“When I was a kid, you stuck a thumb out by the side of the road, you got a ride. Or if you had a car, you gave a ride. If someone was hungry, you fed him. You had community. You know what’s undercut all that?” He pauses. “Big government.”
- Location 169
-
- [note::In what ways has Big Government underminded this?]

An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances. In a period of political tumult, we grasp for quick certainties. We shoehorn new information into ways we already think. We settle for knowing our opposite numbers from the outside. But is it possible, without changing our beliefs, to know others from the inside, to see reality through their eyes, to understand the links between life, feeling, and politics; that is, to cross the empathy wall? I thought it was.
- Location 183
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I didn’t know any members of the Tea Party, not to really talk to, and he didn’t know many people like me. “I’m pro-life, pro-gun, pro-freedom to live our own lives as we see fit so long as we don’t hurt others. And I’m anti–big government,” Mike said. “Our government is way too big, too greedy, too incompetent, too bought, and it’s not ours anymore. We need to get back to our local communities, like we had at Armelise. Honestly, we’d be better off.”
- Location 197
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- [note::Easy to demonize the person you dont know than the person you do.]

But in 2010, 33 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Republicans answered “yes.” In fact, partyism, as some call it, now beats race as the source of divisive prejudice.
- Location 203
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When Americans moved in the past, they left in search of better jobs, cheaper housing, or milder weather. But according to The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded Americans Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing, when people move today, it is more often to live near others who share their views.
- Location 204
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Compared to the past, each side also increasingly gets its news from its own television channel—the right from Fox News, the left from MSNBC. And so the divide widens. We live in what the New Yorker has
- Location 211
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In March 2015, the Republican-dominated U.S. Senate voted 51 to 49 in support of an amendment to a budget resolution to sell or give away all non-military federal lands other than national monuments and national parks. This would include forests, wildlife refuges, and wilderness areas.
- Location 227
-
- [note::Wait... Wut.]

But in the end, a healthy democracy depends on a collective capacity to hash things out. And to get there, we need to figure out what’s going on—especially on the more rapidly shifting and ever stronger right.
- Location 236
-
- [note::I should point this out more. Seems to be a more widely relatable and irrefutable argument than what I've tried to convey in the past.]

Across the country, red states are poorer and have more teen mothers, more divorce, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrollment.
- Location 241
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Out of the 50 states, Louisiana ranked 49th and in overall health ranked last. According to the 2015 National Report Card, Louisiana ranked 48th out of 50 in eighth-grade reading and 49th out of 50 in eighth-grade math. Only eight out of ten Louisianans have graduated from high school, and only 7 percent have graduate or professional degrees.
- Location 248
-
- [note::Why? Are these facts based on standardized tests?]

My neighbors and friends on my side of the wall are more or less like me. They have BA degrees or more and read the New York Times daily. They eat organic food, recycle their garbage, and take BART (the public rail system) when they can. Most have grown up on one or the other coast. Some are churchgoers, but many call themselves “spiritual” and don’t regularly go to church. Many work in public or nonprofit sector jobs, and are as puzzled by all this as I am. When I started out, I had no close friend who’d been born in the South, only one who worked in oil, and none in the Tea Party.
- Location 270
-
- [note::Also me lol]

