There he is, seated on his wooden front porch overlooking a trim yard in suburban DeRidder, Louisiana, watching for my car. He rises from his chair, waving with one arm and steadying himself on his walker with the other. A large-chested, 6ft 3in man with a grey crewcut and blue eyes, Lee Sherman, age 82, gives me a welcoming smile. A player for the Dallas Texans football team (later renamed the Kansas City Chiefs) for two years, an honoree in Who’s Who of American Motorsports, a Nascar racer who drove at 200 miles an hour in a neck brace and fire suit, and the proud purchaser of a waterski boat once owned by TV’s Wonder Woman, he shakes my hand, apologising, “I’m sorry to be on this thing,” he points to his walker, “and not take you through the house properly.” He doesn’t feel like his old self, he says, but accepts his feeble legs good-naturedly. Given his dangerous work at the petrochemical company, Pittsburgh Plate Glass (PPG), he is happy to be alive. “All my co-workers from back then are dead; most died young,” he tells me.

As a young man, Sherman trained as a coppersmith in the US naval shipyards outside Seattle, where his dad worked as an electrician. When travelling south for work in 1965, he was hired by PPG as a maintenance pipefitter and soon earned a reputation as a mechanical genius.

He was fearless and careful, a good fit for his hazardous job fitting and repairing pipes carrying lethal chemicals such as ethylene dichloride, mercury, lead, chromium, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and dioxins.

At one point, Sherman narrowly escaped death, he tells me, taking a careful, long sip of coffee. One day while he was working, cold chlorine was accidentally exposed to extreme heat, which instantly transformed the liquid to gas. Sixteen workers were in the plant at the time. Noting that the company was short of protective gear, Sherman’s boss instructed him to leave. “Thirty minutes after I left,” he says, “the plant blew up. Five of the 15 men I left behind were killed.” The next afternoon, Sherman’s boss asked him to help search for the bodies of the dead workers. Two were found, three were not. Acid had so decomposed the body of one of the three victims that his remains came out in pieces in the sewer that drained into a nearby bayou. “If someone hadn’t found him,” Sherman says, turning his head to look out of his dining room window, “that body would have ended up floating into Bayou d’Inde.”

In the 1960s, safety was at a minimum at PPG. “During safety meetings,” Sherman tells me, “the supervisor just gave us paperwork to fill out. Working with the chemicals, we wore no protective facial masks. You learned how to hold your nose and breathe through your mouth.

“The company didn’t much warn us about dangers,” he says, adding in a softer voice, “My co-workers did. They’d say, ‘You can’t stand in that stuff. Get out of it.’ I wouldn’t be alive today, if it weren’t for my co-workers.”

The pipes Sherman worked on carried oxygen, hydrogen, and chlorine, and when a pipe sprung a leak, he explains, “I was the guy to fix it.”

“Did you use your bare hands?” I ask.

“Oh, yeah, yeah.”

Eventually the general foreman issued badges to the workers to record any overexposure to dangerous chemicals, Sherman says, “but the foreman made fun of them. It’s supposed to take two or three months before the gauge registers you’ve reached the limit. My badge did in three days. The foreman thought I’d stuck it inside a pipe!”

The chemical ate off my shoes. It ate off my pants. It ate my shirt. My undershorts were gone Lee Sherman

Accidents happened. One day, Sherman was standing in a room, leaning over a large pipe to check a filter, when an operator in a distant control room mistakenly turned a knob, sending hot, almond-smelling, liquid chlorinated hydrocarbons coursing through the pipe, drenching him. “It was hot and I got completely soaked,” Sherman tells me. “I jumped into the safety shower and had the respirator in my mouth, so I wasn’t overcome. But the chemical was burning pretty bad. It really gets you worst underneath your arms, in between your legs, up your bottom.” Despite the shower, he said, “The chemical ate off my shoes. It ate off my pants. It ate my shirt. My undershorts were gone. Only some elastic from my socks and my undershorts remained. It burned my clothes clean off me.”

