Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

Citation

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

Chapter Summary

The book reports fieldwork that Arlie Hochschild, a Berkeley sociologist best known for The Managed Heart and The Second Shift, carried out between 2011 and 2016 among supporters of the Tea Party around Lake Charles, Louisiana. She approaches the American right through a single region and a single issue, environmental pollution in a centre of the petrochemical industry, and through her long-standing interest in emotion. The hardcover runs to xii, 351 pages; the 2018 paperback adds an afterword on the election of Donald Trump and a readers' group guide. The sixteen chapters are arranged in four parts.

Part One: The Great Paradox (Chapters 1–5)

Traveling to the Heart; "One Thing Good"; The Rememberers; The Candidates; The "Least Resistant Personality". The opening part sets out the question that drives the book, which Hochschild calls the "great paradox": why people living with the damage of under-regulated industrial pollution oppose the federal regulation and government help that might protect them. It also introduces her method for crossing what she calls the "empathy wall", the obstacle to understanding people whose views and backgrounds differ from one's own.

Part Two: The Social Terrain (Chapters 6–8)

Industry: "The Buckle in America's Energy Belt"; The State: Governing the Market 4,000 Feet Below; The Pulpit and the Press: "The Topic Doesn't Come Up". The second part examines the institutions that shape the region: the oil and petrochemical industry, the state of Louisiana, and the church and local media.

Part Three: The Deep Story and the People in It (Chapters 9–13)

The Deep Story; The Team Player: Loyalty Above All; The Worshipper: Invisible Renunciation; The Cowboy: Stoicism; The Rebel: A Team Loyalist with a New Cause. The core of the book. Chapter 9 presents the "deep story": people raised to expect fair competition and advancement through hard work, waiting in line for the American Dream, feel that others are cutting in ahead of them and that they have become, in Hochschild's words, "strangers in their own land", resentful and dismissed. The following chapters show four ways of living with this story. In Tim Winzler's reading (LSE Review of Books), the team player sacrifices for the greater good while rejecting help for the needy, the worshipper quiets doubts through faith, the cowboy treats hardship as a test of character, and the rebel, after personal loss, begins to move toward a different politics.

Part Four: Going National (Chapters 14–16)

The Fires of History: The 1860s and the 1960s; Strangers No Longer: The Power of Promise; "They Say There Are Beautiful Trees." The final part widens the frame from Louisiana to the nation. Chapter 14 draws a historical comparison between the South of the 1860s and the 1960s and the present; Chapter 15, "Strangers No Longer: The Power of Promise", turns to the appeal of national right-wing politics to people who feel like strangers in their own land.

Key Concepts

Part One: The question and the method

• The great paradox: the gap between the harms people suffer from under-regulated industry and their rejection of the regulation that might reduce them.
• Empathy wall: Hochschild's term for the obstacle to deep understanding of people with different views or backgrounds, which can make one indifferent or hostile to them.
• Single-issue focus: the book's strategy of studying the right through one group, one state and one issue, environmental pollution.

Parts Two–Three: The deep story

• Deep story: the narrative of feeling that Hochschild finds behind support for the right; Publishers Weekly calls it the book's search for emotional truth.
• Cutting in line: the image at the centre of the deep story, in which others seem to move ahead unfairly while those who have played by the rules stand still.
• Feeling rules: Hochschild's concept, from her earlier work, of the norms that govern what people think they ought to feel. Publishers Weekly notes her argument that what the left reads as prejudice the right experiences as release from imposed feeling rules.
• Strategies of endurance: the team player, worshipper, cowboy and rebel as different ways of living with the deep story.

Part Four: National politics

• Historical echoes: the comparison between earlier moments of Southern resentment toward the North and the present.
• Collective effervescence: Durkheim's term for the shared emotional uplift of a gathering, which Winzler highlights in the book's account of how right-wing politics restores a sense of pride and dignity.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Long immersion and mixed methods. Winzler stresses that Hochschild spent five years in close contact with the people she studied, combining focus groups, interviews and participant observation, as in her earlier studies of family and work.
• A respectful, non-moralising approach. Winzler credits the book with avoiding the moralistic dismissal common in explanations of right-wing voting; Publishers Weekly calls her approach humble and says it strengthens the research. Jason DeParle in The New York Times Book Review, quoted by the publisher, called it smart, respectful and compelling.
• A clear organising question. The great paradox gives the book a single puzzle, and the focus on one region and one issue keeps the analysis concrete.
• Portable concepts. The empathy wall, the deep story and the four character types are easy to apply and discuss, which helps explain why the book has been widely used as a common read on campuses.

Limitations

• Emotion over cause. Publishers Weekly notes that Hochschild touches only lightly on objective causes in her search for emotional truth. Winzler argues that the book shows the branches of the deep story but not its roots: it does not explain where the particular vision of fairness and the American Dream comes from, or how class, gender and ethnicity shape it, and the historical analogy with the 1860s and 1960s moves the question back rather than answering it.
• A specific population. Winzler describes Hochschild's protagonists as mostly white, rural, lower-middle-class Louisianans. Findings from this group cannot simply be generalised to all conservatives or all supporters of the right.
• Written for a liberal reader. The book is framed as a journey from Berkeley into unfamiliar territory and invites liberal readers to understand people unlike themselves.
• Tied to its moment. The fieldwork ends in 2016; later developments appear only in the paperback afterword and in Hochschild's later work.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within political sociology this is the course's ethnography: a close study of political feeling in one place, set against books that work at the level of states and theories. Elisabeth Clemens's What Is Political Sociology? and Anthony Orum and John Dale's Political Sociology give the conceptual map (power, the state, participation, social movements) within which Hochschild's case can be placed; Kate Nash's Contemporary Political Sociology treats cultural politics and identity, a useful frame for the book's focus on emotion and recognition. Reading one of these first helps students see what kind of claim an ethnography can and cannot support.

Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions and Charles Tilly's Coercion, Capital, and European States represent the comparative-historical tradition, explaining political outcomes through states, war and structure rather than lived experience. Setting Hochschild beside them is a good exercise in contrasting explanation by structure with explanation by meaning and emotion, and Winzler's criticism that the book shows feelings without fully explaining their origins is a useful starting point for that comparison.

How to Use This Book

No special background is needed; a basic grasp of recent American politics and of what ethnographic fieldwork involves helps. The book suits undergraduates in sociology and political science, students learning qualitative methods, and general readers trying to understand political polarisation.

A practical plan:

• Read Part One for the question and method, noting how Hochschild defines the great paradox and the empathy wall.
• Read Part Two quickly for context on industry, state and media in Louisiana.
• Read Part Three closely. Chapter 9 is the analytical centre; the four portrait chapters show how one story is lived in different ways. Compare the four types and ask which features of each are shared.
• Read Part Four for the move to national politics, and, if using the paperback, the afterword on the 2016 election.

Treat the deep story as a hypothesis to test rather than a conclusion. While reading, separate three kinds of claim: what informants say, Hochschild's interpretation of it, and what external evidence on pollution, jobs and public spending shows. For a methods course, use the book to discuss reflexivity and the researcher's position, and pair it with Winzler's review or another critical response to sharpen the question of explanation versus understanding.