A review by barrosd12
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

5.0

An exceptional treatise on the American South as it specifically relates to politics is what's on offer in Hochschild's hotly recommended book (in particular after the 2016 US elections). Hochschild couches herself in a highly approachable methodology for understanding that mercurial beast, the voter that votes against their own self-interest in favor of a "deep story". Understanding this dynamic is at the heart of understanding the wholesale rejection of so-called mainstream candidates in elections and the generational systems that have allowed entire cultures and regions to lay fallow. The analysis in the book, for the sake of both simplicity and driving home a deeper point is contained within rural Louisiana and the stories that Hochschild unearths are unimaginable to those of us that subscribe to the left-leaning belief that government should be working for the people in supporting them. What's most fascinating about this book and the reason I recommend it so highly is because of just how deeply I was forced to check my own preconceptions of the way I believe government and private sectors should work. This book is challenging, in the way that it demands understanding, or at least in Hochschild's case, empathy. I came away from it not particularly more empathetic to the supposed entreaties of a region of mostly people who believe they are not at the front of the line in favor of minorities, but rather with an understanding of how they came to think that way. Perhaps the saddest event in the entire book revolves around a sinkhole in a remote parish in Louisiana - it brings together the absolute worst in private sector abuses with government non-intervention, leaving dozens of people to fend for themselves and even abandon their homes. But do they blame the companies? The state government? The party that continually reduces regulation? No. And in that way, you begin to see hyper-partisanship for the monster it truly is - some all-consuming nouveau religion whose only deity is money, power, and advancement.