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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Maybe, I thought, the coastal Louisianans who opposed the ban were expressing loyalty to the oil industry and private sector, and falling into a historic refrain against the federal government. But given their vulnerability to loss and contamination, maybe they were managing strong feelings of anxiety, fear, and anger about what they already knew. Maybe they were saying to themselves, “We can’t afford to worry about this. We need to set thoughts of it aside, manage our anxiety and not acknowledge that we’re doing so.” With this in mind, I returned to the Great Paradox. From my initial perspective, Louisiana, like other red states, was coping with a great number of challenges. Perhaps for better-off people of the far right, problems such as poverty, poor schools, and medical care didn’t come up because such problems didn’t hit them directly. Pollution hit better-off people too. But they seemed braced to tough it out. As for blame, it seemed as if Dad had left a dreadful mess, and you blamed Mom because Mom’s used to absorbing blame for what goes wrong and trying to fix it, and she’s still there. At least it seemed like that at first. Freedom