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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

what sociologists Caroline Hanley and Michael T. Douglass call a “low road” strategy. Union bans, lower wages, corporate tax rebates, and loose implementation of environmental regulations are used as lures to get industry that exists somewhere else to move to one’s own state. Fifty years ago, such a strategy brought the New England textile industry to the South, and these days it is bringing Mercedes from New Jersey to Georgia, Toyota from California to Texas, and Nissan from California to Tennessee. Louisiana brought jobs into the state, not by nurturing new business in the state, but by poaching jobs in another state. The “high road” strategy, as the researchers describe it, is to stimulate new jobs by creating an attractive public sector, as California did in Silicon Valley and Washington State did in Seattle.