in politics is one of the stranger ideas identified with end-of-history neoliberalism.