Reading :: Strangers in their own Land

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

In this National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestseller, Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild describes the result of her five years of fieldwork around Lake Charles, Louisiana. As she explains in the Preface, she was alarmed by the hostility between the American Right and Left. "I had some understanding of the liberal left camp, I thought, but what was happening on the right?" (p.xi). Specifically, she wanted to understand the Right's "deep story," or what narrative the Right emotionally felt to be true (p.xi), so she reached out across a wall of empathy (p.5), using a contact in the Lakes Charles area to make contacts in the community and conduct long interviews with residents. These interviews focused on environmental issues, partly because they affect everyone, partly because the Lake Charles area had encountered severe environmental issues as a result of decades of sloppy regulation of the petroleum and chemical industries. 

Based on these interviews, she put together a "deep story," a story that she presented to her informants to see if they thought it accurately reflected their emotional experience. In this story, they are in line for the American Dream, waiting patiently, working hard. But the line seems to have stopped moving, and they see someone—is that President Obama?—letting people cut in line! (Ch.9—she does much better at telling this story than I do at summarizing it). Her informants, she says, all agreed that this story reflected their experience and explained their anger at the Left, which they perceived as putting classes of people and even protected animals in front of their interests. (To my mind, it sounded like the informants saw themselves as the brother of the Prodigal Son. When the Prodigal Son came home, his father celebrated him and threw a party. The brother, who had been faithful and steady, wanted to know why he had never been given a party.)

So Hochschild has accomplished her mission to understand the anger and mourning on the American Right. She has made explicit this deep story. My main criticism is that she doesn't contrast this with the (a?) deep story on the Left. Perhaps she felt like this deep story was beyond her fieldwork, or she thought that most readers would be on the Left and didn't need that story explained. But without such an explanation, readers may be left with the impression that the Right has a story—a fairy tale of grievance—while the Left sees cold hard reality. But Hochschild makes clear that the Left is not objective: "I don't believe we understand anyone's politics, right or left, without it. For we all have a deep story" (p.135). Can the Left really understand the Right, or their dynamic, without better understanding itself?

Still, it's a strong book and can teach us a lot about the rise of Trump (see the Afterword) as well as the Right's COVID response. If you're on the Left and interested in compassionately understanding the Right—or if you're on the Right and interested in how a sociologist on the Left thinks you tick—definitely pick it up.