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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

In The Politics of Resentment, a book based on talks with people in coffee shops and diners in small-town and rural Wisconsin, Katherine Cramer describes people with strong feelings about “being looked down on” by the “big-city elites in Madison.” A student—“the first in my family to go to college”—wrote from western Pennsylvania, where her father and uncles run a scrap-metal yard, operate a dirt track for car racing, and receive checks for natural gas extracted from their land: “the reason I don’t have college debt.” She explained that their childhoods were seared by a fear of poverty while hers was not, and this election sparked strong differences between them. So race, class, national identity, religion, region, views of gender and sexual orientation—all these joined to reinforce a sense that, outside of Louisiana, too, a precious way of life, like the nation itself, was being left behind.