August 5, 2019--Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning On the American Right

This seems to be the week I am recommending summer books. Not the usual sort for the season which are traditionally page turners. It's August, it's hot, who needs more aggravation. Sorry, but this is my way of having fun. So indulge me just once more and I promise to stop.

If you have been following my blog you know that for more than three years I've been struggling to dispassionately understand the Trump phenomenon (it is that), particularly the people who have been his most fervent supporters. Even when doing so, especially when doing so appears not to be in their own best interest. 

The best roadmap to these paradoxes is Arlie Hochschild's brilliant Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning On the American Right.

Here is an excerpt from the New York Times review--

Hochschild calls this the “Great Paradox”--opposition to federal help from people and places that need it--and sets off across Louisiana on an energetic, open-minded quest to understand it.

A distinguished Berkeley sociologist, Hochschild is a woman of the left, but her mission is empathy, not polemics. She takes seriously the Tea Partiers’ complaints that they have become the “strangers” of the title--triply marginalized by flat or falling wages, rapid demographic change, and liberal culture that mocks their faith and patriotism. Her affection for her characters is palpable.

But the resentments she finds are as toxic as the pollutants in the Louisiana marsh and metastasizing throughout politics. What unites her subjects is the powerful feeling that others are “cutting in line” and that the federal government is supporting people on the dole --“taking money from the workers and giving it to the idle.” Income is flowing up, but the anger points down.

The people who feel this are white. The usurpers they picture are blacks and immigrants. Hochschild takes care not to call anyone racist but concludes that “race is an essential part of this story.” 

When she asks a small-town mayor to describe his politics, his first two issues--or is it one in his mind?--are welfare and race: “I don’t like the government paying unwed mothers to have a lot of kids, and I don’t go for affirmative action.”

In welfare politics, this is déjà vu all over again. It’s been two decades since Bill Clinton signed a tough welfare law aimed in part to end the politics of blame. “Ending welfare as we know it” would recast the needy as workers, he said, and build support for a new safety net. The rolls of the main federal welfare program have fallen by 80 percent from their 1990s highs--in Louisiana, by 95 percent. But reverse class anger is more potent than ever.

Liberals have long wondered why working-class voters support policies that (the liberals think) hurt the working class. Why would victims of pollution side with the polluters?

Theories abound. Thomas Frank in What's the Matter With Kansas? accuses the G.O.P. of luring voters with social issues but delivering tax cuts for the rich. Others point to the political machines built by ultra-wealthy donors like Charles and David Koch. Still others emphasize the influence of conservative media like Fox News.

Hochschild sees these as partial explanations but wants a fuller understanding of “emotion in politics”--she wants to know how Tea Partiers feel, on the theory that the movement serves their “emotional self-interest” by providing “a giddy release” from years of frustration. . . .

Many Tea Party adherents warn that more regulation will cost them jobs. (A small-town mayor says the pungent chemical plant “smells like rice and gravy.”) But Hochschild detects other passions and assembles what she calls the “deep story”--a “feels as if” story, beyond facts or judgment, that presents her subjects’ worldview.

It goes like this:

“You are patiently standing in a long line” for something you call the American dream. You are white, Christian, of modest means, and getting along in years. You are male. There are people of color behind you, and “in principle you wish them well.” But you’ve waited long, worked hard, “and the line is barely moving.”

Then “Look! You see people cutting in line ahead of you!” Who are these interlopers? “Some are black,” others “immigrants, refugees.” They get affirmative action, sympathy and welfare--“checks for the listless and idle.” The government wants you to feel sorry for them.

And who runs the government? “The biracial son of a low-income single mother,” and he’s cheering on the line cutters. “The president and his wife are line cutters themselves.” The liberal media mocks you as racist or homophobic. Everywhere you look, “you feel betrayed.”

Hochschild runs the myth past her Tea Party friends.

“You’ve read my mind,” Lee Sherman said.

“I live your analogy,” Mike Schaff said.

Harold Areno’s niece agrees, and says she has seen people drive their children to Head Start in Lexuses. “If people refuse to work, we should let them starve,” she said.

Actually, anger this raw may depart from the 1990s, when welfare critics often framed their attacks as efforts to help the poor by fighting dependency. The resentments Hochschild presents are unadorned, and they have mutated into a broader suspicion of almost everything the federal government does. “The government has gone rogue, corrupt, malicious and ugly,” one Tea Partier complains. “It can’t help anybody.”

Did welfare really “end”? Conservatives say no. Cash aid plummeted, but food stamp usage soared to new highs and the Medicaid rolls expanded. There’s room for debate, but the grievances Hochschild presents feel immune to policy solutions. As long as larger forces are squeezing whites of modest means, it’s going to “feel as if” people are cutting in line. In Lexuses.

None of Hochschild’s characters appear to have been directly hurt by competition from people of color. Their economic problems lie elsewhere, she argues, in unchecked corporate power and technological transformation. Still there’s no denying that demographic and cultural change have robbed white men of the status they once enjoyed. Hochschild doesn’t buy the racial finger-pointing, but she can see their pain.

July 14, 2106--Searching for Trump Supporters

A friend who is remarkably up-to-date with reading the New Yorker, knowing I am always at least three months behind, sent me a link to the very, very long piece by fiction writer George Saunders, "Who Are All These Trump Supporters?" (Two parts July 11th and 18th.)

The first third touches the familiar bases--the people who attend his rallies are ill-informed (I'm being kind), make up their own facts, are undereducated (kindness again), semi-coherent, bullying, violent, and at least borderline racists and bigots.

So I skimmed through that. Been there, heard that.

The middle third is more nuanced, even empathetic, and thus gets closer to the complicated truth.

