Sociation Today

Book Review of
Strangers in Their Own Land

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Reviewed by
Lawrence M. Eppard
Shippensburg University

A question of perpetual interest to social scientists is why some U.S. citizens vote against their own economic interests. In recent years the question has been formulated in a somewhat softer manner, instead asking why social scientists disagree with the poor and working-class about the true nature of their economic self-interest. In Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild travels outside of her self-described liberal bubble in Berkeley, California, to the heart of conservative Louisiana bayou country to examine the "Great Paradox" of citizens who reject government help that they so desperately need.

In one poll released while Hochschild was in the field, half of Louisianans supported the Tea Party, a party interested in dismantling or abolishing much of American government from the state to the federal level. In the 2012 election, only 14 percent of white voters in Louisiana voted for Barack Obama (as evidenced by the enormous "Where's the Birth Certificate?" billboard Hochschild observed along Interstate 49 during her time in Louisiana). This appears to contradict their economic self-interest, which suggests they need government programs:

"Across the country, red states are poorer and have more teen mothers, more divorce, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrollment. On average, people in red states die five years earlier than people in blue states. Indeed, the gap in life expectancy between Louisiana (75.7) and Connecticut (80.8) is the same as that between the United States and Nicaragua. Red states suffer more in another highly important but little-known way. . . industrial pollution. Louisiana is an extreme example of the paradox. . . Out of the 50 states, Louisiana ranked 49th [in human development] and in overall health ranked last. . . Louisiana ranked 48th out of 50 in eight-grade reading and 49th out of 50 in eighth-grade math. . . only 7 percent [of Louisianans] have graduate or professional degrees. . . Louisiana ranked 49th out of 50 states for child well-being. . . a very large proportion of the yearly budgets of red states—in the case of Louisiana, 44 percent—do come from federal funds" (Hochschild, 8-9).

In a state like Louisiana that grapples with widespread poverty, environmental crisis, and educational attainment rates and health outcomes among the lowest in the country, why do citizens reject government help for problems that are extraordinarily difficult to solve at the individual-, community-, and even state-level? This research question, Hochschild's "Great Paradox," lies at the heart of Strangers.

    In Strangers Hochschild succeeds in not denigrating her research participants, instead trying to truly listen to their concerns and understand the different perspective from which they experience the world. Through the use of fieldwork, interviews, and focus groups in Louisiana, much of it in Lake Charles, Hochschild talked to 60 people (including 40 Tea Party activists) and accumulated 4,690 pages of transcripts between 2011 and 2016. She interacted with people everywhere from Pentecostal gumbo cook-offs and pig roasts, to church services, to Donald Trump rallies, as well as on their front porches and at their kitchen tables, and her account of this journey unlocks helpful clues for how to address the paradox.

    Hochschild's "keyhole issue" was environmental degradation—how could a state that is so polluted it contains an area well-known throughout the country as "cancer alley" count as it citizens so many people who are vehemently opposed to government regulation of the environment? How could their citizens support the Tea Party, with their stated desire to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)? This issue was a "keyhole" one because it was something that all voters had to deal with—a parent may choose to reject public schools at the voting booth if they send their own children to private schools, but everybody loses if the environment collapses. Hochschild explained that, "Through a close-up view of this issue, I reasoned, I could uncover the wider perspective that drove people's responses to it and to much else" (Hochschild, 11). Hochschild hoped that, in understanding how people so affected by pollution could oppose the regulation of it, she could understand the "Great Paradox." In Louisiana, Hochschild explained, "the Great Paradox was staring me in the face—great pollution and great resistance to regulating polluters" (Hochschild, 21).

    Clues that help answer Hochschild's paradox, she finds, come through understanding two important things: how these people feel about themselves in relation to economic inequality, globalization, immigration, and racial and gender inequality; and their emotional response to the ways in which politicians address these issues. What she finds is not that her participants do not fully understand their own self-interest, but that they cannot emotionally get on board with a government that they believe has cheated and betrayed them and unjustly helped those who will not help themselves; it seems that for most of her participants, advancing one's own sense of justice, honor, and fair play is more important than advancing one's economic interests. Hochschild's Tea Party participants put their emotional self-interest—the "giddy release from the feeling of being a stranger in one's own land" (Hochschild, 228)—above their economic self-interest. In this way social scientists may be correct that many Americans are indeed voting against their economic self-interest, but only because they have prioritized their emotional self-interest as more important.

