SwatTalk: The 2022 Midterms and the State of American Democracy
with Arlie Hochschild '62, H'93
Recorded on Monday, Nov. 21, 2022
TRANSCRIPT
Jason Zengerle ’96 Welcome everyone. It is great to have you with us tonight. Thank you so much for joining us for this "SwatTalk" about the 2022 midterms and the state of American democracy featuring Arlie Hochschild class of 1962. My name is Jason Zengerle. I am the class of 1996 and I'll be the moderator tonight. Before I turn things over to Arlie, I just wanted to go over a few preliminary pieces of business. "SwatTalks" is a speaker series brought to you by the Swarthmore Alumni Council, of which I'm a member. Tonight's session will be recorded, so you'll be able to find it online at the "SwatTalks" page on the Swarthmore College website within two or three weeks. If you're interested in watching previous talks, you can also find those on the "SwatTalks" page. For those of you who are new to "SwatTalks" or for our regulars who just need a reminder, tonight will go like this. Arlie will present for the first half hour or so, and then we'll finish with our usual question and answer session. Please ask questions by using the Q and A feature at the bottom of Zoom and please be sure to include your name and class year when you do so. I will collect those questions and will pose as many of them as I can to Arlie during the Q and A session. So I'd like to introduce Arlie Hochschild, one of Swarthmore's most celebrated alums and one of America's most esteemed sociologists. Arlie graduated from Swarthmore in 1962. She earned her master's and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and went on to teach there for several decades. She's the author of nine books, including "The Second Shift" about working parents and the division of labor at home and "The Outsourced Self" about the intersections between commerce and private life. Most recently, and most relevant to our discussion tonight, Arlie wrote "Strangers in Their Own Land, Anger and Mourn on the American Right." It's a deeply reported and deeply empathetic examination of a deep red community near Lake Charles, Louisiana. And it was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2016. Since "Strangers" was published six years ago, Arlie has been working on another book, interviewing people in Appalachia, specifically the Trump stronghold of Pike County in Eastern Kentucky. I first encountered Arlie's work when I was assigned "The Second Shift" in an introductory sociology class at Swarthmore nearly 30 years ago. And I've been reading and learning from her ever since. So I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to hear from Arlie tonight about the recently completed midterm elections and what they might tell us about the divisions in our country and the fragile state of our democracy. And with that, I will turn things over to Arlie.
Arlie Hochschild ’62 Well, thank you very much, Jason, and Swatties all. I'm delighted to be with you. You know, I remember my senior year in the spring 1962, sitting on the grass in front of Parrish Hall and looking at the line of oaks and the beautiful kind of hillside and wondering what I should do with my life. And well, you know, what would Lucretia Mott want me to do? And never in a million years would I have foreseen that I would spend five years off and on, among the most polluting petrochemical plants on the earth in Southern, port town of Lake Charles, Louisiana, to study members of the Tea Party, soon to become ardent base of support for Donald Trump. And it's a very epicenter of the revolt against virtually every value that was gently and persuasively imparted to me at Swarthmore. But it was because I took to heart Swarthmore's values that if you've got a problem, figure it out, search for proof and work for a better world, a quality of the races. I think these are our values we all share after our four years there, that I went down to the deep South to understand what could be going on for people who were very enthusiastic about undermining those values. So what I thought I could do in the time we have here, is start with some good news and then talk about what it is that brought us to this moment and what we can do about it. That's the territory. The good news is that actually a very recent "Forbes" survey found that 52% of GOP voters believe that the recent November midterm, 2022 elections, were free and fair, okay? The good news is that the steal, you know, the election was stolen, that the very people who were at the heart of that movement seem to be backing off a little, but I think we are not at all out of the woods. And yeah, I think that Donald Trump has a very good chance to be selected as the Republican candidate in 2024. So, backing up from that, how do we understand the rise of right and the big divide in our country today? I think we have to first go back to an economic story that I think very often liberal progressives don't count in. From 1970 on, I think we divided into the winners and losers of globalization. That is, there were companies, I'm here at Berkeley