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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

People on the right seemed to be strongly moved by three concerns—taxes, faith, and honor.

heard a great deal about freedom in the sense of freedom to—to talk on your cellphone as you drove a car, to pick up a drive-in daiquiri with a straw on the side, to walk about with a loaded gun. But there was almost no talk about freedom from such things as gun violence, car accidents, or toxic pollution.

“Part of the psychological program is that people think they’re free when they’re not,” he said. “A company may be free to pollute, but that means the people aren’t free to swim.”

the “psychological program” involved the belief that there was a terrible choice between jobs and clean water or air.

the oil industry suppressed other lines of work, drew a third of revenue out, left pollution, and did nothing to resolve the many problems saddling the state.

industry in their economy presented a decidedly mixed story. Oil was highly automated and accounted for some 15 percent of jobs—and even some of those were going to foreign workers at lower pay. The state had made huge cuts to local jobs and social services in order to bring in companies and, instead of money trickling down, a third of it was leaking out.

competition between white men and everyone else had increased—for jobs, for recognition, and for government funds. The year when the Dream stopped working for the 90 percent was 1950. If you were born before 1950, on average, the older you got, the more your income rose.

The deep story of the right, the feels-as-if story,

the right sees the free market as its ally against the powerful alliance of the federal government and the takers.

answers. “She could decline to have her tubes tied and decline federal money.”

The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars.

“Collective effervescence,” as the French sociologist Emile Durkheim called it in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, is a state of emotional excitation felt by those who join with others they take to be fellow members of a moral or biological tribe.

“People think we’re not good people if we don’t feel sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees,” one man told me. “But I am a good person and I don’t feel sorry for them.”

Hmm. What's your definition of being a good person, exactly? Does it involve compassion?

For the most part, the real line cutters are not people one can blame or politicians can thunder against. That’s because they’re not people. They’re robots.