Thursday, October 12, 2017

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:


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.
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