A few hundred yards from the shoreline – where the Gulf of Mexico meets the small town of Cameron in south-west Louisiana – my feet are crunching over four-year-old detritus.
I am standing among the battered pews of a Baptist church, on shards of glass and wood that are strewn across the floor, gazing at its partly collapsed roof. The relics of the back-to-back hurricanes that pummelled this community in 2020 are still scattered here and throughout much of Cameron. Residents have long referred to this distant part of the US as “the end of the world” – but the adage feels more prescient now than ever. The population has dwindled from nearly 2,000 to a few hundred since the storms; empty foundations mark the locations of many homes that were swept away in tidal surges; and a gargantuan gas export terminal looms on the horizon.
Down the street, I meet Lerlene Rodrigue, who comes out to find me after hearing my footsteps. She is living in a trailer next to her partly destroyed family home, which is still being rebuilt, and points in the direction of a nearby graveyard. She tells me how the storm surge from Hurricane Laura brought her father’s buried coffin “floating up”. It was missing for years and was rediscovered only months ago; it is now, finally, “back in the ground”.
“We came back,” she says of Laura’s aftermath. “But if it happens again, I’m not. I’m done.”
The humid swamplands and coastal communities of Louisiana’s third congressional district will not decide the outcome of this election. But they have more at stake than most places in the country: sitting on the frontlines of frequent and extreme weather events; increasingly polluted by oil and gas industry proliferation; and at threat of decimation by alarming sea-level rise. Yet you are likely to hear little about life in these parts in the wider conversation as voting day rapidly approaches – so certain is Donald Trump to win here and so absent, over decades, is the Democratic party.
But it was in 2016, after Trump’s unexpected national victory, that the US’s coastal elites turned to writing about this region to explain what had happened. In Strangers in Their Own Land, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild explores the popularity of the Tea Party movement in this area of the state, giving rise to the phrase “the great paradox”. In Hochschild’s view, this notion surmises how voters most in need of federal government assistance and regulation – as those in climate-ravaged Louisiana are – can support a Republican party hell-bent on dismantling such government oversight altogether.
Rodrigue tells me she accepts climate science (Trump calls it a hoax), and is opposed to the blight and pollution of more gas terminal construction (a certainty if Trump wins next month). Yet she will still vote for him, remembering how the former president imposed seafood tariffs on China, which she says were vital to preserving the dwindling community of shrimpers that she and her family have been part of for generations.
***
Farther inland, I make a visit to the Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana at an opulent country club, on the banks of a lake surrounded by chemical plants that belch pollutants into the sky. Hochschild, who also spent time with this group, found an intricate lattice of explanations for her great paradox, including demographic changes, an imbalanced economy, religious dogma and race-based resentment. Much of this is on display here today – and seems even further entrenched.
Many of the women present have also sacrificed a great deal to extreme weather. I ask one attender, who lost her home during Laura, whether she views herself as a victim of the climate crisis. She shakes her head. “I believe almighty God has a say-so of what the climate is gonna be,” she says.
The keynote speech is being delivered by Louisiana’s Republican insurance commissioner, Tim Temple, as the state endures a coverage crisis tied to frequent major hurricanes. Many people here complain about their rates doubling within the past year. But Temple gives an unremarkable oration and doesn’t mention the climate crisis once. Instead, he blames it all on over-regulation. In an interview with me afterwards, he repeatedly refuses to acknowledge climate science.
It is a reminder of the catastrophic failures of conservative leaders in this state, some of whom, such as the hard-right governor, Jeff Landry, have mirrored Trump’s language on climate hoaxes. It also warns of the grim reality a second Trump term would bring, given his shameless promotion of falsehoods and conspiracy theories in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene this month, which are likely to have consequences for those voting for him just as much as anyone else.
There is, perhaps, less made of the failures of the Democrats in Louisiana, who in the last election cycle here woefully capitulated, essentially handing control of the state to the hard right.
And yet, just a few miles from the country club, signs of a refreshing resistance are beginning to take shape. I meet Sadi Summerlin, an abortion-rights organiser who has decided to run for Congress here against an incumbent extremist and climate-science denier named Clay Higgins. Higgins suggested recently that the head of Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency should be arrested and sent to prison for seeking to regulate toxic emissions in the state.
It is clearly an uphill battle, but Summerlin is keen to buck the idea that progressive politics cannot be promoted in communities that vote overwhelmingly conservative. We canvass the streets in the lower-income neighbourhoods of Lake Charles in the sweltering humidity, members of Summerlin’s family doubling as her campaign staff. She listens intently as residents talk about their struggles to bounce back after the storms.
“We’ve not been present,” she acknowledges. “We’ve not been speaking out. We’ve been allowing the Republican party to decide what we should say and what we should not.”
Her campaign, she says, is about starting conversations, not necessarily winning. Her honesty is refreshing. The conversations cannot start soon enough.
• Oliver Laughland is the Guardian’s US southern bureau chief
