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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

“Hard” is the important idea. More than aptitude, reward, or consequence, hard work confers honor.

her piece of America seems like a small, brave holdout against a national tide. The American Dream itself has become strange, un-Bibled, hyper-materialized, and lacking in honor. Even as she stands patiently in line, she is being made to feel a stranger in her own land.

Underlying Janice’s reasoning is her idea about inequality itself. Some people may just be destined to remain at the end of the line for the American Dream. That’s why she opposes redistribution of tax money from rich to poor. The fix wouldn’t last.

many I interviewed estimated that a third to a half of all U.S. workers were employed by the federal government—a common estimate was 40 percent. (Not knowing the figures myself, I looked them up. In 2013, 1.9 percent of American workers were civilian federal employees,

Industry had brought four toxic waste landfills to Sulphur, one only a block from her present home. But “they make what we need—plastic soda bottles, rubber-soled shoes, toothpaste. We need toothpaste.”

She felt loyal to capitalism as it worked through the petrochemical plants of Sulphur, Louisiana, the system that produced the miracle of her father’s wage and her own. She wanted others to want to feel loyal to it. Wasn’t it obvious? What else, besides family and church, was there worth feeling loyal to?

She didn’t want to appear to critics as hard-hearted regarding the poor, immigrants, Syrian refugees. They simply shouldn’t be ahead of her in line.