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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Our home enclaves often reflect special cultures of governance tying politics to geography. This is the thesis of Colin Woodard’s American Nations. Rural areas in the Midwest, the South, and Alaska lean right while large cities, New England, and the two coasts lean left, he notes. Bound by a tradition of small-town governance and oriented toward Europe, New Englanders tend to believe in good government for the “common good.” Appalachians and Texans tend to be freedom-loving government minimalists. Tracing their roots to a caste system, whites in Dixie states treasure local control and resist federal power—linked as that is to the defeat, 150 years ago, of the South by the North. Resistance to federal taxation, the historian Robin Einhorn notes, also originated in the South. Regional traditions are real, of course, but less immutable than Woodard suggests. 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.