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

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

She had made it out of the structural squeeze—aiming high on one side, facing a flat wage, uncertainty, competitors, and government aid on the other. Maybe her salary hadn’t advanced in leaps and bounds, but she’d gotten to the head of the line. And man, oh man, that had been hard. You couldn’t be some wilting violet. Along the way, it hadn’t been so easy enduring surprise explosions, noisy machinery, and strange odors. To live with it, Janice managed anxiety nearly hidden to her, anxiety that now felt like second nature; it kept her steady and brave. It kept her focused on the good news of Citgo for her dad, Lacassane for herself, the “buckle in the energy belt,” the free market. She felt loyal to capitalism as it worked through the petrochemical plants of Sulphur, Louisiana, the system that produced the miracle of her father’s wage and her own. She wanted others to want to feel loyal to it. Wasn’t it obvious? What else, besides family and church, was there worth feeling loyal to? Such devotion wasn’t respected, she felt. Indeed, she had to defend that devotion from a liberal perspective, which she associated with a morally lax, secular, coastal-based culture. It was one thing for certain categories of people to cut in line, but it was another to have false notions of the good and the true gain popularity and edge out her truer ones. Instead of the country agreeing with her community on the natural rightness of heterosexual marriage as the center of family life, she was n...

...ow obligated to defend herself against the idea that these views were sexist, homophobic, old-fashioned, and backward. She also needed to defend her notion of the line itself. She didn't want to appear to critics as hard-hearted regarding the poor, immigrants, Syrian refugees. They simply shouldn't be ahead of her in line.