looking at Silicon Valley and high-tech service industries that call for highly educated populations, new companies, those became the winners of globalization. But there were older companies, older industries that were more vulnerable to offshoring and automation in rural and semi-rural areas and small towns in the Midwest. And they became the losers of globalization. It was a recent study that put together all of the red counties in the country and compared them to all the blue counties in the country, and found that indeed there is an economic difference and that in blue states, blue counties, income was going up, red counties income was going down. I think fundamentally this is very important thing. It's hard to forget and you're just listening to the hot notes of rhetoric, but how do we then put that... I should add to that economic story, and I'm looking at it certainly in Appalachia, Eastern Kentucky, where there can be an exaggerated downward kind of cascade of bad news so that when you lose your job, if you're in a rural area and you're not moving out, really it feels like the end of things. And there's kind of cultural loss, and not just joblessness, but prideless and a devaluation of things that you've always treasured, and opiates have come in big time in blue collar, white areas. But there's a cultural side to this story. People that I came to know don't feel that there is a national narrative that tells their story. They feel silenced, they feel colonized, in fact, that people in cities highly educated, you know, areas are making up values, imposing them on them, and that they are either have to agree or, you know, be shamed. So a lot of them are feeling, actually that something's been, quote, stolen from them. I should also say that along with this, a national survey has found that people were asked which political party was fighting for working families, is it Republican or Democrat? When I was sitting on the grass in front of Parrish Hall, the answer would be for working families, for poor, that would be the Democrats. That was why it was one. But for white, working-class that is be without BAs today, the answer is Republican. That it's the Republican party that they feel represented by. So how do we make sense of this? Let me focus on the whole... recap briefly what my work in Louisiana was, and then carry it forward to today. So I went into this red state world, this world where nationwide, as we know, they're poor, they have all of the social signs of poverty. They take more money from the federal government in aid than they give to it in tax dollars and suspect and revile the federal government. So that's The Red State paradox. And so how do they think about things? I came up with an idea of a deep story and what the deep story is, is a kind of a distillation of, it's a paradigm in a way. It's a story, but it's paradigm for how they feel. I formulated this story and then I went back to them, "What would you do? Does this work for you? Does this say what you think? If not, how would you change it?" And the story is that you are waiting in line and your feet are tired 'cause you've been waiting a long time. At the top of the hill is the American dream, and you are riveted on that dream. You are not looking at the very long line behind you and you feel like you don't, you don't begrudge anyone. You're a nice person, but then you see people cutting in line ahead of you it seems, and you wonder, "Who's that?" Well, that's women who now, through affirmative action, initially are eligible for jobs That used to be reserved for men. And you see Blacks who are now eligible for jobs that used to be reserved for whites. And you see immigrants and you see refugees, you see highly paid public sector workers. All of these feel to you as if they're cutting the line preventing you from moving forward. You feel forgotten. And you see Barack Obama, look at him, he seems to be waving to the line cutters, he seems to be favoring them and forgetting him. And finally, in a moment of a deep sea, the story, someone ahead of you in line, more educated, more successful, closer to the American dream, turns around and said, "You ignorant, I'll-educated, homophobic, sexist, racist, redneck." And then you feel you just wanna get out of that line. I went with that story to people who said, "Oh, you read my mind, that is my story. I live your metaphor." Or they would say, "No, you've left something out. The people waiting in line are paying taxes for the people who are cutting a line." And then there were some, "You left out the fact that we get out of line, we secede, that doesn't feel fair." Okay, so this is, we can say chapter one of the MAGA story as we look at the part of the Republican party that's peeled off into a cult-like section that would be chapter one. And then what happens in chapter two is Donald Trump comes around and Donald Trump says to them, "I'm yours and you're mine. I love you, you love me." And with that is, "I recognize you." Hold onto that idea. I recognize you. I interviewed a unemployed coal miner recently who had been... A