In his New York Times essay, “Who Turned My Blue State Red?” Alec MacGillis offers an intriguing answer to the Great Paradox. People in red states who need Medicaid and food stamps welcome them but don’t vote, he argues, while those a little higher on the class ladder, white conservatives, don’t need them and do vote—against public dollars for the poor. This “two notches up” thesis gives us part of the answer, but not most.
- Location 275
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Virtually every Tea Party advocate I interviewed for this book has personally benefited from a major government service or has close family who have. Several had disabled elderly parents lacking private long-term care insurance, and had them declared indigent in order to enable them to receive Medicaid. Another man, whose wife suffered a severely disabling disease and whose care would have bankrupted him, lovingly divorced her to make her eligible for Medicaid. The able-bodied brother of a disapproving sister—both Tea Party—received SNAP benefits. The brother of another put in for unemployment during hunting season. Most said, “Since it’s there, why not use it?” But many were ashamed and asked me to dissociate their identity from such an act, which I’ve done.
- Location 279
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While this book is not about the personal lives of these two women, it couldn’t have been written without them both, and I believe that their friendship models what our country itself needs to forge: the capacity to connect across difference.
- Location 315
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In The Billionaires’ Tea Party, for example, the Australian filmmaker Taki Oldham had found that home-grown “citizen groups” challenging climate change were funded by oil companies, and argued that populist anti-government rage was orchestrated by corporate strategy.
- Location 318
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Others argued that extremely rich people had stirred the movement to life, without arguing that grassroots support was fake. The New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer describes the strategy of billionaire oil baron brothers Charles and David Koch to direct $889,000,000 to help right-wing candidates and causes in 2016 alone. “To bring about social change,” Charles Koch says, “requires a strategy” that uses “vertically and horizontally integrated” planning “from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action.” It was like a vast, sprawling company that owns the forest, the pulp mill, the publishing house, and pays authors to write slanted books. Such a political “company” could wield astonishing influence.
- Location 320
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In What’s the Matter With Kansas? Frank argues that people like Mike are being greatly misled. A rich man’s “economic agenda” is paired with the “bait” of social issues. Through appeal to abortion bans, gun rights, and school prayer, Mike and his like-minded friends are persuaded to embrace economic policies that hurt them.
- Location 333
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Purchased political influence is real, powerful, and at play, I think, but as an explanation for why any of us believe what we do, duping—and the presumption of gullibility—is too simple an idea.
- Location 342
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Our home enclaves often reflect special cultures of governance tying politics to geography. This is the thesis of Colin Woodard’s American Nations. Rural areas in the Midwest, the South, and Alaska lean right while large cities, New England, and the two coasts lean left, he notes. Bound by a tradition of small-town governance and oriented toward Europe, New Englanders tend to believe in good government for the “common good.” Appalachians and Texans tend to be freedom-loving government minimalists.
- Location 344
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And while the far right is strongest in the South, most of its members make up a demographic—white, middle to low income, older, married, Christian—that spans the whole nation.
- Location 350
- demographics, conservatism,

