Deep story, deep resentment

I recently made my way through Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016). In other words, I turned every page but read just here and there, lacking the patience to follow along with Hochschild’s investigator-on-a-journey approach and its predictable narrative markers: “As I take leave of the Arenos,” “as I take my leave,” “we climb back in his red truck,” “we climb into her tan SUV,” and so on. The core of the book may be found between pages 135 and 145, which present the “deep story” that informs the thinking of the Louisiana Tea Partiers whom Hochschild has sought to understand. You can also find the deep story in condensed form in this New York Times review.

Hochschild’s book helped me to understand something I have never understood: why it might be that so many people in my state-university-dependent town seem unfazed by and even gleeful about the effect of Illinois’s manufactured budget crisis on higher education — declining enrollment, hundreds of faculty and staff positions lost, maintenance and repairs left undone. “They need to live within their means,” “they need to work harder instead of protesting”: that’s the sort of stuff that shows up in comments in the local newspaper. It can’t be anti-intellectualism and distrust of academics alone that account for these attitudes: carpenters, clerical workers, electricians, groundskeepers, and janitors have also lost jobs in the absence of state funding.

I found a possible explanation of local attitudes in two of the “common impressions” shared by people Hochschild spoke with. One: ”A lot of people — maybe 40 percent — work for the federal and state government.” Two: “Public sector workers are way overpaid.” As Hochschild points out, these impressions have no foundation in reality. In 2014, she notes, “less than 17 percent of Americans worked for the government,” and that percentage includes all enlisted and reserve military personnel and all employees of federal, state, and local government, including teachers and hospital workers. Hochschild also points out that private-sector workers “earn 12 percent more than their public sector counterparts.”

A deep resentment of “government” and those it employs seems hard at work in my town. But it’s still remarkable to me that any resident of a town that depends upon a public university for its economic well-being would not be troubled to see that university in decline. It’s like cheering as your own house burns.