Thoughts About People Cutting in Line

A Memory from Guatemala City Rippling Quietly Across Time

It was like a silent echo across three decades.  Reading Arlie Russel Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land – Anger and Mourning on the American Right not long ago, my mind flashed to a memory from just weeks after arriving in Guatemala City, my first diplomatic post.  It must have been June or July of 1994, and I was waiting in line with a friend at a movie theater in Zona 14 one Sunday afternoon.  I suddenly remembered the jolt of frustration I felt at what happened in that line.  I also recalled sensing, just below conscious awareness, that I was seeing the deeper dynamics of a society in quiet action, its unstated norms and rules playing out in a way that I could never have learned by reading about them in a book or listening to a lecture.  Little did I know the same frame fit my own country now.  Or did it?

Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash

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But what does waiting in line have to do with a book?  Let me try to explain.  Arlie Russell Hochschild is a professor emeritus of Sociology from UC Berkeley who gained deserved renown thanks to the very book I was reading, which had become an unexpected best-seller.  The New York Times had put it on a list of one of the six books that best explained President Trump’s surprise 2016 election.  For out-of-touch blue state elites like me, Russell Hochschild’s research shed light on the sources of Trump’s puzzling popularity among working class people in deep red states.  A note in passing: I was not surprised to learn in the preface that the author had developed her keen interest in understanding how other people see the world as the daughter of a diplomat living overseas.

In this case, Russell Hochschild, a political liberal from sky blue Berkeley, wanted to know why people in the ruby red Lake Charles area of Louisiana opposed environmental regulations even while living in an area badly polluted by the petrochemical industry.  She was likewise curious about the staunch support for the anti-tax Tea Party movement (which sounds almost quaint about now) in a place so dependent on federal government funds.  It is important to state for the record that Russell Hochschild formed real bonds of respect, affection, and even friendship with the people she met there, who welcomed her with open arms despite the differences in their political views.   

Russell Hochschild spent five years researching the book, and her reporting contains a number of rich veins.  To boil these down to their core, she resorts to a striking metaphor.  Many of her friends in Louisiana saw themselves as having dutifully waited their turn in line to achieve (some version of) the American dream, only to see a flurry of newcomers be allowed to cut in line ahead of them, derailing their ambition.  The newcomers were a diverse lot: illegal immigrants, minorities, women, LGBTQI folks, and others.  People had grown frustrated by the perceived unfairness of the situation.  Their frustration had metastasized into resentment and anger—resentment with a system they saw as rigged against them, anger about the government’s supposed role in helping others gain unfair advantage.  This cauldron of confused feelings had boiled over into intense opposition to the established system.  Trump was their instrument of destruction.

Whatever the relationship between perception and reality in this case, I know enough to know that perception, particularly in politics, trumps reality every time.  Fast forward to November 2024.  The perceived unfairness, the sense of a system rigged, of undeserving groups being allowed to cut in line, has continued to deepen and spread across the land.

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Back to Guatemala City in mid 1994.  It’s funny to think that lines for movies could snake around a city block back then.  Reserving your seats in advance was not yet a thing, and Netflix and the pandemic lay far in the future.  But if you got there too late, you might be stuck craning your neck in the front row or miss the show altogether.  I remember we arrived at least half an hour early and were near the front of the line at first—maybe ten or so people back.  But something mysterious had occurred.  Fifteen minutes later, we found ourselves closer to the back of the line than the front.  How did this happen?  It happened plain as day right before our eyes.  People were cutting in line, invited in by “friends” who then had more “friends” to invite, and so on.  In that way, a small group of ten or so people in front of us had become 20, then 40, then more.  No exaggeration.  And we, as though by sleight of hand, had slipped from the front of the line to the back. 

That long-ago experience in Guatemala City became weirdly formative for me as a diplomat focused on political affairs.  For one, it reminded me (if I needed reminding) that what you see with your own eyes says more about reality than what people might tell you.  As for the seemingly disorderly line itself, it became a living image of something more fundamental.  It became a metaphor for a kind of structural corruption I would encounter often in many places I served (not only in Guatemala)—a profound and pervasive political distortion and dysfunction characteristic of countries with weak institutions that were easily manipulated by inside players and powerful interests.  

In these places, playing by the rules is punished and going around them rewarded.  Family ties and friendships count for everything while hard work or innate talent, not so much.  The law itself is used as a tool of power, not justice.  As political scientists say, it is rule not of law but by law—because the law is deployed, often deliberately, to facilitate the interests of friends and to thwart the interests of rivals or enemies¹.  It is a system of men (yes, they are mostly men), not of laws. To return to the core metaphor, if you don’t cut in line with the help of your friends, you’ll end up at the back of the line.  

Could the United States have become that kind of place?

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I’m not quite sure I can convey the depth of the irony.  Irony may not be the right word.  It was two years into President Bill Clinton’s first term when I arrived in Guatemala, his main campaign slogan still echoing in my ears:  Those who “work hard and play by the rules” should be able to get ahead in America.  If it was true then, does it remain true now?  Many Americans—an apparent majority—believe it is not.  How can anyone, least of all me, tell so many Americans they’re wrong?  That their perception is wrong.  That the system is not rigged against them.  That other people are not cutting in line ahead of them, and inviting their family and friends to jump to the front just to rub it in.  People know exactly what they’re feeling.  They don’t need to be told that it’s true, or not true.

Not only that, I agree. Those who wait dutifully in line, at a minimum, should not be punished for it. Those who work hard and play by the rules should absolutely be able to get ahead in our country. What is America without that?

But if they know what they’re feeling and have good reason to feel it, do they know exactly what they are seeing too?  Are they seeing people cut in line right before their eyes like I did?  And if not, are they sure they’ve identified the right people? The right cause? The real culprit?

What if their wrath has locked in on the wrong target?  What if their frustration has been manipulated by demagogues and cynics? Reflected back to them in toxic form to inflame them, not to help them?  What if the cause of their economic displacement is automation, not immigration?  What if the petrochemical industry (to take one example) is ceding its dominance in the energy matrix as part of an inexorable economic transition, and not because other people (whoever they are) are cutting in line?  What if the real problem is the creative destruction of a dynamic economy, without which the human race would have remained stuck in the stone age and America mired in the stagecoach era? More pointedly, what if the problem is the political mismanagement of creative destruction?—which (incidentally) is much easier critiqued than conducted?  What if the people plotting to deploy the law to rig the system are those accusing others of rigging?  It would be a tried and true tactic of those who thrive in structurally corrupt systems, I can tell you that.

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I’m reminded that the critical first phase in developing sound strategy is to accurately define the problem you are aiming to solve.  Get that part wrong, and you’re done before you start.  You’ll end up addressing the wrong problem and exacerbating the cause of the underlying condition (which you had failed to accurately frame and define) in the process, making things worse instead of better.  It’s not like this very thing hasn’t happened before.  

But what happens when the proposed treatment for the wrong problem is (among other things) a highly concentrated dose of the very disease that caused the problem in the first place—a brazen, unabashed, absolutely shameless American version of structural corruption?

Welcome to the American version of the undeveloping world.

1. The idea is aptly captured in the infamous phrase, variously attributed to different Latin American autocrats and dictators, “Para mis amigos, todo; para mis enemigos, la ley.” (For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.)