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.

how can a system both create pain and deflect blame for that pain?

Virtually every Tea Party advocate I interviewed for this book has personally benefited from a major government service or has close family who have.

So if I wanted to understand the right, I would need to get to know the white South.

believe that their friendship models what our country itself needs to forge: the capacity to connect across difference.

In What’s the Matter With Kansas? Frank argues that people like Mike are being greatly misled. A rich man’s “economic agenda” is paired with the “bait” of social issues. Through appeal to abortion bans, gun rights, and school prayer, Mike and his like-minded friends are persuaded to embrace economic policies that hurt them. As Frank writes, “Vote to stop abortion: receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. . . . Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meat packing. Vote to strike a blow against elitism, receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes.”

And while the far right is strongest in the South, most of its members make up a demographic—white, middle to low income, older, married, Christian—that spans the whole nation.

What, I wanted to know, do people want to feel, what do they think they should or shouldn’t feel, and what do they feel about a range of issues?

The deep story was to take me to the shoulds and shouldn’ts of feeling, to the management of feeling, and to the core feelings stirred by charismatic leaders. And, as we shall see, everyone has a deep story.