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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

When I speak to audiences elsewhere in the country, I use different examples, but the spirit of what I say is the same. I suggest we address our present-day political impasse through four pillars of activism. The first is to affirm in every possible way our precious and potentially fragile system of democracy: its checks and balances, its independent judiciary, its free press. The second is to recognize that if the Democratic Party is to pose a real, viable, attractive alternative to Donald Trump, it must address the grievances, the life experiences, the sense of losing ground, of people like those in this book. A third pillar of activism is the vote. We’re a democracy, but in the 2016 presidential election, voter turnout was at a twenty-year low. Four out of every ten eligible voters did not vote. Nearly six out of ten young people aged eighteen to twenty-four did not vote. We need to challenge unjust gerrymandering, needless long lines, and other voter restrictions, assure the reliability of voting machines, and above all encourage fellow citizens to exercise their priceless right to vote. Finally, to build the fourth pillar of activism I would reach across our painful partisan divide to initiate talks about race, robots, government, and more. Democrats might be surprised to discover that they are more isolated in their own political bubbles than Republicans are in theirs. According to a 2017 Pew poll, nearly half—47 percent—of Clinton supporters had no close friends who...