coal mine closed down, but he was injured. He took Oxycontin for his injury to control the pain. Some years ago I became an addict. He lost his family, lost custody of his children, he lost his pride. And he said, "Oh, Donald Trump came to town. And he said, "Oh, I'm going to bring back coal. I knew he was lying, but I felt he saw who I was." Recognition, somehow his rhetoric, and in his, he has communicated this. So that's chapter two of a kind of a binding of leader to followers, and I think a lot of it has to do with their shame and his shamelessness. I believe that they feel no narrative above them. They feel downwardly mobile without an explanation for it and are suffering what I would call it structural shame. And that he's the guy who is one guy said, "Oh, he's like lightning in a jar." Well, what is that lightning in that jar? I think it's his very boldness from anyone else's point of view. The fact that he takes us through kind of a three-moment shame ritual, I believe. Moment one, he says something outrageous. "Oh, all immigrants are are rapists and and thieves." Moment two, the punditry, shame sense says, "You can't say that, that's outrageous to say something like that. They're good people stop it," they shame him. Moment three, he rails against the shamers. "Oh, treasonous press, the, you know, deep state, all these Democrats, PC." I think they love that, they love the railing against the shamers. And I've tried that out on people I've talked to. Yeah, yeah, sometimes he just pokes the bear and, of course, the left just falls right in with that. And, "Oh look, he's poking the bear." Okay, so that's that chapter of bind in chapter one. Chapter two of the deep story as we move forward in time is look what I do for you, how I suffer for you. I'm suffering the slings and arrows of this liberal culture that is of this economically winning team that we're now divided into. And there's a beatification. I am suffering for you. And I know that will sound unbelievable, but I do believe that's kind of what I'm hearing. That is how it feels to the people I've come to know, "look how he's suffered for us. They're shaming him the way they shame us." And because he's shame proof, because he's shame pugilist, he's pushing, he's defending us. Okay, so then we move, that's beatification, to the next chapter in which he says, "Look how I've done for you, I am suffering for you. You can see how they're after me. There's a whole narrative of suffering he carries forward, and then he adds to it. "So come, you defend me," the call to January 6th, "and stand up as a patriot, I'll give you your pride back. You can be dress up as you know, as the revolutionary heroes." And that brings us to January 6th and kind of the pride-shame mashup as the very people who felt they were defending their great leader are hauled into prison, the FBI, arraigned as treasonists, in fact. So there was a whole period of confusion now. And I believe that we are still in that period of confusion. And for the people that I'm looking at, I think they're kind of two groups. One who are just withdrawing from the media little bit in mourning, you know, four or five stages of loss and mourn. It's time to retreat, we were misled. And there are others who are, the second group, that are kind of doubling down. So this, what is it, fourth, fifth chapter, is one of splitting within the Republican party. And I'm hearing people saying, "Well, oh, they're the country club Republicans. I'm not a country club Republican, I'm a populist Republican." And among those, I think there is confusion, but they are still stop the steal. Something has been stolen. And here I'd like to pause because I'm sure we are all wondering, certainly I was scratching my head, how could it be with this mountain of evidence that the election was not stolen, it was legitimate. The Supreme Court says it, you know, 50 different state lawsuits, all say, no, it's safe, and I don't need to recite this for you. You know it well, and then we have the January 6th hearings. These people peak at that news, but they know it and still hold on to the idea that the election was stolen. So what goes on here? What is it? I can tell you they're regular people. They're not dumb, they're nice people. We're talking about a half, nearly half the American population. But there is magical thinking and why I feel that what Donald Trump has done in posing himself as the suffering victim of a liberal culture and economy and promising a new, you know, a new day for the losing side that he has, in a way, by claiming loss, he's laminated it onto the deep story. In other words, people are understanding the election and the claim of something being stolen because they're seeing it through a sense of many things have been stolen. My prosperity, my American dream, quote, "isn't just lost." He moved lost to stolen, he moved the emotional needle. And there people could point to many things that they used to have or that their father or grandfather had that they don't have. What's gone missing, who took it? So he's, in a way, been quite emotionally