As a result of the things he suffered, saw, and was ordered to do as a pipefitter in the petrochemical plant, Sherman became an ardent environmentalist. Calcasieu Parish, in which he worked for 15 years at PPG, is among the 2% of American counties with the highest toxic emissions per capita. According to the American Cancer Society, Louisiana has the second-highest incidence of cancer for men and the fifth-highest male death rate from cancer in the nation.

How the ‘Great Paradox’ of American politics holds the secret to Trump’s success – podcast Read more

But Sherman has recently volunteered to post lawn signs for the Tea Party congressman John Fleming, who favours cutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), weakening the Clean Air Act, and oil drilling on the outer continental shelf of the US, as well as opposing the regulation of greenhouse gases and backing less regulation of Wall Street. Sherman is a regular at meetings of the DeRidder Tea Party, wearing his red, white and blue party T-shirt, which features an eagle sharpening its talons. So why was Sherman the environmentalist eager to plant lawn signs for a politician calling for cuts in the EPA?

If I could answer this question, maybe I could unlock the door to what I came to call the Great Paradox.

I had begun my five-year journey to the heart of the American right carrying with me, as if it were a backpack, a great paradox. Back in 2004, there was a paradox underlying the right–left split. Since then the split has become a gulf.

Across the country, conservative “red states” are poorer and have more teenage mothers, more divorce, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrolment. On average, people in red states die five years earlier than people in liberal “blue states”. Indeed, the gap in life expectancy between Louisiana (75.7) and Connecticut (80.8) is the same as that between Nicaragua and the United States. Red states suffer more in another important but little-known way, one that speaks to the very biological self-interest in health and life: industrial pollution.

The right now calls for cuts in entire segments of the federal government – the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, and Interior, for example. In January 2015, 58 Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, which is responsible for the collection of taxes. Some Republican congressional candidates call for abolishing all state schools. In March 2015, the Republican-dominated 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. Joined by 95 Republican congressmen, Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, one of the most polluted states in the union, has called for the end of the EPA.

The Tea Party’s turn away from government may signal a broader trend. During the depression of the 1930s, Americans turned to the federal government for aid in their economic recovery. But in response to the great recession of 2008, the majority turned away from it. As the political divide widens and opinions harden, the stakes have grown vastly higher. Neither ordinary citizens nor leaders are talking much “across the aisle”, damaging the surprisingly delicate process of governance itself. The United States has been divided before, of course. During the civil war, a difference in belief led to some 750,000 deaths. During the stormy 1960s, too, clashes arose over the war in Vietnam, civil rights, and women’s rights. 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 rapidly shifting and ever-stronger right.

Lee Sherman’s work at PPG was a source of personal pride, but he clearly did not feel particularly loyal to the company. Still, he did as he was told. And one day in the late 1960s, after his acid bath, he was told to take on another ominous job. It was to be done twice a day, usually after dusk, and always in secret. In order to do this job, Sherman had to wield an 8ft-long “tar buggy”, propelled forwards on four wheels. Loaded on this buggy was an enormous steel tank that held “heavy bottoms” – the highly viscous tar residue of chlorinated hydrocarbon that had sunk to the bottom of kitchen-sized steel vessels. A layer of asbestos surrounded the tank, to retain heat generated by a heater beneath the buggy. Copper coils were wound around its base. The hotter the tar, the less likely it was to solidify before it was dumped.

Working overtime in the evenings, under cover of dark, his respirator on, Sherman would tow the tar buggy down a path that led towards the Calcasieu Ship Channel in one direction and towards Bayou d’Inde in another.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A bayou in Louisiana. Photograph: Laurence Mathieu-Leger/The Guardian

Sherman would look around “to make sure no one saw me” and check if the wind was blowing away from him, so as to avoid fumes blowing into his face. He backed the tar buggy up to the marsh. Then, he said, “I’d bend down and open the faucet.” Under the pressure of compressed air, the toxins would spurt out “20 or 30 feet” into the marsh. Sherman waited until the buggy was drained of the illegal toxic waste.

