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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances.

In 1960, when a survey asked American adults whether it would “disturb” them if their child married a member of the other political party, no more than 5 percent of either party answered “yes.” But in 2010, 33 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Republicans answered “yes.” In fact, partyism, as some call it, now beats race as the source of divisive prejudice.

Ninety percent of Democrats believe in the human role in climate change, surveys find, compared with 59 percent of moderate Republicans, 38 percent of conservative Republicans, and only 29 percent of Tea Party advocates. In fact, politics is the single biggest factor determining views on climate change.

This split has widened because the right has moved right, not because the left has moved left.

Under Dwight Eisenhower, top earners were taxed at 91 percent; in 2015, it was 40 percent.

Planned Parenthood has come under serious attack from nearly all Republican presidential candidates running in 2016. Yet a founder of the organization was Peggy Goldwater, wife of the 1964 conservative Republican candidate for president Barry Goldwater.

Conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or liberal today.

Across the country, red states are poorer and have more teen mothers, more divorce, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrollment. On average, people in red states die five years earlier than people in blue states.

In the last two decades the South has also grown by 14 percent. Between 1952 and 2000, among high school–educated whites in the South, there has been a 20 percent increase in Republican voters, and among college-educated whites, the increase was higher still.

Reaching 150 feet high, these trees can live 600 years, and some have been known to live 1,700 years.

I think they overregulate the bottom because it’s harder to regulate the top.”

“We’re on this earth for a limited amount of time,” he says, leaning on the edge of the window. “But if we get our souls saved, we go to Heaven, and Heaven is for eternity. We’ll never have to worry about the environment from then on. That’s the most important thing. I’m thinking long-term.”

Louisiana incarcerates the highest proportion of its population of all the states in the union, and those inmates are disproportionately black. It also houses Angola, the nation’s largest maximum security prison, in which rules are notoriously harsh. The prison is the site of the longest-standing case of solitary confinement in the nation—a black man, Albert Woodfox, who had been locked up for twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours a day for forty-three years before finally being released on February 19, 2016.