brilliant at exploiting a kind of an open, emotional, open sore. So that in a way, in a way lead to explain this piece of the Republican party, the MAGA part, part that's hard to explain by speaking in emotional Morse code, in a way, I'm trying to translate what I think emotions are into a language that I think we at Swarthmore could normally speak in. And so turning to what we need to do to get out of this hole, I think that answers are multiple, of course. But that one thing is that we all need to speak in Morse code. We all need to be able to hear something crazy and think what's under it. What would be another way of describing that belief? What would be the deep story that's animating it? Why the deep story? I guess I'm advocating kind of a way of understanding people who are angry, they will present which anger, but I think under that, is fear and shame. So how to create reaches from one culture to another, one party to another. First thing I should say is that studies show that right wing people know more are likely to make more accurate guesses about what Democrats think than Democrats are to make guesses about what Republicans think. In other words, we are both, we're all living in bubbles now, but urban, highly-educated bubbles where Democrats are concentrated, we're actually more bubblized than they are. So that's a first thing, a little piece of humble pie for us to eat, I think. And the second thing is to realize that, you know, in the 1960s, '50 and so on, there was a vibrant labor union movement in this country. And it formed, I think, the main bridge between the working class and the Democratic party. And because labor unions have been undercut by globalization, basically as companies just left, you couldn't bargain with them, we need a substitute kind of structure. And in the last actual days of my research in Louisiana, there was a young man, David McCullough, who came with me and he met all people that I came to know there. And he has started a high school national project called The American Exchange Project. And actually, Bob Putnam, another Swattie, is on the board of this with us. And what he has done is to take high school seniors, they get to know each other on Google, and then they arrange visits with one another. You get Southern high school, public high school kids to visit people in the North. North visit kids in the South, you get coastal kids, inland, inland kids to the coast, three week visits. And you don't start with politics, you start with, gosh, you know, "What's it like here? What do you eat? What are the jobs?" And I think that kind of, that kind of civic kind of intelligence growing experience would be great. I don't think it's enough, but it's a start to build kind of a more cosmopolitan culture, and one that increased recognition across the differences. So there are many more things I could say, but maybe we'll stop there. We'll open it up for questions and comments.
Jason Zengerle ’96 Thank you so much, Arlie, that was fantastic. We have a bunch of questions. I will try to get through as many as I possibly can before we run outta time. The first one is that I'm gonna ask this from Spencer Jones, class of '13, and he has a question about the phenomenon of wanting to be quote, unquote seen or understood by a politician while knowing that the politician's policies will do little to help the actual circumstances of one's life. Is this a universal political phenomenon or is there something historically unique about these particular circumstances?
Arlie Hochschild ’62 Wow, these questions are golden. I don't think this is unique, but it's certainly, I think, exaggerated in this instance, there's a feeling, and I felt it with so many interviews of people, they would start, so this isn't exactly the question, but I'm elaborating a little bit on the experience of talking to people who don't feel recognized. They feel, some of the first things they would say to me is, "Oh, you know, what are you doing here? Why are you here?" I said, "Well, I'm worried about the divide." They'll say, "Oh yeah, we're worried about that divide too." And then they would say, "But we think people like you, you know, on the coasts think we are backward and dumb, uneducated." And I said, "Well, I'm interested in telling the real story here. Would you let me into your life? Can I get to know you?" You know, "Where are your ancestors buried?" Take me to church, let me look at your life and I will commit to trying to correct that message if it needs correction. So it began with, "You don't recognize us." That was the first thing they would say to me, time and time again. So I think it's, of course, a politician's tool, but any politician will go and say, "I'm trying to understand who you are," but some people are better at it than others and charismatic leaders who come in and promise heaven, it's not just the heaven they're promising, they're directing it to an injury, to a sense of injured pride. Of course, in the case of Appalachia, things got worse after Trump. He did not deliver in any way, same thing with Louisiana.