“No one ever saw me,” he says.

Sherman lingers over an event that occurred one day while he was alone on the bank with his secret. “While I was dumping the heavy bottoms in the canal, I saw a bird fly into the fumes and fall instantly into the water. It was like he’d been shot. I put two shovels out into the mud, so I could walk on them into the marsh without sinking too far down. I walked out and picked up the bird. Its wings and body didn’t move. It looked dead, but its heart was still beating. I grew up on a farm, and I know about birds. I walked back on the shovels to the bank with the bird. I held its head in my right hand and its wings and body in my left hand.

“I blew into its beak and worked it up and down. Then it started breathing again. Its eyes opened. But the rest of its body still didn’t move. I put it on the hood of my truck, which was warm. Then I left the bird to go check my tar buggy. But when I got back, the bird was gone. It had flown away. So that was one thing good.”

During the afternoon, Sherman circles back to the story of the bird, alternating between it and the story of the tar buggy. “I knew what I did was wrong,” he repeats. “Toxins are a killer. And I’m very sorry I did it. My mama would not have wanted me to do it. I never told anybody this before, but I knew how not to get caught.” It was as if Sherman had performed the company’s crime and assumed the company’s guilt as his own.

But, like the bird, Sherman himself became a victim. He grew ill from his exposure to the chemicals. After his hydrocarbon burn, “My feet felt like clubs, and I couldn’t bend my legs and rise up, so the company doctor ordered me put on medical leave. I kept visiting the company doctor to see if I was ready to come back, but he kept saying I shouldn’t come back until I could do a deep knee bend.” Sherman took a medical leave of eight months and then returned to work. But not for long.

In 1980, after 15 years of working at PPG, Sherman was summoned and found himself facing a seven-member termination committee. “They didn’t want to pay my medical disability,” he explains. “So they fired me for absenteeism. They said I hadn’t worked enough hours! They didn’t count my overtime. They didn’t discount time I took off for my Army Reserve duty. So that’s what I got fired for – absenteeism. They handed me my pink slip. Two security guards escorted me to the parking lot.” Sherman slaps the table as if, decades later, he has just got fired again.

Seven years later, Sherman would meet a member of that termination committee once again. There had been an enormous fish kill in Bayou d’Inde, downstream from the spot where Sherman had dumped the toxic waste and rescued the overcome bird. A Calcasieu Advisory Task Force met to discuss the surrounding waterways, to describe them as “impaired”, and to consider issuing a seafood advisory, warning people to limit their consumption of local fish.

Local waterways had long been contaminated from many sources. But in 1987, the state finally issued a seafood advisory for Bayou d’Inde, the Calcasieu Ship Channel, and the estuary to the Gulf of Mexico. The warning was shocking, the first in memory, and it called for limits “due to low levels of chemical contamination”. No more than two meals with locally caught fish a month, it said. No swimming, water sports, or contact with bottom sediments. It was a very belated attempt by the state of Louisiana to warn the public of toxins in its waters.

Instantly fishermen became alarmed. Would they be able to sell their fish? Would residents limit what they ate? Were people now being asked to look at fish, not with relish for a scrumptious gumbo, jambalaya, or all-you-can-eat fish fry, but as dubious carriers of toxic chemicals? The carefully cultivated notion of harmony between oil and fishing – all this was thrown into question, and not just in Louisiana. One-third of all seafood consumed across the US came from the Gulf of Mexico, and two-thirds of that from Louisiana itself.

Many livelihoods were at stake.

