When I began this research five years ago, I was becoming alarmed at the increasingly hostile split in our nation between two political camps. To many on the left, the Republican Party and Fox News seemed intent on dismantling much of the federal government, cutting help to the poor, and increasing the power and money of an already powerful and rich top 1 percent. To many on the right, that government itself was a power-amassing elite, creating bogus causes to increase its control and handing out easy money in return for loyal Democratic votes. Since that time both parties have split their seams and Donald Trump has burst onto the scene, quickening the pulse of American political life. I had some understanding of the liberal left camp, I thought, but what was happening on the right?
Most people who ask this question come at it from a political perspective. And while I have my views too, as a sociologist I had a keen interest in how life feels to people on the right—that is, in the emotion that underlies politics. To understand their emotions, I had to imagine myself into their shoes. Trying this, I came upon their “deep story,” a narrative as felt.
The subject of politics was a big departure for me but my close-up approach was not. In a previous book, The Second Shift, I focused on the abiding question of how parents guard care and time for life at home when both work outside it. I found myself sitting on kitchen floors in the homes of working families, watching to see which parent a child called for, which parent answered the phone, the relative gratitude each partner felt to the other. In search of a family-friendly workplace, I hung out in parking lots outside industrial plants and corporate headquarters to observe the hour when weary workers headed home (The Time Bind) and explored workers’ fantasies of the vacations they’d go on, the guitar they would learn, “if only they had time.” I conducted in-depth interviews with Filipina nannies (Global Woman) and, in a small village in Gujarat, India, interviewed commercial surrogate mothers who carry the genetic babies of Western clients (The Outsourced Self). All this work led me to believe strongly in paid parental leave for working parents of newborns and adoptive babies—a policy offered by all the world’s major industrial nations except the United States. Now that most American children live in homes in which all adults work, the idea of paid parental leave seemed to me highly welcome, humane, overdue. But this ideal has come slam up against a new truth—many on the right oppose the very idea of government help for working families. In fact, apart from the military, they don’t want much government at all. Other ideals—strengthening environmental protection, averting global warming, ending homelessness—face the same firmly closed door. If we want government help in achieving any of these goals, I realized, we need to understand those who see government more as problem than solution. And so it was that I began my journey to the heart of the American right.
Already in the late 1960s, sensing a split in American culture, my husband Adam and I set off to live for a month in Kings Kauai Garden Apartments—complete with jungle bird and beast sound effects piped into a common jungle decorated patio—in Santa Ana, California, to try to get to know members of the John Birch Society, an earlier right-wing precursor to the Tea Party. We attended meetings of the society and talked to as many people as we could. Many members we met had grown up in small towns in the Midwest and felt deeply disoriented in California’s anomic suburbs, an unease they transformed into a belief that American society was at risk of being taken over by communists. Looking around, we could well understand why they felt “taken over”—in a few years, entire orange groves had disappeared into parking lots and shopping malls, a case of wildly unplanned urban sprawl. We too felt taken over by something, but it wasn’t communism.
I have lived most of my life in the progressive camp but in recent years I began to want to better understand those on the right. How did they come to hold their views? Could we make common cause on some issues? These questions led me to drive, one day, from plant to plant in the bleak industrial outskirts of Lake Charles, Louisiana, with Sharon Galicia, a warm, petite, white single mother, a blond beauty, on her rounds selling medical insurance. Unfazed by a deafening buzz saw cutting vast sheets of steel, she bantered with workmen, their protective gear lifted to their brows, their arms folded. She was an appealing and persuasive fast-talker. (“What if you have an accident, can’t pay bills or can’t wait a month for your insurance to kick in? We insure you within twenty-four hours.”) As they reached for a pen to sign up, Sharon talked to them about deer hunting, about the amount of alligator meat in boudin—a beloved spicy Louisiana sausage—and about the latest LSU Tigers game.
As her story unfolded while we drove between plants, Sharon recounted how her dad, a taciturn plant worker, had divorced her troubled mother, remarried, and moved into a trailer a thirty-minute drive away, all without telling her brother or her. I left alive with questions. What had happened to her father? How had the fate of his marriage affected her as a little girl, then as a wife and now as a single mother? What were the lives of the young men she talked to? Why was this bright, thoughtful, determined young woman—one who could have benefited from paid parental leave—an enthusiastic member of the Tea Party, to whom the idea was unthinkable?
I thanked Sharon directly, of course, for allowing me to follow her in her rounds, but later in my mind I thanked her again for her gift of trust and outreach. And after a while it occurred to me that the kind of connection she offered me was more precious than I’d first imagined. It built the scaffolding of an empathy bridge. We, on both sides, wrongly imagine that empathy with the “other” side brings an end to clearheaded analysis when, in truth, it’s on the other side of that bridge that the most important analysis can begin.
The English language doesn’t give us many words to describe the feeling of reaching out to someone from another world, and of having that interest welcomed. Something of its own kind, mutual, is created. What a gift. Gratitude, awe, appreciation; for me, all those words apply and I don’t know which to use. But I think we need a special word, and should hold a place of honor for it, so as to restore what might be a missing key on the English-speaking world’s cultural piano. Our polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don’t know each other, makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt.
I first experienced reaching out and being reached out to as the child of a Foreign Service officer. In my child’s mind, I had been given a personal mission, parallel to my father’s, to befriend the people of all the foreign countries my father’s job took us to. I was instructed to reach out, I imagined, to people who spoke, dressed, walked, looked, and worshipped differently than we did. Had my father really asked me to do this? I don’t think so. Why do it? I had no idea. That understanding came later. Curiously, I felt that same gratitude for connection when, many decades later, I drove from plant to plant with Sharon, and when I talked with the many others I’ve met in the course of researching this book. I felt I was in a foreign country again, only this time it was my own.