    Hochschild's research participants believe in a "deep story" about hard work and success in the U.S. Hochschild explains the meaning of the concept:

"A deep story is a feels-as-if story—it's the story feelings tell, in the language of symbols. 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 don't believe we understand anyone's politics, right or left, without it. For we all have a deep story. There are many kinds of deep story, of course. Lovers come to know each other's childhood in order to understand how it feels to be the other person. . . The deep story here, that of the Tea Party, focuses on relationships between social groups within our national borders. I constructed the deep story to represent—in metaphorical form—the hopes, fears, pride, shame, resentment, and anxiety in the lives of those I talked with. Then I tried it out on my Tea Party friends to see if they thought it fit their experience. They did" (Hochschild, 135).

Her participants believe they (largely older, white, Christian males) have been working hard to advance towards the American Dream—Hochschild described it as feeling like "waiting in line," patiently standing and waiting your turn to advance towards the Dream. When they do move in line, it is because they were patient, worked hard, and played by the rules. Unlike the merit-based and socially-just advancement they have sought and sometimes attained, "others" in their country (immigrants, non-whites, public sector workers, refugees, and even women) have progressed towards the American Dream based on the help of the government—through affirmative action, welfare, and other programs. Sometimes these people move in line at a faster rate than the hard working white males, and sometimes they even "cut in line." To make matters worse, demographic trends had increased the line-cutter share of the population, and reduced the share of patient hard-workers—they might soon even be outnumbered, becoming a "besieged minority." To Hochschild's participants, it is particularly insulting that these "line-cutters" have been aided in a significant manner by President Barack Obama; he is not only on their side and therefore gives them special treatment, but he is suspected of being a line-cutter himself:

"And President Obama: how did he rise so high? The biracial son of a low-income single mother becomes president of the most powerful country in the world; you didn't see that coming. . . Or did Obama get there fairly?" (Hochschild, 137).

In this deep story, the government and the "takers" cutting in line have formed an alliance that conspires against hard working Americans. Not only do her participants feel cheated and betrayed by their government, which helps others advance while their progress has stalled, they feel the same towards their culture, which has cast their kind as racist, sexist, homophobic, stupid, and backwards, labeling them "rednecks," "white trash,"' and "bible-thumpers." The sense of honor that at one time may have come in the form of healthy wages, or the prestige of being a white married heterosexual Christian male, or from living in the South, or from growing up in and never leaving your small rural community, or from being a devoted patriot, is no longer perceived to be accessible to her participants. Hochschild notes that, "For the Tea Party around the country, the shifting moral qualifications for the American Dream have turned them into strangers in their own land, afraid, resentful, displaced, and dismissed by the very people who were, they felt, cutting in line" (Hochschild, 218). They are unfairly threatened by the line-cutters behind them in line, and ridiculed and deprived of honor by those ahead of them in line. They feel as strangers in their own land economically, culturally, demographically, and politically. Betrayed and cheated by everyone around them, they respond in an overwhelmingly positive manner to political messages which tap into the deep-seated anger that they feel. Hochschild noted that "virtually everyone I talked to embraced the same 'feels-as-if' deep story" (Hochschild, 221), with most feeling it was indeed true while resenting liberals who claimed it wasn't true. Much of Donald Trump's campaign messaging, intentionally or not, perpetuates this line-cutting narrative and provides emotionally-appealing answers for how to resolve this perceived problem of the violation of the rules of fairness. He will "Make America Great Again" by restoring their honor and policing the line towards the American Dream in a fairer manner than his predecessor.

Hochschild's participants are not wrong that they have lost some of their privilege. From a sociological point of view, this loss of privilege is a socially-just outcome, correcting centuries of oppression based upon race, class, and gender. But to her participants, any loss of privilege feels like the tables have been turned, as if white males are now the oppressed and women and non-whites are now the oppressors; this of course despite the fact that their privilege remains even after a relative loss in status. These voters' anger over "line cutters" leads them to vote for politicians who emotionally appeal to this deep sense of injustice, even if facts and self-interest suggest they should vote for a different candidate. This is how Louisiana residents, whose lives have been significantly and forever disrupted by major environmental catastrophes, can support political candidates who work to allow such disasters to occur.

