Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

[gilda_elise]

In Strangers in Their Own Land, the renowned sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild embarks on a thought-provoking journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou country – a stronghold of the conservative right. As she gets to know people who strongly oppose many of the ideas she famously champions, Russell Hochschild nevertheless finds common ground and quickly warms to the people she meets – among them a Tea Party activist whose town has been swallowed by a sinkhole caused by a drilling accident – people whose concerns are actually ones that all Americans share: the desire for community, the embrace of family, and hopes for their children.

Strangers in Their Own Land goes beyond the commonplace liberal idea that these are people who have been duped into voting against their own interests. Instead, Russell Hochschild finds lives ripped apart by stagnant wages, a loss of home, an elusive American dream – and political choices and views that make sense in the context of their lives. Russell Hochschild draws on her expert knowledge of the sociology of emotion to help us understand what it feels like to live in "red" America. Along the way she finds answers to one of the crucial questions of contemporary American politics: why do the people who would seem to benefit most from "liberal" government intervention abhor the very idea?

What will people give up, clean air, clean water, a livable environment, in order to have a job? A job with an employer who isn’t held accountable for the damage its done? But what if it turned out that oil or chemical companies don’t bring an exceptional number of jobs? What then is the reason that these people vote against their own self interest?

And why would people rail against the government while living in a state that gets a disproportionate amount of government largess? Those are the questions Hochschild is trying to finds the answers to.

It takes about half the book before some answers are forthcoming. A big reason for their discontent seems to be the idea that people of color are “cutting in line,” in front of white workers, keeping them from reaching the “American dream.” No thought is ever given to the fact that for generations people of color weren’t even allowed in line. And now for most, white, black or brown, the line doesn’t even exist anymore.

What it seemed to all come down to was what the author calls “emotional self-interest.” Many of the people she interviewed believe the story of their being pushed aside, of the other “taking over their country,” and they’ll do anything to hold onto that story, even if it means overlooking facts that don’t fit into their narrative.

I suppose that’s the closest will get to an answer. I’m not 100% satisfied with it, but I think it’s definitely a start.







Links are to more information regarding each book or author, not to the review.


1. The Outsider
2. War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence
3. Lost Dogs and Lonely Hearts
4. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
5. Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition
6. From Baghdad to America: Life after War for a Marine and His Rescued Dog (Lava #2)
7. The Gap Into Vision: Forbidden Knowledge (Gap #2)
8. The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery
9. First King of Shannara (Original Shannara Trilogy 0)
10. Legends of the Fall
11. Moon of the Crusted Snow
12. Mio, My Son
13. Circe
14. Al Franken: Giant of the Senate
15. Memoirs of a Polar Bear
16. Of Mice and Men
17. A Dog's Purpose
18. A Quiet Victory for Latino Rights: FDR and the Controversy Over "Whiteness"
19. The Gap Into Power: A Dark and Hungry God Arises (Gap #3)
20. The Face of Apollo (Book of the Gods #1)
21. The Talisman
22. The Sword of Shannara
23. The Scarlet Lion
24. 999
25. The Sugar Solution
26. The Court of the Midnight King
27. Children Of the Sun
28. Stranger: The Challenge of a Latino Immigrant in the Trump Era
29. The God Gene (The ICE Sequence #2)
30. The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant: The Complete Annotated Edition by Ulysses S. Grant
31. Duel: Terror Stories
32. The Roanoke Girls
33. Colour Bar: The Triumph of Seretse Khama and His Nation
34. Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl
35. Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization
36. The Ice
37. Nature's New Deal:The Civilian Conservation Corps & the Roots of the American Environmental Movement
38. Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae
39. The Eden Legacy
40. Charnel House
41. In Search of Dark Matter
42. General James Longstreet: The Confederacy's Most Controversial Soldier
43. Carrion Comfort
44. I Travel by Night (I Travel by Night #1)
45. Midnight Sun
46. Wolf Willow: A History, a Story & a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier
47. Doom City (Greystone Bay #2)
48. Through Blood & Fire
49. A Blaze of Glory (Civil War: 1861-1865, Western Theater #1)
50. Recursion
51. Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
52. Thomas Paine and the Promise of America
53. The Gap Into Madness: Chaos and Order (Gap #4)
54. Inspection
55. The Editor
56. The Void Protocol (The ICE Sequence #3)
57. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

Comments

[shooting2kill.livejournal.com]

I know little about Trump and wouldn't presume to know anything about the motives of people who voted for him. I was speaking from my own perspective here in the UK where London has effectively become a city-state, far removed from the concerns of people who live elsewhere. I think a lot of the disdain and scepticism (can't spell that) which England has for the metropolitan London elite is rooted less in the ideas and values of this elite but more in the way the elite presents itself (without meaning to or realising) as being pretty obnoxious: intellectually snobby, very hypocritical, materialistic and with very little understanding of the problems of the average, low paid worker, for whom worries about popular social concerns are a luxury and irrelevant. Maybe in the US Trump gets this?

