Strangers in Their Own Land Quotes

“Across the country, red states are poorer and have more teen mothers, more divorce, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrollment. On average, people in red states die five years earlier than people in blue states. Indeed, the gap in life expectancy between Louisiana (75.7) and Connecticut (80.8) is the same as that between the United States and Nicaragua. Red states suffer more in another highly important but little-known way, one that speaks to the very biological self-interest in health and life: industrial pollution.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“In 1960, when a survey asked American adults whether it would “disturb” them if their child married a member of the other political party, no more than 5 percent of either party answered “yes.” But in 2010, 33 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Republicans answered “yes.” In fact, partyism, as some call it, now beats race as the source of divisive prejudice.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“Those on the far right I came to know felt two things. First, they felt the deep story was true. Second, they felt that liberals were saying it was not true, and that they themselves were not feeling the right feelings. Blacks and women who were beneficiaries of affirmative action, immigrants, refugees, and public employees were not really stealing their place in line, liberals said. So don't feel resentful. Obama's help to these groups was not really a betrayal, liberals said. The success of those who cut ahead was not really at the expense of white men and their wives. In other words, the far right felt that the deep story was their real story and that there was a false PC cover-up of that story. They felt scorned. "People think we're not good people if we don't fee sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees," one man told me. "But I am a good person and I don't feel sorry for them."