By 1987, several things had transpired that would affect the fishermen’s response to the edict. For one thing, PPG was not alone. Other industries had been polluting so much that Louisiana had become the worst hazardous waste producer in the nation. For another thing, the US Congress had established the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), the Clean Air Act (1970), and the Clean Water Act (1972). In addition, many small grassroots environmental groups had sprung up throughout the state, led by homemakers, teachers, farmers, and others who were appalled to discover toxic waste being dumped in their backyard, illness, and disease. Around the time of the advisory, local activists were rising up against toxic dumping around Lake Charles and elsewhere, as part of the “front-porch” – or “kitchen-sink” – politics of the 1970s and 1980s.

But most of those local activists are now Tea Party Republicans and, like Lee Sherman himself, are averse to an overbearing federal government, and even to much of the EPA. There it was: the Great Paradox.

In the meantime, the Louisiana Department of Health and Human Services posted warning signs about fishing and swimming, which were promptly riddled with bullets or stolen. Burton Coliseum, the largest public meeting place in Lake Charles at the time, was filled “with about a thousand angry fishermen and others in the fish industry”. Sherman continues, “When the meeting was called to order, it was standing room only. I could hear murmuring in the crowd. Oh, they were ready to kill the government.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bayou d’Inde in Louisiana. Photograph: DARRP

A row of company officials, including two from PPG, company lawyers, and state officials, all sat behind a table on a stage in front of the crowd. A state official stood to explain the reason for the seafood advisory: the fish had been contaminated. Citizens had to be informed. What had caused it? The officials from PPG seated on the stage feigned ignorance.

The meeting went on for 20 or 30 minutes, with catcalls to the government officials rising from the crowd.

Then, to everyone’s astonishment, uninvited, Lee Sherman – long since fired by PPG – climbed on stage. With his back to the officials, he faced the angry fishermen, lifted a large cardboard sign, and slowly walked from one side of the stage to the other, so all could read it: “I’M THE ONE WHO DUMPED IT IN THE BAYOU.”

The entire coliseum went silent.

Officials tried to get Sherman to leave the stage. But a fisherman called out, “We want to hear him.”

“I talked for 36 minutes,” Sherman recalls. “I told them I had followed my boss’s orders. I told them the chemicals had made me sick. I told them I’d been fired for absenteeism.

“The only thing I didn’t tell them was that sitting behind the front table on stage was a member of the PPG termination committee that had fired me. That was the best part – the PPG guys had both hands over the backs of their heads.”

The most heroic act of Lee Sherman’s life had been to reveal to the world a company’s dirty secret

Now the fishermen knew the fish were truly contaminated. Soon after the meeting, they filed a civil lawsuit against PPG and won an out-of-court settlement that gave a mere $12,000 to each fisherman.

Sherman had worked hard, unpleasant, dangerous jobs. He had loyally followed company orders to contaminate an estuary. He had done his company’s moral dirty work, taken its guilt as his own, and then been betrayed and discarded, like a form of waste. The most heroic act of Lee Sherman’s life had been to reveal to the world a company’s dirty secret, and to tell a thousand fishermen furious at the government that companies like PPG were to blame.

Yet over the course of his lifetime, Sherman had moved from the left to the right. When he lived as a young man in Washington State, he said proudly, “I ran the campaign of the first woman to run for Congress in the state.” But when he moved from Seattle to Dallas for work in the 1950s, he shifted from conservative Democrat to Republican, and after 2009, to the Tea Party. So while his central life experience had been betrayal at the hands of industry, he now felt – as his politics reflected – most betrayed by the federal government. He believed that PPG and many other local petrochemical companies at the time had done wrong, and that cleaning the mess up was right. He thought industry would not “do the right thing” by itself. But still he rejected the federal government. Indeed, Sherman embraced candidates who wanted to remove nearly all the guardrails on industry and cut the EPA. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration had vastly improved life for workmen such as Sherman – and he appreciated those reforms – but he felt the job was largely done.

In the life of one man, Lee Sherman, I saw reflected both sides of the Great Paradox – the need for help and a principled refusal of it. As a victim of toxic exposure himself, a participant in polluting public waters, now proudly declaring himself as an environmentalist, why was he throwing in his lot with the anti-environmental Tea Party? Not because anyone was paying him to, at least directly. Sherman was putting up Tea Party lawn signs for free.