[leethet.livejournal.com]

People in Britain do sometimes (I say sometimes because I know a few who do - I can't speak to what the majority think!) try to compare Britain to the U.S. in this particular regard, and you really can't. It isn't that there aren't some general similarities - there certainly are. One of the key differences, culturally, is that Britain always respected education and the bettering of one's self intellectually. America has always been anti-intellectual, proud to be rough and tough and adventurous and always contemptuous of "those faggy intellectuals in their ivory towers."

That's one of many differences, so I don't think a straight comparison is valid without a lot of caveats. That said, yes, the low-paid, poorly educated people do feel threatened and excluded by intellectual elites (not so much, I think, by the rich, who show clearly, quite often, that they are not intellectually superior to anyone). The U.S. has a lot of citizens who are high school dropouts, under or unemployed, avowed Christians (though you wouldn't know it from their behavior) who do actually believe that only white Christians like themselves should be in the U.S., should have jobs, should have rights - that treating those different from themselves as citizens with equal rights somehow is taking away their birthright - they long for an imaginary era where white high school drop outs had good paying jobs. Those days are long gone. Trump was never going to bring them back, and it isn't the fault of brown people or uppity women. That's an ignorant and bigoted position, one that it is very difficult to warm to or sympathize with. These are people who blatantly dismiss facts (such as that men like Trump are PRECISELY the problem) because they don't align with their personal preferences as victims of "diversity."

I understand that many Brits feel uncomfortable in a similar way with the waves of immigrants (hence Brexit, etc) and it's true that this fear of "other" is fueled by intolerance and ignorance (and fear).

But there are too many cultural differences to really equate the two populations, I think.

[leethet.livejournal.com]

London has effectively become a city-state, far removed from the concerns of people who live elsewhere

I feel the same is true here. A friend and I were just discussing this, in fact. Newspapers tend to cover what's happening in big cities - L.A., New York City, Washington D.C. - as if the opinions expressed there and the desires and beliefs of the residents there are somehow nationwide. But they certainly are not. People out in what the sneerers like to call "flyover country" are not ultra-chic urbanites. They have very different ways of living and thinking about the world. I think the news business in the U.S. sometimes gets lazy - the big city papers don't get out of the big city often enough because they think if they know what the urbanites think and want, they know all that matters.

[gilda-elise.livejournal.com]

Though there are similarities, the two countries aren't as alike as the media tries to maintain. For one, are "elites" are spread throughout the country. LA, Chicago, New York. Even the South has its mega-cities and centers of liberal thought, like Austin. And more people live in those cities than not.

While certainly not an elite, I'm not a low paid worker, either, but my father was. Yet he was still able to feel for those who had less. Maybe not give, but certainly understand. One would think that those who do have less would understand more what those at the bottom are going through.

And, no, Trump doesn't think that deeply. He understood that he could con those people into thinking that he was on their side. Oh, and that the Electoral College is rigged.

[shooting2kill.livejournal.com]

While certainly not an elite, I'm not a low paid worker, either, but my father was. Yet he was still able to feel for those who had less. Maybe not give, but certainly understand.

He was able to do that because he was a thinking, feeling human being and not someone who could be generalised about, unimaginatively, and lumped into some huge group.

One would think that those who do have less would understand more what those at the bottom are going through.

There does seem to be something which happens in society where each class strives to move away from the class which is closest behind them i.e. middle class from working class and working class from classes below them such as poor whites and poor non-whites. But I don't think it means that they don't understand the class below them, just that they want to move on from them! People talk a lot about the desire for 'equality' (another secular religion) but when the views of people are analysed being equal to others is often the last thing they want because they're striving to be better than the next guy! That's partly what the exam system is about, to filter out which student is better than the other - students don't want to be equally at the bottom but at the top and ahead of their peers.

[gilda-elise.livejournal.com]

There does seem to be something which happens in society where each class strives to move away from the class which is closest behind them i.e. middle class from working class and working class from classes below them such as poor whites and poor non-whites. But I don't think it means that they don't understand the class below them, just that they want to move on from them! People talk a lot about the desire for 'equality' (another secular religion) but when the views of people are analysed being equal to others is often the last thing they want because they're striving to be better than the next guy! That's partly what the exam system is about, to filter out which student is better than the other - students don't want to be equally at the bottom but at the top and ahead of their peers.

Considering how some over here talk, "They need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps," forgetting that those are many of the people whose bootstraps have been cut, "They're all cheating the government out of money so they don't have to work," even though many people on Welfare have jobs, you wouldn't know it. Some people have two or three jobs, but the jobs don't pay well enough for someone to live on. Yes, there are cheaters in all systems; the only way we could do away with that is to not let humans participate.

[shooting2kill.livejournal.com]

Yes, there are cheaters in all systems; the only way we could do away with that is to not let humans participate.

I might have misunderstood this but I really don't understand how we got to this point as I *never* once mentioned people cheating on the system and would never do so.

[gilda-elise.livejournal.com]

No, I know you didn't, but it's part of the narrative over here. They assume that most of the people on Welfare shouldn't be. That's the part I don't understand, how someone so close to that situation would belittle those who are. I think most people want to work.