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

An empathy wall is “an obstacle to deep understanding of another person” (5). It is a difference in belief and opinion rooted in divergent life experiences that prevents one person from truly understanding how the other sees and interprets the world. Empathy walls can result in differences of opinion so great that they breed hostility, mistrust, and even hatred. The author contends that empathy walls divide the Right and the Left in contemporary American politics, and much of her research is oriented toward identifying and overcoming her own empathy walls. Although a trained sociologist who relies on objectivity in her work, Hochschild is honest about her own politics: She is a Berkeley-trained academic who is the product of a liberal family and liberal institutions. She encounters an empathy wall almost immediately when she interviews a man who continues to support pro-business, anti-regulatory politicians even after much of his property and his town are swallowed up by a sinkhole, created by lax oversight and both industry and governmental failure to abide by environmental regulations. To break down her empathy wall, the author makes a concerted effort to understand the role of emotion and history in political belief formation, and she comes to realize that there is more to voting patterns than economics.

The endurance self is a conservative ideal uncovered by the author during her exploration of the Tea Party’s deep story. It refers to an individual who works diligently, endures difficulties with stoicism, is deeply rooted in their church and community, and believes in the power, the promise, and the attainability of the American dream. Individuals who embody the endurance self have, throughout the latter half of the 20th century, come to feel that their happiness, ability to succeed, and livelihoods are threatened by the rise of identity politics and the societal preference for a liberal, cosmopolitan identity that values diversity, the welfare state, and environmentalist causes. The idea of the endurance self is in opposition to liberal societal ideals in that it eschews identity politics and privileges hard work and “endurance.” The author comes to understand that individuals who value the endurance self locate a sense of honor within the idea of hard work and endurance, and so it is not only their livelihoods and access to the American Dream that is threatened by competing modalities of being, but their identities: That the endurance self is no longer a privileged position within American societies feels like an assault on who they are and what they value.

Hochschild research is motivated in part by her desire to understand what she terms “the great paradox”: that residents in red states are subject to worse pollution, have lower wages, struggle in underperforming schools, and produce lower tax revenue, yet consistently vote for politicians who do little to improve their quality of life. She does not initially comprehend why individuals would, en masse, vote against their economic and political self-interests, and many of her interviews try to get at the heart of this “paradox.” The “keyhole issue” through which she seeks to understand the great paradox is environmental pollution in and around Lake Charles, Louisiana. Here, she learns that voters support politicians who fail to keep them safe from environmental disasters out of a broader mistrust for government itself. They resent the use of their tax dollars to fund what they perceive as wasteful programs. Additionally, they do not trust the government to develop and implement environmental regulations without wasting money and “overreaching” by interfering in the affairs of industries and businesses seen as the area’s only hope for economic prosperity.