In The Righteous Mind, for example, Jonathan Haidt argues, unlike Frank, that people are not misled but instead vote in their self-interest—one based on cultural values. While right and left both value caring and fairness, he notes, they place different priorities on obedience to authority (the right) and originality (the left), for example.
- Location 352
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Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson rightly argue that it is a unique coalescence of circumstances—predisposing factors and precipitating ones. Primary among the latter were the Great Recession of 2008 and government efforts to forestall it, the presidency of Barack Obama, and Fox News.
- Location 355
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While all these works greatly helped me, I found one thing missing in them all—a full understanding of emotion in politics.
- Location 357
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When we listen to a political leader, we don’t simply hear words; we listen predisposed to want to feel certain things. Some broad emotional ideals are shared across the political spectrum but others are not. Some feel proud of a “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” Statue of Liberty America, while others yearn to feel proud of a Constitution-abiding, work-your-own-way-up America.
- Location 359
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The right seeks release from liberal notions of what they should feel—happy for the gay newlywed, sad at the plight of the Syrian refugee, unresentful about paying taxes. The left sees prejudice.
- Location 363
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Race seemed everywhere in the physical surroundings, but almost nowhere in spontaneous direct talk.
- Location 446
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she felt liberals were lobbing at her: “Oh, liberals think that Bible-believing Southerners are ignorant, backward, rednecks, losers. They think we’re racist, sexist, homophobic, and maybe fat.” Her grandfather had struggled as a desperately poor Arkansas sharecropper.
- Location 481
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I began to recognize the power of blue-state catcalls taunting red state residents. Limbaugh was a firewall against liberal insults thrown at her and her ancestors, she felt. Was the right-wing media making them up to stoke hatred, I wondered, or were there enough blue-state insults to go around?
- Location 483
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Tea Party adherents seemed to arrive at their dislike of the federal government via three routes—through their religious faith (the government curtailed the church, they felt), through hatred of taxes (which they saw as too high and too progressive), and through its impact on their loss of honor,
- Location 663
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“Stricter regulation would be good,” Harold replies. “We’re not against industry,” Annette clarifies. “We were happy when industry came. It brought jobs. We were glad for Harold to get one. But for decades now, they’ve done nothing to clean up the bayou or compensate us to move.” Like other friends and family, the Arenos are Republican and had voted in the presidential election of 2012 for Mitt Romney. “He’s a big business guy, of course,” Harold explains. “If he were here he’d be having friendly visits with the CEOs of the companies around here. He wouldn’t be cleaning up the mess.”
- Location 819
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“We vote for candidates that put the Bible where it belongs,” Harold adds. “We try to be right-living, clean-living people, and we’d like our leaders to live that way and believe in that, too.” Before settling on Romney in the 2012 election, they had favored the former senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum. The Arenos disapprove of “greedy corporations” stepping on the little guy. “Oil interests tried to suppress the development of the electric car,” Annette adds. Agreeing, Harold says: “Republicans stand for big business. They won’t help us with the problems we’ve got here.” But Republicans put God and family on their side and “we like that. The Scripture says Jesus wants us to be about his Father’s business,”
- Location 825
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People on the right seemed to be strongly moved by three concerns—taxes, faith, and honor. Lee Sherman was eager to lower his taxes, the Arenos to protect their Christian faith. Added to these basic motives were certain personal wishes: Lee, who had borne the guilt of polluting public waters and been cheated by a dishonest official at a tax office, wanted to feel vindicated. The tax office was corrupt, and taxes themselves were connected to dishonesty, he felt. One didn’t know where they went or for what. The Arenos shared Lee’s concern, but added another personal wish. Given their extended ordeal and the importance of God and the church in getting through it, they felt a powerful drive to place themselves in spiritually guided hands. For both Lee and the Arenos, at issue in politics was trust. It was hard enough to trust people close at hand, and very hard to trust those far away; to locally rooted people, Washington, D.C., felt very far away. Like everyone I was to talk with, both also felt like victims of a frightening loss—or was it theft?—of their cultural home, their place in the world, and their honor.
- Location 839
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Together they worked out that climate change was, indeed, a man-made disaster-in-waiting that called for strong countermeasures. In the climate of opinion around them, they were brave to do so. But their concern raised the question: how could repairs be made? On that, the Bible gave them clearer answers than politics did.
- Location 858
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They didn’t want to leave, and even if they had wanted to, they couldn’t afford to. The polluting companies had given them no money to enable them to move. And the value of their house had now fallen, for who would want to live on Bayou d’Inde Pass Road, even in a home as beautifully kept up as theirs? The Arenos had become stay-at-home migrants. They had stayed. The environment had left.
- Location 868
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They had children to take care of and felt wary of supporting any environmental movement or federal government action that might jeopardize them. The general talk around town was that the choice was between the environment and jobs. On Fox News, in the local paper, in talk with friends, that was the refrain: too much nostalgia for croaking frogs and clean rivers might seem like just that—too much nostalgia.
- Location 897
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“The state always seems to come down on the little guy,” he notes. “Take this bayou. If your motorboat leaks a little gas into the water, the warden’ll write you up. But if companies leak thousands of gallons of it and kill all the life here? The state lets them go. If you shoot an endangered brown pelican, they’ll put you in jail. But if a company kills the brown pelican by poisoning the fish he eats? They let it go. I think they overregulate the bottom because it’s harder to regulate the top.”
- Location 918
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the planet will be purified 1,000 years from now, and until then, the devil is on the rampage, Derwin says. In the Garden of Eden, “there wasn’t anything hurting your environment. We’ll probably never see the bayou like God made it in the beginning until He fixes it himself. And that will happen pretty shortly, so it don’t matter how much man destroys.”
- Location 930
-
- [note::God fucking dammit.]

In 2012, all three were watching speeches by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. He wouldn’t help the country clean up dirty rivers, they thought, but as an opponent to the right to abortion, he was for “saving all those babies”—and that seemed to them the more important moral issue on which they would be ultimately judged.
- Location 946
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“We’re on this earth for a limited amount of time,” he says, leaning on the edge of the window. “But if we get our souls saved, we go to Heaven, and Heaven is for eternity. We’ll never have to worry about the environment from then on. That’s the most important thing. I’m thinking long-term.”
- Location 949
- beliefs, afterlife, heaven, sustainability,
- [note::Christ, what close-minded, self-centered thinking. Though, if you view getting into heaven as the end-all-be-all, it's pretty logical.]