His source of news was limited to Fox News and videos and blogs exchanged by rightwing friends, which placed him in an echo chamber of doubt about the EPA, the federal government, the president, and taxes.

When Americans moved in the past, they left their homes in search of better jobs, cheaper housing, or milder weather. But, according to Bill Bishop and Robert G Cushing’s book, The Big Sort, when people move today, it is more often to live near others who share their views. People are segregating themselves into different emotionally toned enclaves – anger here, hopefulness and trust there. And the more people who confine themselves to like-minded company, the more extreme their views become. According to a 2014 Pew study of more than 10,000 Americans, the most politically engaged on each side see those in the “other party” not just as wrong, but as “so misguided that they threaten the nation’s wellbeing”. Compared with 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.

As I reviewed the social terrain of the right-leaning people I had come to know – the companies, the state government, the church, Fox News – I reflected on the paradox. Everyone I was talking to was enduring a great deal of pollution and despite the silence from companies, politicians and state officials, nearly everyone clearly knew it. To some, such as Lee Sherman, exposure had become the defining experience of their lives. To others, it was a passing matter. While many spoke of their love of capitalism, the dominant industry in their economy presented a decidedly mixed story. Oil was highly automated and accounted for some 15% of jobs – and even some of those were going to foreign workers at lower pay. The state had made huge cuts to local jobs and social services in order to bring in companies and, instead of money trickling down, a substantial amount was leaking out. To some degree, the community had become the site of local production without being the site of local producers.

Behind all I was learning about bayou and factory childhoods and the larger context – industry, state, church, regular media, Fox News – of the lives of those I had come to know lay, I realised, a deep story.

A deep story is a story that feels as if it were true. It removes judgment. It removes fact. It tells us how things feel. Such a story permits those on both sides of the political spectrum to stand back and explore the subjective prism through which the party on the other side sees the world. And I do not believe that we understand anyone’s politics, right or left, without it. For we all have a deep story.

The deep story here focuses on relationships between social groups within the national borders of the United States. I constructed this deep story to represent – in metaphorical form – the hopes, fears, pride, shame, resentment and anxiety in the lives of those I talked with.

You are patiently standing in a long line leading up a hill, as in a pilgrimage. You are situated in the middle of this line, along with others who are also white, older, Christian, and predominantly male, some with college degrees, some not.

Just over the brow of the hill is the American dream, the goal of everyone waiting in line. Many at the back of the line are people of colour – poor, young and old, mainly without college degrees. It is scary to look back – there are so many behind you, and in principle you wish them well. Still, you have waited a long time, worked hard, and the line is barely moving. You deserve to move forward a little faster. You are patient but weary. You focus ahead, especially on those at the very top of the hill.

The American dream is a dream of progress – the idea that you are better off than your forebears, just as they superseded their parents – and it extends beyond money and stuff. You have suffered long hours, layoffs, and exposure to dangerous chemicals at work, and received reduced pensions. You have shown moral character through trial by fire, and the American dream of prosperity and security is a reward for all of this, showing who you have been and are – a badge of honour.

The sun is hot and the line unmoving. In fact, is it moving backwards? You have not had a raise in years, and there is no talk of one. Actually, if you are short a high school diploma, or even a BA, your income has dropped over the last 20 years.

You have taken the bad news in stride because you are a positive person. You are not a complainer. You count your blessings. You wish you could help your family and church more, because that is where your heart is. You would like them to feel grateful to you for being so giving to them. But this line is not moving. And after all your intense effort, all your sacrifice, you are beginning to feel stuck.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Donald Trump supporter from Louisiana at a rally in neighbouring Mississippi. Photograph: Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images

Look! You see people cutting in line ahead of you! You are following the rules. They are not. As they cut in, it feels like you are being moved back. How can they just do that? Who are they? Some are black. Through affirmative action plans, pushed by the federal government, they are being given preference for places in colleges and universities, apprenticeships, jobs, welfare payments, and free lunches. Women, immigrants, refugees, public-sector workers – where will it end? Your money is running through a liberal sympathy sieve you do not control or agree with. These are opportunities you would have loved to have had in your day – and either you should have had them when you were young or the young shouldn’t be getting them now. It’s not fair.

