In many ways, this book reveals more about the nature of our national divide than "Hillbilly Elegy" does. The author spent a good bit of time with people on the far right -- self-identifying Tea Party members from coastal Louisiana. She came to know them, got them to speak candidly about their value ...more
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Horchschild is a 2016 New Press publication.
Recently, there has been a rash of books published that highlight the ‘angry white American’ movement, that attempts to explain the cultural and class divisions our cou ...more
The thing is, no matter how well Trump voters' psyche and worldview are explained to me (and this book does a fantastic job of presenting the Right's "deep story"), I can never truly comprehend them, especially the lack of generosity in their version of morality, aversion to objective facts and cons ...more
The concept of this book is exactly what I had been thinking about for the past two years. I am so grateful for Hochschild for structuring a study to investigate the political divide in the United States as evinced by Louisiana, a deeply conservative red state facing environmental degradation and wi ...more
It’s been a little under two weeks since Donald Trump won the presidential election. Since then, I’ve been hearing a lot of gloating from conservatives and self-flagellation from liberals to the effect of: this happened because out-of-touch urban elites ignored the pain of the white working class, w ...more
I listened to the audio of Strangers In Their Own Land. Arlie Russell Hochschild is a self described liberal Democrat sociology professor at Berkeley. She set out to climb what she describes as the "empathy wall" for the purpose of understanding what has motivated the Republican base in the US in re ...more
I liked this quite a lot. This is a ‘walk in mile in my shoes’ book, in many ways. That is, the author wants to know why people in ‘red’ states in the US – where, unlike the rest of the world, ‘red’ means deeply conservative (yeah, I know, yet another of those US oddities) – seem so consistently to ...more
Recently it's occurred to me that perhaps I'm not doing enough to defeat Trump...
I may be complacent. It's still hard to take the idea of him as president seriously. Whatever the outcome of this election, however, it's clear that he's captured a huge percentage of the electorate - millions and milli ...more
“You are patiently standing in a long line leading up a hill, as in a pilgrimage. You are situated in the middle of this line, along with others who are also white, older, Christian, and predominantly male, some with college degrees, some not.
“Just over the brow of the hill is the American Dream, t ...more
Hochschild is a University of California Berkeley sociologist. She states she was attempting to understand the Great Paradox: the fact that people in the poorest states who most need federal programs consistently vote for candidates who oppose those programs. The author traveled to Louisiana one of ...more
I liked Hillbilly Elegy but this is the book we should all be reading if we want to understand the extreme polarization in this country from the point of view of the white working class. I think Arlie could have gone even deeper than she did, because she mostly wanted to focus on environmental issue ...more
I was attracted to this book because it promised to answer the question, "Why do the people who would seem to benefit most from "liberal" government intervention abhor the very idea?" I have puzzled with this question ever since I read Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas.
I learned a lot about pollution in Louisiana from this book, but I'm not sure I learned anything new about the "deep story" of the tea-party right. It could be that I have read enough about this phenomena, both past (it swept Europe between the two Great Wars) and present, that I already had a fairl ...more
Reading Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right is definitely a walk on the weird side. I wasn’t surprised by her revelations that the Right doesn’t believe in regulations or hates the federal government. I already knew all that. What is amazi ...more
Arlie Hochschild has gone the extra mile, and then some, to understand conservatives. I would say that she exemplifies the (pseudo-) Indian saying, “Never criticize a man until you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins,” except that is not politically correct, so I will not say it. Nonetheless, Hochschi ...more
I was avoiding reading this one because it seemed so hyped up by everyone about "how to understand Trump's people" and I admit that maybe I just didn't want to understand them. But this book was wonderful. So well written and so insightful. I don't resonate with the Tea Party in any respect and in f ...more
Strangers in Their Own Land is a detailed look at the cultural divide in the US. The scope of this divide is deep (and wide), and Hochschild, a Berkeley sociologist, chooses to focus on a specific sector: the environment, corporate pollution, and regulatory practices. It's an interesting shift as so ...more
I read this book to broaden my understanding of the Donald Trump victory in 2016. In some ways it accomplished this. I also learnt of the extensive pollution in the area of Louisiana under scrutiny in this book. Many of the people living there, rather than wanting more government control on the indu ...more