Jason Zengerle ’96 This is-
Arlie Hochschild ’62 I'm leaving that question there, it's a great question. I think I can't answer it beyond that.
Jason Zengerle ’96 This is a question from Barry Skolnick, I don't know his class, but he notes that his former high school best friend "is a college graduate and engineer, had a long career at Intel and he is now a full on MAGA election denier and all the rest. I've been befuddled by his conversion. I'm not sure the quote, unquote story you have brilliantly set out explains him. Any ideas on how to understand this type of person?"
Arlie Hochschild ’62 Yeah, yeah, that's great. The people that I met who were actually paradoxically the most ardent were people I would call the elite of the left behind. They were not the abject poor. They had gone to college, you know, maybe it was an online college, maybe it was two years, maybe it took a few years getting through, but they were anguished and aggrieved at the kind of decline of the region and their town and their family. They felt perched to be a leader in a place that was falling down. And they often, the people that I came to think of as the most ardent, were people who knew how much better it was elsewhere. Like one guy I met was a real stayer, in Appalachia you were a stayer or a leaver. And if you are stayer, you really committed, you wanted to make your reputation, be a leader in a place where you grew up and valuing everything was there in that place. And this guy, though, had a job that took him here, there the other place and he could come back and say, "We're a mess, look what we don't have, and look at how they look down on us. We don't exist for them, no narrative for us." So they became obsessed with the comparison in a way between blue states and red states, and so I think what we could do, and this is just a beginning, is kind of collect the conditions under which people like, like Mr. Skolnick's friend, college-educated friend could get the MAGA message and have it speak to him. Yeah, but I can do it now.
Jason Zengerle ’96 This is a question from Lawrence Phillips. "What other than understanding can be offered to those who realistically have been left behind?"
Arlie Hochschild ’62 I think that actually Joe Biden's Build Back Better is a huge kind of potential a sort of shot in the arm for the people I'm talking to. But what's missing with all of those opportunities for blue-collar, skill building and job opportunities is a narrative, a narrative of recognition. I mean, what was so brilliant about Great Again is that it implies a decline, a fall, it's an answer to a fall. And Hillary Clinton was just saying, "Oh hey, you just have to work hard and get there and speak to them." They felt that was a slap in the face in a way. So what can realistically be given? Here's an example, actually, I did an op-ed on this, but there's a democratic, a congressman here Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley. So Google, Facebook, you name it, he represents it here, Democrat. He says, "Look, I have a lot of immigrants here and I'm an immigrant myself or my parents were, but and we outsource coding jobs to Bangalore, India, but what I'm proposing," he said, "is to insource those jobs to Middle America," and he got together with a Republican, Hal Rogers of Paintsville, Kentucky who said, "Hey, let's make Silicon Holler." And they went and did it. And I went to look at the training program and interviewed the people whose lives were transformed from putting sandwiches together at Subway for $7.50 an hour or working the night shift at Hotel 6 for 10. they were now in, you know, 70,000 a year jobs. And so that could be replicated and actually Khanna has a book out proposing that. And I think it's a great idea. So that's the kind of thing that could be amplified. There's some good ideas that we just need to beef up.
Jason Zengerle ’96 This question is from David Gelber class of '63. He asks, "How do your friends in Kentucky think about the climate issue and how should people like us talk to them about it?"
