Strangers in Their Own Land

Arlie Russell Hochschild set out to understand a paradox she couldn't explain from the outside: why residents of Louisiana's bayou country — among the most heavily polluted, industry-dependent, and economically precarious places in America, with among the worst outcomes in health and education — consistently voted for candidates promising to shrink the very regulations and safety nets that might have helped them, and despised the federal agency, the EPA, tasked with cleaning up the pollution poisoning their own water and air. Rather than survey or debate her way to an answer, she spent five years visiting, interviewing, and building real friendships with dozens of Tea Party supporters around Lake Charles, trying to climb over what she calls the "empathy wall" that keeps people who disagree politically from genuinely understanding each other's felt experience.

What she constructs from this fieldwork is a concept she names the "deep story": a narrative, not fact-checkable and not meant to be, that describes how her subjects feel about their place in America regardless of the specific policy debate of the moment. In her rendering, it goes roughly like this — you've been waiting patiently in a long line up a hill toward the American Dream, playing by the rules, paying your dues; then you watch others — immigrants, women, refugees, public employees — cut ahead of you in line, aided by a government you experience as an unfair line supervisor, personified for many of her subjects by Barack Obama, waving the line-cutters forward while gesturing for you to wait. Hochschild treats this deep story not as something to refute with statistics, but as an emotional truth that has to be understood on its own terms before any productive political conversation becomes possible.