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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

In his classic The Mind of the South, W.J. Cash says that the plantation system “threw up walls [which] . . . enclosed the white man, walls he did not see.” The poor white did not see himself “locked into a marginal life” but as “a potential planter or mill baron himself.” Within those walls, the cultural imagination focused intently on two groups—the dominant and dominated, very rich and very poor, free and bound, envied and pitied, with very little in between. Rich planters sipped foreign wine under crystal chandeliers, seated on European chairs, in white-pillared mansions. They saw themselves not as wicked oppressors but as generous benefactors, and poor whites took them as such. At the other extreme, poor whites saw the terrifying misery of the traumatized, short-lived slave. This set in their minds a picture of the best and worst fates in life. Compared to life in New England farming villages, there was much more wealth to envy above, and far more misery to gasp at below. Such a system suggested its own metaphoric line waiting for the American Dream—one with little room for the lucky ahead, and much room for the forgotten behind.