Arlie Hochschild ’62 You know, there is a lot of possible crossover on climate, Dave, and great too hear you, and by the way, Squattie Dave has, in his work, done more than almost anyone I know to help get a climate, a winning issue across this country. Thank you, Dave, for your work. But I would give you an example of a guy who is a big MAGA advocate, and I asked him what he did for his line of work. He said, "Oh, I grow hemp." I said, "What do you grow hemp for?" "Oh, I'm getting, in fact all the hemp farmers, 40 different hemp farmers together to create a biomass, which we're putting together with municipal waste. And that can be used for natural gas that, you know, could be mixed with the fuel line for Delta Airlines." Oh my goodness, but he's a coal guy, he's very interested in wind and solar and a lot of these people are talking about getting solar panels on the top of sawed-off mountains and sawed off for the coal. So I think if it's an economic opportunity and it's presented with recognition and no put down, I think it's a crossover issue.
Jason Zengerle ’96 This is a question from Perry Chang, class of '85 who has some personal experience in Hazard, Kentucky, and the question is, "What have you picked up from your research there, if anything that is different from what you found in Louisiana? How much do you think that might be a function of several years in tumultuous political events having passed and how much from a different culture or different economic base?"
Arlie Hochschild ’62 It feels like a different version of the same deep story and the version is different in that the economy is very much up and down, depending on the demand for coal. I think they've been harder hit than Louisiana, although both, you know, are fuel related economies. And I think the culture is different. They're less religious. I think they're more isolated from Blacks, and more generally suspicious of government. So I think they're different cultural roots, but it's a version of the deep story, but some change has to do with time. In other words, I would've found it in Louisiana, it's not region related. And I asked one guy, I told him about the deep story and he said, "Well, you're waiting in line really imagine that someone in line has been beating you up. There some bully in line, and then another guy fights the bully and the guy that fights the bully in line, isn't perfect, you know, he's kind of a counter bully, but he's your bully. That's the story we're in." And he said, "I don't think Donald Trump is a great guy, you know, he's got flaws, but he's our bully, and you need a guy that big to almost make up, to be like the government. So that is kind of the alteration to the deep story that I'm finding that has to do, I think, with recent events.
Jason Zengerle ’96 This is a question from Sanda Balaban. She asks, "Are you finding, are you finding differences in the outlook of the young people in those communities and what are the implications for bridge building?"
Arlie Hochschild ’62 Wonderful. Hi, Sanda, I love Sanda. Who's a dear, dear friend of our son David, who's also a Swattie, so and is the godmother of our granddaughter. So yeah, you know, I was sticking with all these oldsters, you know, '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s and I not as old as me, but oldsters and they are far more likely to be conservative than their kids. And I think we need more reach out to young kids, but they are, the young ones, some of these new coders that I mentioned, who are younger, were much more socially progressive. But they didn't, they felt actually pushed back by a sense that they were not recognized again by other young people on the coasts. They were quite diffident and felt that there's a missing empathy bridge. I think I can envision a young to young kind of set of connections that aren't there, but I met people that felt they were interested in urban people and one woman, for example, said, "You know, I grew up in the all-white area. I wish I hadn't, you know, I'd be interested to get to know people that are different from me." So that's not the stereotype, but I do report I've this.
Jason Zengerle ’96 This question is from Atinuke Lardner, and I apologize if I butchered the pronunciation of your name, class of '22. "Can you speak more to the relationship between the quote, unquote left behind and whiteness?" What would you say to the argument that the rise of the right is a movement of whiteness and that the left behind aren't as isolated from educated whites as they might like to think?"
