PDF Summary:Strangers In Their Own Land, by Arlie Russell Hochschild

In Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, sociologist Arlie Hochschild seeks to understand the social, cultural, and emotional forces driving right-wing politics, in an effort to move past the partisan divide and approach American politics from a position of empathy for those on the right. By breaking down this empathy wall, we can come to truly inhabit the emotional world of the right, giving us insight into why these voters believe what they believe—and why those beliefs might make sense given these voters’ experiences.

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While many Louisiana Tea Party members may lament the loss of the natural environment and the old Cajun way of life at the hands of the petrochemical industry, they insist that they are grateful for the jobs and economic opportunity that these companies bring.

More than environmental concerns, many conservatives claim that their faith in God and their belief in traditional family values are most important to them—and that their commitment to these values is what cements their loyalty to the Republican Party.

For them, the federal government is the far bigger threat to their way of life, with liberal politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton representing a direct affront to their values.

Honor and the Tea Party

So far, we’ve examined some of the deeper attitudes that underlie the political conservatism of Tea Party supporters.

Now, we need to expand upon that analysis and explore a key theme that runs through much of right-wing politics: honor. By understanding their culture of honor, we can gain deep insight into how members of the right view themselves as losing status and position in the world—critical if we are to overcome the empathy wall and find common ground.

Cutting in Line

A major driver of the resentment felt by many Tea Party members is the belief that undeserving “others” have cut in front of them in the line to the American Dream. The feeling of having one’s rightful position usurped stands as a tremendous insult to the honor and dignity of people who believe this.

The Tea Party members—predominantly (although not exclusively) older, white, rural, Christian, native-born, and male see an increasingly diverse, unrecognizable, and alien America usurping their rightful place at the front of the line. They see programs such as affirmative action, cash assistance, and higher education subsidies as taking their hard-earned money and giving it away to provide unfair advantages to other social groups—young people, African-Americans and Latin people, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and women.

Race and Sympathy Fatigue

Although they deny harboring any personal racial animosity toward minorities, many Tea Party attitudes toward government redistribution programs are racially tinged.

The figure of former President Barack Obama looms large in the racially inflected Tea Party narrative of unfair advantage. They see the first African-American president as the line-cutter-in-chief, who gleefully waved ahead the other non-white line cutters through his liberal tax-and-spend programs.

These themes are amplified by conservative media like talk radio and Fox News, which focuses on supposed “welfare queens” living a glamorous lifestyle on the government dime. This further contributes to the feelings of diminished honor. People on the right believe themselves to be suckers for working hard for a living, while others are enjoying the luxurious benefits of government largesse.

They proclaim themselves to have “sympathy fatigue” when they hear about the supposed plight of immigrants and minorities. For them, it is absurd to feel sympathy for people who’ve simply been handed every advantage in life, while they have had to work and struggle for everything—and still find themselves falling behind.

The Makers vs. the Takers

Closely related to the idea of line cutters is the concept of “makers” and “takers,” in which hardworking “makers” are victimized and exploited by lazy “takers” living off the government. The foundations of this worldview are rooted in a deeply emotional conviction that there are deserving and undeserving recipients of government aid—and that liberals and the federal government have sided with the undeserving at the expense of the deserving.

In this view, hard work is inherently correct and moral. Getting paid without doing work is not just a waste of taxpayer money; it is damaging to the pride and dignity of the individual and a gross moral violation of the natural order.

Masculinity and Risk

Conservative notions of honor are also closely linked to traditional ideas around manhood and masculinity. A real man values toughness, endurance, bravery, and honor. It is unmanly and dishonorable to rely on the government or to seek redress for your problems through the legal system.

Thus, for many white male conservatives, state regulations forbidding a company from dumping waste in a bayou or mandating individuals to wear seatbelts make people weak and dependent on the government for their own safety.

A true man doesn’t run to the government for a handout when he gets into an accident on the job or contracts cancer through exposure to chemicals. He recognizes that he is the only one responsible if he gets hurt or sick—not the company and certainly not the government.

This attitude is backed up by sociological data. One 1997 study found that white males engaged in the most risky manual labor professions were significantly less concerned about exposure to dangerous occupational conditions than workers who were less exposed to danger on the job.

Loss of Status

These resentments at being cut in front of reflect deeper anxieties about the perceived loss of once-privileged social status. White Christian men in particular (who comprise a disproportionate share of the Republican base) believe that they have lost their dominance in both the economic and cultural spheres.

Declining Wealth

Many white working-class people have indeed lost ground within the nation’s economic hierarchy. To many, this certainly feels like they are being robbed of their just rewards.

People born after 1950 have, on average, seen their real incomes (wages when adjusted for inflation) steadily decline as they get older, leading to an alarming downward mobility. This is the inverse of the fabled American Dream—people are doing worse than the generation that preceded them.

