What unites Trump voters?

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Her Tea Party friends (as she sometimes describes them) live in a region deeply polluted by petrochemical industries, and some of their most obvious losses and grievances are environmental. One devout Pentecostal Cajun family lives on a poisoned bayou, surrounded by dead forests. They carry memories of their grandparents’ time, when the family lived on the bountiful water and woods, and of their parents’ time, when cows and horses drank from or waded into polluted waterways and died within days. One elderly informant lost his engineering job after he was doused at work with harmful chemicals that disabled and could have killed him. Born into a Democratic family in the Pacific Northwest, he became an environmentalist after going public with stories of being instructed to dump his factory’s most dangerous by-products into local wetlands, week after week, always in secret. Now in his eighties, he puts up signs for Tea Party candidates. Another Tea Partier lost his home and neighborhood to a sinkhole the size of a subdivision after a risky fracking operation shattered a subterranean mineral formation (which other companies were already using to store toxic waste).

Hochschild asks a question familiar to anyone who has ever wondered what’s the matter with Kansas: How does a Republican Party of big business, whose candidates split over whether to shrink the Environmental Protection Agency or abolish it outright, appeal to these victims of what one can only call environmental injustice?

Here is what she hears: The line for advancement toward the American dream of secure prosperity has grown very long. Sometimes it seems to have stopped moving. And, in front of these hard-working people, newcomers are cutting in line, playing by their own rules to get ahead. Affirmative action, jobs for illegal immigrants, and (in some men’s view) women in the workforce are all moving the goalposts, undercutting what these traditionalist Louisianans feel are lives of working hard, waiting patiently, and playing by the rules. Many of these people don’t trust the companies that have poisoned their home place; but they feel that the federal government, especially under Barack Obama, is on the side of the line-skippers who are changing the rules.

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