Then you become suspicious. If people are cutting in line ahead of you, someone must be helping them. Who? A man is monitoring the line, walking up and down it, ensuring that the line is orderly and that access to the dream is fair. His name is President Barack Hussein Obama. But – hey – you see him waving to the line cutters. He feels extra sympathy for them that he does not feel for you. He’s on their side.

You can certainly be proud of being American. And anyone who criticises America – well, they are criticising you. If you can no longer feel pride in the United States through its president, you’ll have to feel American in some new way – by banding with others who feel as you do – strangers in their own land.

I return to my new Louisiana friends and acquaintances to find out whether the deep story resonates with them. When I relate it to Lee Sherman, he tells me, “You’ve read my mind.”

Feeling betrayed by the federal government and turning wholeheartedly to the free market, the right finds it hard to see the realities that confront them. Giant companies have grown vastly larger, more automated, more global, and more powerful. For them, productivity is increasingly based on cheap labour in plants abroad, cheap imported labour at home, and automation, and less on American labour. The more powerful they have become, the less resistance they have encountered from unions and government. Thus, they have felt more free to allocate more profits to top executives and stockholders, and less to workers.

But it is very hard to criticise an ally, and the right sees the free market as its ally against the powerful alliance of the federal government and the takers. Even Sherman, who had greatly suffered at the hands of Pittsburg Plate Glass, owned stock in it and exclaimed proudly to me, when I asked him how he felt about getting fired, “I was pissed and stunned but, hey, I didn’t lose everything. I had $5,000 in stocks!”

In the undeclared class war, expressed through the weary and ultimately enraging wait for the American dream, those I came to know developed a visceral hate for the ally of the “enemy” cutters in line – the federal government. They hated other people for needing it. They rejected their own need of it – even to help clean up the pollution in their backyard.

Normally when doing field research, a sociologist comes to a scene, then leaves it, and the scene itself remains unchanged. By my 10th visit with my core of white, middle-aged and older, Christian, married, blue- and white-collar Louisianans, I had discovered that virtually everyone I talked to embraced the same “feels-as-if” deep story. But by the end of my research, there had been a profound change.

I checked in with my new friends and acquaintances to see how they felt about Donald Trump. Looking back at my previous research, I see that the scene had been set for Trump’s rise, like kindling before a match is lit. Three elements had come together. Since 1980, virtually all those I talked with felt on shaky economic ground, a fact that made them brace at the very idea of “redistribution”. They also felt culturally marginalised: their views about abortion, gay marriage, gender roles, race, guns, and the Confederate flag all were held up to ridicule in the national media. They had begun to feel like a besieged minority. And to these feelings they added the cultural tendency to identify “up” the social ladder with the planter, the oil magnate, and to feel detached from those further down the ladder.

Trump is an “emotions candidate”. More than any other presidential candidate in decades, Trump focuses on eliciting and praising emotional responses from his fans rather than on detailed policy prescriptions. His speeches – evoking dominance, bravado, clarity, national pride, and personal uplift – inspire an emotional transformation. Then he points to that transformation. Not only does Trump evoke emotion, he makes an object of it, presenting it back to his fans as a sign of collective success.

His supporters have been in mourning for a lost way of life. Many have become discouraged, others depressed. They yearn to feel pride but instead have felt shame. Their land no longer feels like their own. Joined together with others like themselves, they feel greatly elated at Trump’s promise to deliver them unto a state in which they are no longer strangers in their own land.

Strangers in Their Own Land is published by The New Press

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