Despite directing their anger at the wrong people, Hochschild's participants have lost. She notes that, "They disliked the word 'suffer,' but they had suffered from wage cuts, the dream trap, and the covert dishonor of being the one group everyone thought stood unfairly ahead of the line" (Hochschild, 215). As flawed as their deep story is it was "a response to a real squeeze," the transformation of the American economy since the 1970s:

"On the one hand, the national ideal and promise at the brow of the hill was the American Dream—which is to say progress. On the other hand, it had become hard to progress. . . for the bottom 90 percent of Americans, the Dream Machine—invisible over the brow of the hill—had stopped due to automation, off-shoring, and the growing power of multinationals. . . competition between white men and everyone else had increased—for jobs, for recognition, and for government funds. . . If you were born before 1950, on average, the older you got, the more your income rose. If you were born after 1950, it did not. . . [her participants are] the first generation in American history to experience the kind of lifetime downward mobility 'in which at every stage of adult life, they have less income and less net wealth than people their age ten years before'" (Hochschild, 140-142, quoting Longman, 2015).

Her participants should be taken seriously, for they have legitimate grievances even if they dangerously scapegoat the wrong people for them. The U.S. government could have and should have done more to protect all Americans, including the poor and working-class, from the major economic shifts that have occurred since the 1970s. With over a third of the world's wealth, it is difficult to argue that more could not have been done. The result is that many perceive they have been left behind, while others have been helped, fueling a deep-seated anger. Other groups, even if they have been left behind by the same social forces, may perceive that they have somebody helping them. Hochschild's participants believe they are the only ones being left to fend completely for themselves. The trick to solving the paradox is helping Americans to understand the real culprit responsible for contemporary social problems and convincing the American government to act in ways that other wealthy countries have successfully demonstrated will protect citizens from globalizing forces. Hochschild's work suggests that this political work will be difficult and hard fought, as the anger and resentment these people feel isn't likely to be easily assuaged by public policy prescriptions; after all, they do not believe the government works to benefit hard-working people, only cheaters and line-cutters. It seems as if any policy designed to help the poor and working-class will be met with intense suspicion and knee-jerk resistance from Hochschild's participants. Her work suggests that facts and self-interest are no match for many voters' emotional responses to political messaging; this is a scary finding indeed. The "deep story" of her participants, after all, is a fiction; white men are not oppressed, at least not based on their gender and not based on their race.

Yet Hochschild's Strangers might provide us with tools to begin to understand how each side might build "empathy bridges" to the other in order to appreciate their perspective, and communicate effectively to solve this problem. As a culture, we urgently need to better understand the nature and structural causes of racial, class, and gender hierarchies, and we need to continue the work of addressing them. Too many of Hochschild's participants rely on a belief system that assumes equality of opportunity was won in the U.S. in the 1960s and that any remaining inequalities are the result of individual failings. Hochschild argued that those on the political right look up to economic elites and down on the poor (who, not unrelatedly, don't seem to resemble them racially), and the reverse is true for the left; this reality suggests a rejection of the sociological worldview among her participants and instead an embrace of a deeply individualistic one. Solving "The Great Paradox" is one of the major and urgent challenges facing our country and requires a more knowledgeable citizenry, one that recognizes the complex array of social forces which interact to influence people's lives. We all lose, both left and right, if we don't identify the structural forces constraining us, as Hochschild explains:

"Ironically, both sides of the political divide are struggling to address the same new and frightening face of global capitalism. In an age of extreme automation and globalization, how can the 90 percent for whom income is stagnant or falling respond?" (Hochschild, 236)

Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land is a useful and timely book that will aid in the struggle to build "empathy bridges" between left and right, unveiling the true nature of this frightening new world for all to see, and hopefully, to change.

References

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. (2016). Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: The New Press.

Longman, Phillip. (2015). "Wealth and Generations." Washington Monthly. (http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/junejulyaug-2015/wealth-and-generations/).