With the cover-up, as my new friends explained to me, came the need to manage the appearance of their real feelings and even, to some extent, the feelings themselves. They didn't have to do this with friends, neighbors, and family. But they realized that the rest of America did not agree. ("I know liberals want us to feel sorry for blacks. I know they think they are so idealistic and we aren't," one woman told me.) My friends on the right felt obliged to try to modify their feelings, and they didn't like having to do that; they felt under the watchful eye of the "PC police." In the realm of emotions, the right felt like they were being treated as the criminals, and the liberals had the guns.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“For the left, the flashpoint is up the class ladder (between the very top and the rest); for the right, it is down between the middle class and the poor. For the left, the flashpoint is centered in the private sector; for the right, in the public sector. Ironically, both call for an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“The choice is not, Reich argues, between a governed and an ungoverned market, but between a market governed by laws favoring monopolistic companies and one governed by those favoring small business.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“But if we get our souls saved, we go to Heaven, and Heaven is for eternity. We’ll never have to worry about the environment from then on. That’s the most important thing. I’m thinking long-term.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“Tea Party adherents seemed to arrive at their dislike of the federal government via three routes--through their religious faith (the government curtailed the church, they felt), through hatred of taxes (which they saw as too high and too progressive), and through its impact on their loss of honor.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“Conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or liberal to us today.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“The split has widened because the right has moved right, not because the left has moved left. Republican presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford all supported the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1960, the GOP platform embraced "free collective bargaining" between management and labor. REpublicans boasted of "extending the minimum wage to several million more workers" and "strengthening the unemployment insurance system and extension of its benefits." Under Dwight Eisenhower, top earners were taxed at 91 percent; in 2015, it was 40 percent. Planned Parenthood has come under serious attack from nearly all Republican presidential candidates running in 2016. Yet a founder of the organization was Peggy Goldwater, wife of the 1968 conservative Republican candidate for president Barry Goldwater. General Eisenhower called for massive invenstment in infrastructure, and now nearly all congressional Republicans see such a thing as frightening government overreach. Ronald Reagan raised the national debt and favored gun control, and now the Republican state legislature of Texas authorizes citizens to "open carry" loaded guns into churches and banks. Conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or liberal today.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“Virtually every Tea Party advocate I interviewed for this book has personally benefited from a major government service or has close family who have.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“As one man explains, "A lot of us have done okay, but we don't want to lose what we've got, see it given away." When I ask him what he saw as being "given away," it was not public waters given to dumpers, or clean air give to smoke stacks. It was not health or years of life. It was not lost public sector jobs. What he felt was being given away was tax money to support non-working people and non-deserving people--and not just tax money, but honor too.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“We, on both sides, wrongly imagine that empathy with the “other” side brings an end to clearheaded analysis when, in truth, it’s on the other side of that bridge that the most important analysis can begin.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“Memory, Evans-Pritchard reasoned, was an indirect expression of power. The Arenos faced structural amnesia about something else and linked it to a different source of power: the Louisiana Chemical Association, the Society of the Plastics Industry, the Vinyl Institute, Shell Oil, PPG Industries, and their leaders in government. Spokesmen for this source of power drew the popular imagination to the exciting economic fugure. The Arenos felt that their silent bayou, their buried kin, their dead trees were forgotten.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“The Measure of America, a report of the Social Science Research Council, ranks every state in the United States on its “human development.” Each rank is based on life expectancy, school enrollment, educational degree attainment, and median personal earnings. Out of the 50 states, Louisiana ranked 49th and in overall health ranked last. According to the 2015 National Report Card, Louisiana ranked 48th out of 50 in eighth-grade reading and 49th out of 50 in eighth-grade math. Only eight out of ten Louisianans have graduated from high school, and only 7 percent have graduate or professional degrees. According to the Kids Count Data Book, compiled by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Louisiana ranked 49th out of 50 states for child well-being. And the problem transcends race; an average black in Maryland lives four years longer, earns twice as much, and is twice as likely to have a college degree as a black in Louisiana. And whites in Louisiana are worse off than whites in Maryland or anywhere else outside Mississippi. Louisiana has suffered many environmental problems too: there are nearly 400 miles of low, flat, subsiding coastline, and the state loses a football field–size patch of wetland every hour. It is threatened by rising sea levels and severe hurricanes, which the world’s top scientists connect to climate change.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“If, in 2010, you lived in a county with a higher exposure to toxic pollution, we discovered, you are more likely to believe that Americans “worry too much” about the environment and to believe that the United States is doing “more than enough” about it. You are also more likely to describe yourself as a strong Republican.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“The right seeks release from liberal notions of what they should feel—happy for the gay newlywed, sad at the plight of the Syrian refugee, unresentful about paying taxes. The left sees prejudice.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the state legislature set up the Southeast Flood Control Commission to come up with a plan for protecting Louisiana from floods. They concluded that the best course of action was to fill in the canals and repair the shore. Since this was a task the oil companies had in their contracts agreed to do, and had not done, in 2014 the commission did what had never been done: it sued the ninety-seven responsible oil companies. Governor Jindal quickly squashed the upstart commission. He removed members from it. He challenged its right to sue. In another unprecedented move, the legislature voted to nullify—retroactively—the lawsuit by withdrawing the authority to file it from those who had done so. A measure (SB 553) called for costs of repairs to be paid, not by the oil companies, but by the state’s taxpayers.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“Just 158 rich families contributed nearly half of the $176 million given to candidates in the first phase of the presidential election of 2016—$138 million to Republicans and $20 million to Democrats.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“the more that people confine themselves to likeminded company, the more extreme their views become.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“Blacks, women, immigrants, refugees, brown pelicans—all have cut ahead of you in line. But it’s people like you who have made this country great. You feel uneasy. It has to be said: the line cutters irritate you. They are violating rules of fairness. You resent them, and you feel it’s right that you do. So do your friends. Fox commentators reflect your feelings, for your deep story is also the Fox News deep story.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“Fox News stokes fear. And the fear seems to reflect that of the audience it most serves—white middle- and working-class people.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“The more at risk a person is to exposure to hazardous waste, nationwide, we discovered, the less likely a person was to be worried about it, and the more likely to be a conservative Republican.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“A Lake Charles-based artist, Sally was a progressive Democrat who in 2016 primary favored Bernie Sanders. Sally's very dear friend and worl-traveling flight attendant from Opelousas, Louisiana, Shirley was an enthusiast for the Tea Party and Donald Trump. Both woman had joined sororities at LSU. Each had married, had three children, lived in homes walking distance apart in Lake Charles, and had keys to each other's houses. Each loved the other's children. Shirley knew Sally's parents and even consulted Sally's mother when the two go to "fussing to much." They exchanged birthday and Christmas gifts and jointly scoured the newspaper for notices of upcoming cultural events they had, when they were neighbors in Lake Charles, attended together. One day when I was staying as Shirley's overnight guest in Opelousas, I noticed a watercolor picture hanging on the guestroom wall, which Sally had painted as a gift for Shirley's eleven-year-old daughter, who aspired to become a ballerina. With one pointed toe on a pudgy, pastel cloud, the other lifted high, the ballerina's head was encircled by yellow star-like butterflies. It was a loving picture of a child's dream--one that came true. Both women followed the news on TV--Sally through MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, and Shirley via Fox News's Charles Krauthammer, and each talked these different reports over with a like-minded husband. The two women talk by phone two or three times a week, and their grown children keep in touch, partly across the same politcal divide. While this book is not about the personal lives of these two women, it couldn't have been written without them both, and I believe that their friendship models what our country itself needs to forge: the capacity to connect across difference.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“Our polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don't know each other, makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“Many workers in the petrochemical plants were conservative Republicans and avid hunters and fishers and felt caught in a terrible bind. They loved their magnificent wilderness. They remembered it as children. They knew it and respect it as sportsmen. But their jobs were in industries that polluted--often legally--this same wilderness.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“The Greek word “nostalgia” derives from the root nostros, meaning “return home,” and algia, meaning “longing.” Doctors in seventeenth-century Europe considered nostalgia an illness, like the flu, mainly suffered by displaced migrant servants, soldiers, and job seekers, and curable through opium, leeches, or, for the affluent, a journey to the Swiss Alps. Throughout time, such feeling has been widely acknowledged. The Portuguese have the term saudade. The Russians have toska. The Czechs have litost. Others too name the feeling: for Romanians, it’s dor, for Germans, it’s heimweh. The Welsh have hiraeth, the Spanish mal de corazon. Many”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“A political campaign has a central place in the cultural life of a people. It tells citizens what issues powerful people think are worth hearing about.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“Issued in February 2012, and still online as of May 5, 2016, the report was written by one set of state officials for another. After a chilling description of a “cancer slope factor,” the report continues, in a matter-of-fact tone, to advise the recreational fisherman on how to prepare a contaminated fish to eat: “Trimming the fat and skin on finfish, and removing the hepatopancreas from crabs, will reduce the amount of contaminants in the fish and shellfish,” the document reads.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

“Our polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don’t know each other, makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt.

I first experienced reaching out and being reached out to as the child of a Foreign Service Officer. In my child’s mind, I had been given a personal mission, parallel to my father’s, to befriend the people of all the foreign countries my father’s job took us to. I was instructed to reach out, I imagined, to people who spoke, dressed, walked, looked, and worshipped differently than we did. Had my father asked me to do this? I don’t think so. […] Curiously, I felt that same gratitude for connection when, many decades later, I drove from plant to plant with Sharon, and when I talked to the many others I met in the course of researching this book. I felt I was in a foreign country again, only this time it was my own.”
― Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right