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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

to as many people as we could. Many members we met had grown up in small towns in the Midwest and felt deeply disoriented in California’s anomic suburbs, an unease they transformed into a belief that American society was at risk of being taken over by communists.

“Throw a Cajun in a swamp,” Harold chuckles, his eyebrows lifting for emphasis, “and he can make a livin’.”

Like many in southwest Louisiana, the Arenos were descended from Catholics who, in the 1600s, fled from France to what came to be known as Arcadia, now Nova Scotia, Canada. Victorious in war with France, the British in 1755 brutally expelled these Arcadians--later called Cajuns--many of whom found their way to the swamplands of Louisiana.

Many plant workers were indeed caught in a bind—as enthusiastic members of the Calcasieu Rod and Gun Club and lovers of wildlife, they feel remorse about pollution, but as employees, they felt obliged to keep quiet about it. And

When I was about three, back when we lived on the Armelise Plantation, my daddy used to take me with him crawfishing. He’s set the traps in a nearby swamp. Then he’d put me in a plastic tub and pull it along in the water as he waded through the water, emptying the traps.

As sociologist Richard Florida notes, “Blue state knowledge economies run on red state energy. Red state energy economies, in their turn, depend on dense coastal cities and metro areas, not just as markets and sources of migrants, but for the technology and talent they supply.”

The deadly Ku Klux Klan was born just after the Civil War in the South, and it flared up strongly in the 1920s, when its highest per capita membership was in Indiana and Oregon; half a century later, some of the fiercest white resistance to school desegregation took place in Boston.