What he felt was being given away was tax money to non-working, non-deserving people—and not just tax money, but honor too. If that tax money could come back to citizens—as a sort of “raise” in the midst of a three-decade-long national economic lull, why not?
- Location 1047
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“All the people in Louisiana hear is jobs, jobs, jobs. And there’s just enough to it, that people slip into believing it’s the whole story. Really they’re captives of a psychological program.”
- Location 1070
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becomes more complicated than it first seemed. Liquor, guns, motorcycle helmets (legislation had gone back and forth on that)—mainly white masculine pursuits—are fairly unregulated. But for women and black men, regulation is greater. Within given parameters, federal law gives women the right to decide whether or not to abort a fetus. But the state of Louisiana has imposed restrictions on clinics offering the procedure, which, if upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court, would prevent all but one clinic, in New Orleans, from offering women access to it.
- Location 1172
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So while the state boasts a reputation of an almost cowboy-style “don’t-fence-me-in” freedom, that is probably not how a female rape victim who wants an abortion, or a young black boy in Jefferson Davis Parish, or Albert Woodfox see the matter.
- Location 1187
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“But here we have ‘self-regulation.’ The federal EPA passes the buck to the state Department of Environmental Quality. The state passes the buck to the oil companies. They regulate themselves. It’s like me driving this truck 100 miles an hour down River Road. I call up the Highway Patrol and say, ‘Officer, excuse me. I’m speeding right now.’”
- Location 1222
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I heard a great deal about freedom in the sense of freedom to—to talk on your cellphone as you drove a car, to pick up a drive-in daiquiri with a straw on the side, to walk about with a loaded gun. But there was almost no talk about freedom from such things as gun violence, car accidents, or toxic pollution.
- Location 1226
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Oil brought jobs. Jobs brought money. Money brought a better life—school, home, health, a piece of the American Dream. Maybe it was not so much that the people sitting with me in the audiences of the campaign rallies hated the federal government but that they loved the private sector, especially the queen of it in Louisiana: oil. Maybe I’d been so busy listening to the “unsung tune” about cleaning up pollution that I wasn’t hearing the loud and clear song about jobs.
- Location 1231
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To build a petrochemical plant, you need many construction workers for a temporary period, and then their job is over. To run a petrochemical plant, you need a small number of highly trained engineers, chemists, and operators to keep watch over panels of gauges and to know what to do when there’s trouble. Then you need a few repairmen such as Lee Sherman.
- Location 1261
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“Oil brought in some jobs,” Templet says, “but it causes other jobs to disappear or simply inhibits other sectors—such as the seafood industry and tourism—from growing.” Oil rig explosions such as the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon blowout severely hurt the seafood and tourism industries—oyster fishermen, deep sea fisherman, wholesalers, restaurateurs, and hotel workers were impacted.
- Location 1287
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The “high road” strategy, as the researchers describe it, is to stimulate new jobs by creating an attractive public sector, as California did in Silicon Valley and Washington State did in Seattle. Perhaps, it occurred to me, the first strategy for economic development was backed by one party (the Tea Party, Louisiana model), and the second strategy by another party (the Democratic, California model).
- Location 1314
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Meyer then matched regulatory strictness to economic growth over a twenty-year period and found that the tougher the regulation, the more jobs were available in the economy. A 2016 survey of the world’s major economies also found that strict environmental policies improved, rather than handicapped, competitiveness in the international market. If this was the growing consensus among Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) economists, I wondered why my Tea Party friends weren’t hearing about it.
- Location 1321
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As companies squeeze favors out of the state, he argued, the more urgent its citizens’ needs for good schools and hospitals, the less the poor are able to use what opportunities exist, and the more atrophied become other sectors of the economy—which further concentrates power in the hands of oil.
- Location 1326
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companies often privately give back to the community in gestures of goodwill. To do this they use the incentive money the cash-strapped state government has given them to lure them into the state in the first place. Dow Chemical gives to the Audubon Nature Institute. Shell Oil Company supports the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Pittsburgh Plate Glass pays for a “Naturelab–Classroom in the Woods” near Lake Charles. Sasol funds a project to record the history of Mossville, a black community its expansion displaced. The Louisiana Chemical Association gives to the Louisiana Tumor Registry. The people of Louisiana are now grateful—here Templet pauses for a moment of sad irony—“not just for jobs, but for gifts.”
- Location 1328
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