Arlie Hochschild ’62 Yeah, I think that, I like that question a lot. I think the left behind is race-based, but not just race-based. I think it's part of a collage of left behinds. That's the simple answer to it. But there is a sense that actually, you know, Blacks are getting ahead, they're doing better than we are and so there's an envy thing there. At the same time, a lot of them are saying, "You know, what's the difference between hood and holler?" I mean, you know, in Louisville, for example, you know you've got people that aren't working, unemployed, they're on welfare here, there are a lot of people who are unemployed on welfare, they've got addiction here, we've got addiction, what's the difference? You know, there's crime in the street, you're frightened, we've got that too. And one guy said, "I don't see any different between living in Murray Trailer Court in Eastern Kentucky and living in center of Chicago." You know, white to Black similarity. And then I mentioned that to another guy I talked to and he said, "Oh, I haven't heard about hillbilly?" Oh, he said, "There's no difference except for the music. We've got twangy music and they've got rap." And then the next person I talked to said, "Oh, well they haven't heard about hillbilly rap." So even the music was similar. So, okay, what about, you know, the whole acknowledgement of the history of slavery and discrimination? No, I think not, but I think there's a start, maybe you're talking to an optimist here, but there is a recognition of social class and they feel, the young people I've talked to, that class has been dropped out of the story by the left, left is talking about race, it's talking about gender, it's talking about sexuality, but it is not talking about what you would think would be basic to left, social class. I'm hearing that among the young on the right.
Jason Zengerle ’96 This is a question from Deborah Vagins class of '91. She asked, "Do you have any recommendation for how we might depoliticize economic issues that have become partisan because they're winning for Democrats, but they've now alienated Republicans. These initiatives help people in both parties, of course, but have been more polarized in recent years." And in particular she's thinking of issues "that would've been addressed in "The Second Shift." Pay equity, paid leave, et cetera."
Arlie Hochschild ’62 There is a book and I think it's called "Turn Left," it's by a guy named Lopez, which has tried out three basic kinds of appeal... It's really an important thing that he's done. The three kinds of Democratic appeal to blue-collar America. One is to just talk about economics, you know, just leave race out of it. That's one, the second is a to appeal, as Donald Trump does, to race. And the third is to mix an appeal of economic improvements with racial equity improvements. So you've got, what he's done is to look at persuadables as people that don't always vote one party or they're in the middle. They're independents, those persuadables and he says, "I think about 40%, actually a high percent, of people are not the extremes, they're persuadables, and he's trying these three kinds of appeal out on these persuadables and discovering that when you present a persuadable with a combination of both economic policies that are gonna help everybody of a certain class and racial improvement, you're improving racial equaling, that third category of appeals works better than the other two. So Haney Lopez, yeah, is a guy that's done this and so I think he's made a contribution there.
Jason Zengerle ’96 I think we only have time for one more question, unfortunately. I'm gonna try to combine a few, this has sort of been a theme running throughout the Q and As and it's a question about whether a national post-high school or post-college term of service would help at all in terms of bridging some of these gaps, giving people com some sort of common story that they could tap into, and whether you think that would be a good and useful idea to trying to solve some of these divisions?
Arlie Hochschild ’62 I love that suggestion and I wonder if Lucretia Mott, you know, a face on the hallway as you go in for dinner every day in Parrish. It was there when I was there.
Jason Zengerle ’96 It might be gone now.
Arlie Hochschild ’62 Times have changed. Okay. Both the picture and the location of dinner, that's a very Swarthmore idea. It's a wonderful idea, and I'd love to see it happen and what bad could happen? I mean, already these students, these high school students in this kind of fledgling project that I've just mentioned are transformed and they're talking a little differently and I think to have it be something everybody does would be great. The only other institutions we have are the Army that puts people of different social classes and races together and labor unions. Some of them did that. And so I think it's a great idea for a new kind of solution to the divide we are faced with.
Jason Zengerle ’96 This was fascinating. Thank you so much, Arlie, for doing this tonight. I'm really sorry we were not able to get, we had a ton of questions. I think we had, you know, close to 60 and I think I was able to ask nine. So I apologize to everyone I did not get to, and hopefully, the answers that you were able to hear were helpful. But thank you everyone for coming out. Thank you, Arlie, for doing this, and this was great. Thanks a lot.
Arlie Hochschild ’62 Great! Thanks, Jason.
Jason Zengerle ’96 Bye.
Arlie Hochschild ’62 Bye.
