Strangers in Their Own Land

Hochschild is a Berkeley sociologist who spent five years driving to Louisiana to talk to Tea Party supporters — people who voted against environmental regulation while living on a bayou that had been devastated by petrochemical pollution, who voted against government programs while struggling economically, who felt, as she puts it, like strangers in their own land. She was not trying to convert them or expose them but to understand the deep story they were telling themselves — the emotional logic underneath the political positions. What she found is one of the most important sociological documents of the decade: a portrait of people who feel they have been waiting in line for the American Dream all their lives, playing by the rules, and watching others — Black people, immigrants, women, refugees — cut in line ahead of them, aided by a federal government that has abandoned the people who were there first. The deep story is not true in the ways its believers think it is. But it is emotionally real, and Hochschild is the rare sociologist who understands that emotional reality is a political fact that cannot be argued away. The most important book on the shelf for understanding why people vote against their material interests — and the one that most clearly shows that the answer is never stupidity but always a story that makes sense from the inside.