Strangers in Their Own Land

Hochschild attends campaign event thrown by Republican representative Charles Boustany, who is running against Tea Party favorite Jeff Landry. Hochschild wonders whether the candidates would remember disasters like the pollution in the Bayou d’Inde and notes that political campaigns have “a central place in the cultural life of a people” because they demonstrate “what issues powerful people think are worth hearing about.”

Hochschild feels that she is “backing into the deep story” by noticing what that story excludes. She is clearly not yet “over the empathy wall,” even though the Tea Party members she met surprised her with their warmth and generosity. To these voters, “there was something else” more important than community, church, and (for some) the environment, although Hochschild does not yet say what that “something else” is. Louisiana conservatives seem to want a representative who can represent them in Washington but is not a member of the Washington elite.

Boustany gives a speech emphasizing oil’s economic benefits. Soon thereafter, at a different event, Landry “makes a remarkably similar speech,” suggesting that the oil industry can give Louisianans “better money than most people make anywhere else in this country” and decrying the idea that people should ask the federal government for help. When older constituents ask him about improving their Social Security and Medicare, “Landry has no answers.”

Hochschild is “struck by what both candidates avoid saying.” They fail to mention the state’s widespread poverty and dependence on federal money, then turn around and “both express and promote a culture that has produced the Great Paradox.” Boustany and Landry are campaigning to represent “one of the most polluted counties in the nation,” but neither mentions pollution during the campaign. During their previous terms, both voted against a variety of environmental protections and even supported a measure “to redefine ‘healthy air,’ basing the definition of it on the feasibility and cost to polluting industries, and not on human health.” Even the Democrat in the race is “pro-life, pro-marriage, pro-gun, and pro-oil.”

Hochschild interviews “three dozen retired plant workers” who remember when Louisiana used to consistently vote for Democrats before 1970. They echo Lee Sherman’s concern that the government is “giving away” their tax dollars to a class of “non-working, non-deserving people.” Hochschild suggests that, beyond taxes, their votes are also a matter of honor.

Hochschild meets gubernatorial candidate Russel Honoré, an Army general who led the Hurricane Katrina rescue effort and who is one of the few Louisiana politicians to openly discuss the environment on the campaign trail. Hochschild describes Honoré (who is black Creole but popularly known as the “Ragin’ Cajun”) as an “empathy wall leaper.” When Hochschild asks him why Louisianans do not “ask politicians to clean up their environment,” he responds that he thinks of them as “captives of a psychological program” that touts oil’s potential to create jobs without considering its downsides. To help create awareness about pollution in Louisiana, Honoré started “The Green Army,” an umbrella group for smaller environmentalist organizations.

Hochschild and Honoré travel to the town of Gonzales, which lies within “one of the most polluted industrial strips in the world.” Not only is the area dotted with petrochemical plants, but Honoré tells Hochschild that Louisiana actually imports toxic waste from other states and dumps it here. He takes her to the campus of Southern University and points to “Free Nigger Point” across the Mississippi. It was so called “because if a man could swim across the river to it, he could reach the Underground Railroad and he was free.” Many drowned trying to cross, but now, Honoré says, they would just “get sick and die gradually of pollution.”

Hochschild realizes how easy it is to “forget or ignore the problems with Louisiana’s environment.” But she wonders how Louisiana would respond to a disaster “so spectacular” that people had to look. The massive 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill created exactly this sort of spectacle: it threatened 98% of commercial seafood in the Gulf of Mexico and put 90,000 fishermen out of work. President Obama imposed a moratorium on drilling after the accident, since BP was using unproven technology, and “no one knew for sure why the accident had occurred.”

A Louisiana State University survey found that more coastal residents opposed than favored the drilling moratorium and most did not think differently about global warming or pollution after the spill. Hochschild finds the same attitudes near Lake Charles: many Louisianans believe government regulation is unnecessary because “it’s not in the company’s own interest to have a spill or an accident”—one person even blamed the spill on regulators “looking over BP’s shoulder.” Hochschild wonders whether Louisianans were “expressing loyalty to the oil industry,” or perhaps trying to cope with “strong feelings of anxiety, fear, and anger about what they already knew.” Returning to the Great Paradox, Hochschild notes that in Louisiana “pollution hit better-off people” as much as the poor, but all “seemed braced to tough it out” instead of fighting it with regulations.

Hochschild considers the possibility that Louisianans’ frustration with the drilling moratorium might simply be an extension of their general aversion to government regulation. She looks at the state’s lax alcohol and gun regulations—people can buy alcohol in drive-through stores as long as “the plastic lid is pressed on and the straw is not yet inserted,” it is legal to bring loaded guns into bars and churches, and gun vendors can legally sell to domestic abusers and suspected terrorists without conducting background checks or keeping any records. Louisiana’s gun death rate is the highest in the United States, “nearly double the national average,” and many of the people Hochschild meets keep firearms.

Hochschild contrasts these light regulations on drinking and shooting with the severe restrictions Louisiana places on particular social groups, like women seeking abortions and black men who can be fined for wearing their pants too low. In fact, Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the United States, which has the world’s second-highest incarceration rate, and blacks disproportionately make up its prison population. Despite this selective overregulation, the regulations Hochschild’s conservative acquaintances actually care about involve “what the government was telling them to buy,” like energy-efficient light bulbs, salads, and seatbelts.

Louise, a Louisiana mother who lives near petrochemical plants, told Hochschild how she anxiously watches for signs of another accident. Another man suggested that “they don’t tell us the truth about what’s going on because they don’t want to alarm us,” and Hochschild gives the example of a 2013 explosion at the old PPG plant, after which regulators claimed to detect nothing out of the ordinary.

Hochschild returns to her drive with Honoré. She asked him to answer one of the most common objections she hears from Louisianans: why have the government if companies “want to avoid accidents themselves?” He answers that “regulation works” but the Louisiana state Department of Environmental Quality asks companies to regulate themselves, which clearly does not work.

Reflecting on the meetings she had attended during the campaign, Hochschild notes that Louisianans worry “a great deal about freedom in the sense of freedom to” but have little interest in protecting their “freedom from such things as gun violence, car accidents, or toxic pollution.” She wonders whether the “psychological program” Honoré sees at work is the true explanation for Louisianans’ politics—perhaps people don’t hate the government so much as simply love oil. She declares that, in order to understand Louisiana’s economic reliance on oil, she “had to understand the private sector.”