Hochschild aptly maps the sense of losing ground, the contour map of resentment. “After
the 2008 crash... some got rich, others got poor. And you didn’t want the government
playing favorites on top of that .”^158 In the past roughly 20 years, the proportion of whites
who felt their standard of living is worse than their parents’ increased from 13% to
21%.^159 During that period, liberal “feeling rules”—norms about how one should feel—
mandated sympathy for the poor, for people of color, for women, for refugees, for
LGBTQ individuals.^160 Caring about working-class whites is optional—a private frolic
some indulge but most don’t share.
Hochschild, with her unerring sense of metaphor, sums it up. The Tea Party members she
befriended in Louisiana felt like people patiently waiting in line, living settled lives that
required hard work and self-discipline, only to “see people cutting in line ahead of you!
You’re following the rules. They aren’t.... Some are black. Through affirmative action
plans,... jobs, welfare payments, and free lunches,... they hold a certain secret place in
people’s minds.... Women, immigrants, refugees, public sector workers—where will it
end?” “ I live your analogy ,” commented one of her Tea Party friends. Hochschild points
out that “virtually all those I talked with felt on shaky economic ground.... They also
felt culturally marginalized.”^161 Their traditionalist views were held up to ridicule by the
national media; they felt belittled and besieged. Referring to people like this as
“deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton did during the campaign,^162 is not a great way to win
them back.
Many things we can’t change, but here’s one we can: we can communicate that we
believe that the injustices experienced by working-class whites are ones elites have a
moral obligation to address. It’s only human to place much of the world’s vast reservoir
of injustice outside of one’s personal ambit of responsibility. We do not immediately drop
what we are doing, sell all our worldly goods, and fly to Calcutta to distribute the
proceeds in the streets. Why? We see the injustice, but don’t see it as our responsibility to
redress. Historian Thomas Haskell’s elegant study documents how slavery went from
being seen as an unfortunate-but-unavoidable reality to being seen as a pressingly
unethical outrage. Quite abruptly in the eighteenth century, slaves were included in
Europeans’ ambit of responsibility.^163
Once white workers were placed outside liberals’ ambit of responsibility, they wrote off
“those below” as lacking in morals, grit, and taste. “My fellow liberals should have
listened to me and other liberals from white working-class backgrounds. They should
have listened to those of us they call hillbillies, rednecks, hicks, and toothless idiots. They
should have understood that we don’t live in a ‘fly-over’ state; we live in our home,”
- Is the Working Class Just Racist?