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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

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.

We too felt taken over by something, but it wasn’t communism.

How did they come to hold their views?

but later in my mind I thanked her again for her gift of trust and outreach.

it’s clear that Mike and I see different things. Mike sees a busy, beloved, bygone world. I see a field of green.

“When I was a kid, you stuck a thumb out by the side of the road, you got a ride. Or if you had a car, you gave a ride. If someone was hungry, you fed him. You had community. You know what’s undercut all that?” He pauses. “Big government.”

Mike was one of seven children his dad had raised on a plumber’s wage. “We didn’t know we were poor,” he said, a refrain I would hear often among those I came to know on the far right, speaking of their own or their parents’ childhoods.

“Our government is way too big, too greedy, too incompetent, too bought, and it’s not ours anymore.

My neighbors and

friends on my side of the wall are more or less like me. They have BA degrees or more and read the New York Times daily. They eat organic food, recycle their garbage, and take BART (the public rail system) when they can.

Finally, we came to Madonna’s basic feeling that Limbaugh was defending her against insults she felt liberals were lobbing at her: “Oh, liberals think that Bible-believing Southerners are ignorant, backward, rednecks, losers. They think we’re racist, sexist, homophobic, and maybe fat.”

I began to recognize the power of blue-state catcalls taunting red state residents. Limbaugh was a firewall against liberal insults thrown at her and her ancestors, she felt.