Capitalism, Media, and Class Conflict Theme Analysis

Many Louisianans feel left behind by a federal government that has increasingly recognized the pleas of historically marginalized groups. Hochschild argues that, although Louisianans correctly recognize that their economic opportunities are dwindling, their downward mobility is the result of broader trends in global capitalism, rather than direct competition with affirmative action beneficiaries in the labor market. One important reason Louisianans resent minorities is that their understanding of these groups is based largely on media misinformation rather than personal experience. By examining how these media stereotypes help consolidate class identities and pit classes against one another, Hochschild shows how wealthy business owners encourage working-class whites to identify with the rich and protect elite interests, rather than collaborating with other workers to fight the increasing concentration of wealth that 21st century monopoly capitalism has fostered.

Many of the people Hochschild interviews “spoke of their love of capitalism.” Bill Beatifo, for instance, believes that his side project selling medical devices will make him a millionaire, and Janice Areno “felt loyal to capitalism” because it taught her the value of work and allowed her to support herself. But wages for the bottom 90% of American workers have not increased since 1980. For white men without a college degree—including many of the workers Hochschild interviewed—wages have actually declined. And Hochschild argues that this is precisely due to certain features of 21st century globalized capitalism. She cites three crucial mechanisms: offshoring, in which companies move labor-intensive work to other countries where they can pay workers less; automation, which makes many forms of work obsolete; and the rise of multinational corporations, which let business leaders more easily dodge taxes and pressure governments into treating them favorably.

Louisianans blame their lack of opportunity not on these causes, but rather on “line cutters,” which includes groups that have gained political recognition and civil rights since the 1960s, as well as others who benefit from government programs and work in public sector jobs. Whereas Hochschild sees the dominant American class conflict as that between the working class and the capitalist class of corporate executives, Louisianans see “line cutters” taking their jobs. They tend to view racism as an issue of the past rather than a continuing structural problem, so they see minorities who claim to suffer from discrimination as simply playing “victim” to get special protections that they neither need nor deserve. Ironically, Southern whites have developed a collective identity largely through their feeling of exclusion from identity politics—they see themselves as a distinct social class championing fairness and traditional moral values, in part by fighting off lazy minorities who want special treatment. This is why Hochschild sees the conservative, working- to middle-class whites she met in Louisiana as fighting a hidden class war against impoverished minority groups. In reality, as she explains in the Afterword, “the real line cutters” are actually robots, which promise to eliminate many of the manual labor jobs—especially in the oil industry—that Louisianans expect will bring them prosperity.

Hochschild argues that Louisianans’ animosity toward “line cutters” stems from images they receive from the media rather than firsthand knowledge about what minorities have experienced. Media representations of African-Americans, in particular, are prejudicial and split: on the one hand, images of wealthy black celebrities and athletes lead working whites to feel that minorities are taking all the wealth; on the other, stereotypes that paint African-Americans as criminals and welfare recipients who refuse to work make whites feel that undeserving, immoral minorities are taking advantage of the system, or even that the system is designed to be taken advantage of by these groups. Together, these two images lead whites to suspect that their tax dollars are being redirected through welfare to make black Americans rich. In reality, the missing tax dollars are funneled to business owners who get enormous incentives from politicians like Bobby Jindal; indeed, black Americans suffered much more during the financial crisis than whites did, and the majority of welfare recipients’ income actually comes from work. These harmful images largely come from Fox News, which has a veritable monopoly on conservative American news media—nearly all of Hochschild’s interviewees watch it primarily or exclusively, and one even holds Fox anchors as dear as her family. Perhaps unsurprisingly, corporate-owned Fox also consistently defends the interests of business owners. By turning white workers against “line cutters,” it redirects class animosity away from itself and the inflating wealth of corporate executives.

Yet, on some level, Southern whites realize that media traffics in stereotypes: they are dismayed at the way the liberal media portrays them, which leads them to think that the country at large looks down on them as racists and “rednecks” who need to modernize. In other words, their reaction to media images is as influential in their development of a class identity as their belief in Fox News images of the “line cutters.” Ultimately, the combination of such images and white identity politics (defined as the opposition to identity politics) leads Louisianans to protect the very transformations in contemporary capitalism that are eviscerating their access to the American Dream of economic progress.