It does leave out one significant part of the diagnosis--how Trump followers (and Bernie's as well) feel duped, lied to, and manipulated by both political parties. What's the Matter With Kansas remains the classic statement of that insight.

I hung on until the end of the article though in the final part I began to glaze over--the same reaction I have to Saunders' over-mannered fiction.

But it does include a dense and brilliant quote from Norman Mailer's 1960 Esquire piece about the emergence of John Kennedy at the Democratic national convention--"Superman Comes to the Supermarket." Title aside, Mailer too was a better reporter than novelist.

I leave you with it at the risk of your plaintively asking as I do--where is Norman now that we need him?

American presidential campaigns are not about ideas; they are about the selection of a hero to embody the prevailing national ethos.  Only a hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation; a hero embodies the fantasy and so allows each private mind the liberty to consider its fantasy and find a way to grow. Each mind can become more conscious of its desire and waste little strength in hiding from itself.

I love it as does Saunders who asks--

"What fantasy is Trump giving his supporters the liberty to consider? What secret have they been hiding from themselves?"

This, like so much else, is still to be determined. It may be that our very future depends on the answers to these questions.

Norman Mailer

December 10, 2015--Islamic Eschatology: "The Blessed Invasion"

About 15 years ago, at a Ford Foundation meeting where I was serving as a senior director, because our new president wanted to shift some of the foundation's emphasis to cultural grantmaking that would include funding organizations devoted to religious tolerance and interfaith projects, senior staff gathered to discuss what that meant and how we should proceed.

For me it turned out to be a life-altering experience.

One staff member who attended was a Pakistani-born and raised colleague who, after hearing the rest of us flounder for half a day, struggling with how to think about our new president's challenge, out of exasperation with us, she said--

"The problem is that all of you are liberals and liberals look back to the Enlightenment for guidance on how to think about the world and its problems. You all believe that there are rational solutions to every problem. In fact, you abjure anything that isn't rational or evidence-based. Thus you are uncomfortable with much that has to do with the power of culture, especially belief systems, religions, that are not strictly speaking rational.

"In fact, they are decidedly not rational nor fact-based. None of them are. They are about belief. Derived from that. And thus you do not know how to respond to our new CEO's mandate--that we pay more attention to the power of culture as it shapes peoples' lives, again, especially how religious beliefs affect behavior. Even, perhaps especially behavior that doesn't make sense if viewed through only an Enlightenment lens."

The room grew hushed. None of us, very much including me, knew what to think, how to respond, most important what to do.

And over the next few years of funding cultural institutions and organizations devoted to religious diversity, very little that we supported had much impact.

Retrospectively, we funded groups that were pushing against the mainstream, against orthodoxies mainly in the Middle East, orthodoxies that limited diversity of thought and practice. We supported, for example, groups that were fighting for more gender equality within powerful religious institutions. But to them, not unlike how our government's interventions in the Muslim world are meeting with such fierce resistance, the organizations we funded may have done more unintended harm than good.

From an Enlightenment perspective, which still guided the foundation's work, we thought that all we needed to do was raise social justice issues and religious leaders would quickly see the light (pun intended) and embark upon campaigns of reform.

In fact, history is showing that various forms of Western intervention--from the cultural to governmental to military--most often contribute to the problem.

Out of arrogance, ignoring history, we may have caused harm with the best of intentions.

Thus, from that, for me, fateful meeting and our largely failed grantmaking, I have become convinced that national and ethnic and tribal culture derived from religious beliefs (from the arts to language to gender relations to governance structures) are more powerful than any other social force. Economics very much included.

In fact, people in the Islamic world (and for that matter, the rest of us) are not just longing to have access to Western consumer goods, Hollywood movies, rock and roll or, as too many of us back in the day metaphorically and literally thought, MTV.

Many, perhaps most reject the blandishments of the West--things that objectively-speaking would "improve" their lives--because belief systems and cultural practices teach them otherwise.

Thus, the power of culture and religion. Something my colleagues and I never fully came to understand.

Since that time I have attempted to learn more about belief systems, especially those that are so powerful and influential that they cause people frequently to act in ways that seemingly contribute to their own disadvantage.

Looking at the world and peoples' behavior that way, What's the Matter with Kansas can be extrapolated to most of the rest of the world.

I have been particularly interested in religious orthodoxies, especially those that are guided by an apocalyptic view of the world. That believe the End is near and that it is not too soon to be prepared to welcome it.

We find strong themes of this kind in all three Religions of the Book and those of you who have been following Behind know that this has for years been an ongoing topic for me, even to the point of obsession that runs the likely risk of boring you.

But during these dangerous times, I cannot resist applauding the New York Times, which two days ago, on the front page, ran a story about prophetic Islam and how an awareness of its wide-reaching power is guiding some of out best strategic behavior as we struggle to figure out culturally careful ways to limit and hopefully defeat ISIS.

Specifically, ISIS wants the United Staes to be drawn into a ground war in northern Syria.

ISIS leader Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi called our 2003 intervention in Iraq "the Blessed Invasion." A view based on Muslim prophetic texts that state that Islam will be victorious against the West after an apocalyptic battle that will be ignited once Western armies enter the region.

Jean-Pierre Filin, author of Apocalypse in Islam, says, "This is a very powerful and emotional narrative. It gives . . . [Islamic] fighters the feeling that they are not only part of the elite, they are part of the final battle."

These texts prophesize an apocalyptic battle in the small Syrian towns of Dabiq and al-Amaq. Last year Islamic State militants beheaded American hostage Peter Kassig in Dabiq. The executioner said, "Here we are burying the first American crusader in Dabiq, eagerly awaiting the remainder of your armies to arrive."