Donald Trump in the Bayou

The Redder the State, the More the Toxic Waste

Louisiana was, it turned out, in good company. A 2012 study by sociologist Arthur O’Connor showed that residents of red states suffer higher rates of industrial pollution than those of blue states. Voters in the 22 states that went Republican in the five presidential elections between 1992 and 2008 live in more polluted environments.  And what was true for Red States generally and Louisiana in particular was true for Mike himself.  Looking into exposure to toxic waste, my research assistant Rebecca Elliot and I discovered that people who believe Americans “worry too much about the environment,” and that the U.S. already “does enough” to protect that environment were likely to be living in zip codes with high rates of pollution.  As a Tea Party member enmeshed in the Bayou Corne sinkhole disaster, Mike was just an exaggerated version of a haunting national story.

Mike wanted to live in a nearly total free-market society. In a way Louisiana already was exactly that.  Government was barely present at all.  But how, I wondered, did Mike reconcile his deep love of, and desire to protect, Bayou Corne with his strong dislike of government regulation?  As it happened, he did what most of us tend to do when we face a powerful conflict.  He jerrybuilt a new world out of desperate beliefs, becoming what he termed a “Tea Party conservationist.”

Seated at his dining room table surrounded by cardboard boxes filled with his belongings, he composed letter after letter of complaint to members of the Louisiana legislature, demanding that they force companies like Texas Brine to pay victims in a timely way, that they not permit storage of hazardous waste in precarious waterways, or again permit drilling in Lake Peigneur, which had suffered a devastating drilling accident in 1980. By August of 2015, he had written 50 of them to state and federal officials. “This is the closest I’ve come to being a tree-hugger,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent of the environmentalists I meet are liberal. But I’ve had to do something. This bayou will never be the same.”

As we putted around the bayou, I asked, “What has the federal government done for you that you feel grateful for?”

He paused.

“Hurricane relief,” he finally responded.

He paused again. “The I-10…,” he added, referring to a federally funded freeway.

Another long pause. “Okay, unemployment insurance.” (He had once briefly been on it.)

I ask about the Food and Drug Administration inspectors who check the safety of our food.

“Yeah, that too.”

The military in which he’d enlisted?

“Yeah, okay.” 

“Do you know anyone who receives federal government benefits?”  

“Oh sure,” he answers. “And I don’t blame them. Most people I know use available government programs, since they paid for part of them. If the programs are there, why not use them?”

And then the conversation continued about how we don’t need government for this, for that, or for the other thing.

Mike and his wife had recently moved from their ruined home near the sinkhole into a large fixer-upper on a canal flowing into Lake Verret, some 15 miles south of Bayou Corne. At nights, he can hear the two-toned calls of tree frogs and toads. He had jacked up the living room floor, redone the bedroom molding, put in a new deck, and set up his airplane-building kit in the garage.  A recent tornado had ripped the American flag from a pole on that garage, although it hadn’t harmed the Confederate flag hanging from the porch of his neighbor. 

His new home lies near the entrance to the spillway of the magnificent Atchafalaya Basin, an 800,000-acre National Wildlife Refuge — the largest bottomland hardwood swamp in the country — overseen, in part, by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. On my last visit, he took me in his flatboat to fish for perch, pointing out a bald eagle on the bare branch of a tall cypress. “I’ve gone from the frying pan to the fire,” he explained. “They are disposing of millions of gallons of fracking waste — the industry calls it ‘produced water’ — right here in the Basin. It can contain methanol, chloride, sulphates, and radium. And they’re importing it from Pennsylvania and other fracking sites to go into an injection well near here. Salt can corrode the casing of those wells, and it’s not far from our aquifer.”

A Sinkhole of Pride

Mike loves the waters of Louisiana more than anything in the world. A vote for Hillary Clinton would protect the Clean Water Act, secure the EPA, and ensure that government would continue to act as a counterbalance to the Texas Brines of the nation. But there was one thing more important to Mike than clean water: pride in his people.

He had struggled hard to climb out of the world of a poor plumber’s fifth son, to make it to a salary of $70,000 a year with a company that built oil rigs, to a third and at-last-right wife, and to a home he loved that was now wrecked. At the entrance gate to the middle class, he felt he’d been slapped in the face.  For progressive movements from the 1960s on — in support of blacks, women, sexual minorities, immigrants, refugees — the federal government was, he believed, a giant ticket-dispensing machine in an era in which the economy was visiting on middle-class and blue-collar white men the sorts of punishment once more commonly reserved for blacks. Democrats were, he was convinced, continuing to make the government into an instrument of his own marginalization — and media liberals were now ridiculing people like him as ignorant, backward rednecks.  Culturally, demographically, economically, and now environmentally, he felt ever more like a stranger in his own land.

It mattered little to him that Donald Trump would not reduce the big government he so fervently wanted cut, or that The Donald was soft on the pro-life, pro-marriage positions he valued, or that he hadn’t uttered a peep about the national debt. None of it mattered because Trump, he felt, would switch off that marginalization machine and restore the honor of his kind of people, of himself.  Mike knew that liberals favored care for the environment far more than Republicans, Tea Partiers, or Donald Trump.  Yet, despite his lost home in a despoiled land, like others of his older white neighbors back at the Bayou and here in the Basin, Mike was foursquare for Trump; that’s how deeply his pride was injured and a measure of just how much that injury galled him.

What would Trump do to prevent another calamity like Bayou Corne with its methane-drenched mud, its lost forest, its dead fish? He has been vague on many of the policies he might pursue as president, but on one thing he was clear: he would abolish the Environmental Protection Agency.

Arlie Hochschild is the author of many books, including The Second Shift and The Time Bind.  Her latest book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press), will be published in early September. This essay is adapted for TomDispatch from that book.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.