This trend is especially true for people without a college education, as is the case with many Tea Partiers in southwestern Louisiana. Global economic developments have exacerbated this trend. Globalization has made it easy for large multinational corporations to export low-wage, low-skill manufacturing jobs overseas; moreover, automation greatly reduces the need for human workers.

Once-thriving communities across the United States have been hollowed out and destroyed, leading to economic misery and social decay. For a certain subset of white men, their inability to provide for themselves or their families is a deep source of emasculating shame. This affront to their honor leads them to cast about for someone to blame for their plight—and in their outrage and despair, they are increasingly drawn to far-right politics of resentment.

The Civil Rights Era

The events of the 1960s, particularly the Civil Rights Movement, provide a deeper historical context for the political attitudes of conservative Southern whites.

While the successes of the Civil Rights Movement are celebrated as crucial victories for justice in much of the rest of the U.S., white Southerners have a different perspective on them. They deeply resented white northern allies of the Civil Rights Movement (whom they saw as moralizing and condescending) descending on their communities to upend what they believed to be the traditional Southern way of life. In some instances, federal troops were even sent into Southern states to supervise integration efforts.

To many white Southerners, the erosion of the region’s traditional racial order represented a downgrading of their own status. Going back to the antebellum era, their whiteness itself had always protected them from ever being at the bottom of the social hierarchy, regardless of their personal or economic circumstances. Any movement toward Black equality—particularly one imposed and enforced by the hated federal government—represented a deep threat to their status and honor.

This bitterness is reflected in the sentiments expressed by many Southern Tea Party supporters, who resent the portrayal of white Southerners as racist, ignorant, and backward—the villains in the American story of progress.

Loss of Cultural Dominance

The backlash to the 1960s continues, as many Tea Party supporters bemoan their loss of cultural dominance, with movies and television shows appearing to cater exclusively to minorities, LGBTQ people, and non-binary people, while portraying non-traditional family units in a positive light.

Adding insult to injury, the castigation of white identity has come as other groups are embracing and celebrating their identities—Black, Latinx, women, LGBTQ, and so on. Tea Party supporters, deeply imbued with an ideology that values hard work and self-reliance, resent what they see as a celebration of marginalization and victimization on the part of such groups.

Trump Voters and Emotional Self-Interest

These long-simmering historical resentments among white voters were a crucial factor in driving support for Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

As we’ve seen, liberals often deride conservative white working-class voters for voting against their own interest—the conservative paradox we explored earlier. But liberals take too narrow a view of what constitutes “interest.” Interests can be non-economic in nature. For blue-collar conservatives, supporting Trump was powerfully in their emotional self-interest. What they admired most about Trump was his willingness to give voice to their grievances and resentments in unvarnished terms.

With his inflammatory rhetoric toward Muslims (whom he proposed outright banning from the country) and the nation of Mexico (along whose border with the U.S. he proposed building a wall to stop illegal immigration), Trump skillfully activated conservative voters’ anger toward line cutters. More than any other Republican candidate, Trump helped to create a new emotional permission structure that enabled white conservatives to express long-simmering anger and defy the cultural elites who they believe look down upon them.

When Trump called Mexican immigrants “rapists” or encouraged his supporters to rough up protesters at his rallies, he was deliberately discarding the emotional rules that many conservatives feel have been imposed upon them by liberals—that they must only speak about marginalized groups in certain ways and be careful to always use whatever politically correct term is in vogue.

Conclusion: Breaking Through the Empathy Wall

To heal America’s growing political divide, liberals and conservatives must find ways to overcome the empathy wall that separates them. Each side is far too busy demonizing the other and reacting to caricatures of their political opponents, rather than substantively engaging with what the other side really believes and why they believe it.

Liberals must recognize that conservatives are not motivated solely by bigotry and hatred, nor are they uneducated or unsophisticated. Their political beliefs and resentments stem from a long history of feeling marginalized and discarded by mainstream American culture—of feeling like strangers in their own land. Moreover, there is much that liberals ought to admire about people on the right—their sense of pride in the dignity of work; their commitment to family and community; and their spirit of entrepreneurship, individualism, and independence.

If progressives wish to remain electorally competitive and to make progress toward their vision of a national common good, they must step outside their left-wing bubble and actually engage with those who disagree with them. Some ways to bridge this division could include:

• A national high-school exchange program in which students from different regions of the country live and study in another part of the U.S. for the school year
• A national youth service program, similar to the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps, that brings together young people from around the nation to work on projects that will benefit the whole nation, such as installing solar panels, building dams, or planting gardens.

However we do it, getting past the empathy wall is the only way we can bring civility back to our politics, restore public faith in democratic institutions, and rejuvenate the American Dream.