Strangers in Their Own Land: Afterword Summary & Analysis

The first edition of Strangers in Their Own Land was published in September 2016, just months before Donald Trump’s election. In the following year, Hochschild returned to Louisiana three times to check in on her friends and acquaintances there. Hochschild describes them as “ecstatic”; after all, everyone whose story she told ended up voting for Trump.

In September 2017, Trump stopped in Lake Charles during a trip to visit flooding victims in Houston. Although he was not planning a public appearance, a large crowd turned up, hoping he would decide to speak anyway. Berkeley, on the other hand, “was gloomy” after Trump’s election. Californians wondered how conservatives could support Trump despite Russian meddling in the election and his infidelity.

Hochschild wonders whether Trump’s policy agenda intentionally takes after Louisiana’s. Ultimately, Governor Jindal left the state devastated socially and economically—even Sasol, the South African petrochemical company, cancelled most of its enormous investment in Lake Charles. As director of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, Trump chose Scott Angelle, the official who okayed the drilling that led to the Bayou Corne Sinkhole. His pick to lead the EPA, Scott Pruitt, has started slashing its budget. Louisiana polluters still go unpunished—for instance, a plant in Westlake exploded twice and 18 people ended up in the emergency room, but the company was never penalized.

Most of the mail Hochschild received after publishing Strangers in Their Own Land came from worried liberals who “despaired of developing empathy for the right” or wondered why conservatives do not reach out to them. The majority of conservatives who wrote to Hochschild “felt the book was a fair portrait” and particularly agreed with her picture of the deep story. Others outlined “postelection impasses with loved ones” and felt estranged from their former families and communities because of their political differences. Indeed, Hochschild feels that polarization has gotten noticeably worse since she started her research in 2011.

After the election, Hochschild repeatedly visited Sharon Galicia, who initially favored Ted Cruz but warmed up to Donald Trump during the campaign when he called for keeping jobs in the United States and keeping illegal immigrants out. Hochschild explains that Sharon’s feeling of being a “stranger in her own land” was a significant predictor of Trump support in postelection polls. Whereas Sharon used to obsess over the national debt, now her primary worry is that mainstream American media is unfairly biased against the president, which Hochschild explains was also a common shift in concern. Galicia’s eighteen-year-old son supported Bernie Sanders, and the whole family came to Berkeley for a college visit. Hochschild even set up a “right-meets-left ‘Living Room Conversation’” between the Galicia family and Berkeley liberals.

Mike Schaff was busy working on his new house, but he still visited his old one in Bayou Corne. He was also busy caring for his stepdaughter’s children, which gave him plenty of time to follow the news—but “mainly Fox.” He continued to lampoon the “donut-bloated overpaid useless ass bureaucrats” at the EPA for their tendency to side with polluters. Instead, Mike has his own master plan for fixing the environment: use digital environmental toxin monitors rather than bureaucracy to enforce environmental regulations and simply abolish state regulatory agencies. Hochschild sees this plan as “advocating for an honest, well-functioning federal government.”

Hochschild brings her son David to meet Mike—the men “were polar opposites in nearly every way,” from their political beliefs to their regional heritage and family structures to their jobs: David oversees renewable energy for the California State Energy Commission. She asks the two to discuss environmental policy on tape. They agree that investors should prioritize renewable energy, but Mike recoils when David argues that California oil drilling is cleaner because of state regulations. Hochschild sees that “big differences remained, but palpable common moral ground had grown larger.” Despite this, when David brings up climate change, Mike tells him not to mention it if he wants “to sell solar panels to guys like me.”

Lee Sherman has stayed in touch with Hochschild by phone. Lee adores Donald Trump, watches 14 hours of Fox News a day, and defends the president’s “right to his own opinion.” Hochschild brings him a reader’s poem about the bird Lee had saved after dumping toxic waste in the bayou; Lee plans to frame it and hang it in his living room.

A “lean, friendly man in his sixties” visits Annette Areno at her house and asks if she the is “the Annette Areno in that book.” She is; he asks her to sign it. The man was Ray Bowman, a former plant worker and union president who told Hochschild he was tasked with collecting dead fish when he worked for Citgo decades before. He explained that “they didn’t tell us why but I knew.”

The Arenos now live between the polluted bayou and a huge Westlake Chemical processing plant under construction. Sometimes visitors cannot get to their house because “a company flagman could halt traffic for hours.” Hochschild followed them to church one Sunday, where the minister warned the congregation about communists and other “outside influences” before celebrating their aid to Houston hurricane victims, even across racial lines. The Arenos favor Trump’s policies and specifically worry about their town’s influx of Mexican construction workers, whom they accuse of taking locals’ jobs. They see world events —“talk of moving the capital [sic] of Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, then the floods, and maybe nuclear war with North Korea”—as possible signs that the rapture is coming.

Janice Areno wears a jersey reading “ADORABLE DEPLORABLES” to a dinner Hochschild hosts in Lake Charles and later mails one to her in Berkeley. (The line is a response to Hillary Clinton calling Trump supporters “a basket of deplorables” during the campaign.) Janice is “the staunchest of Trump fans,” alongside Lee Sherman, and she applauds his antagonism toward “line cutters.” She jokes that the Mexico border wall should extend to cut off California, too.

A year after Hochschild first published this book, white nationalists and neo-Nazis assembled for a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; one of them drove his car into a liberal crowd and killed a woman. Some of these demonstrators belonged to “old-guard groups like the Aryan Nation and the Ku Klux Klan” while others saw themselves as “alt-right.” Trump openly equated the white nationalists with the liberals who protested them by suggesting that each side was partially to blame for the violence and had “very fine people.” Besides Fox News, national media responded with an appropriate scrutiny of his “reluctance to condemn” the demonstration; public opinion polls showed that the vast majority of Americans—but not most Republicans—disapproved of his comments.

Hochschild explains that the events in Charlottesville were “rekindling a nationwide racism that had never disappeared.” Racist movements have waxed and waned with the times, in the North as well as the South. After asking whether “white racism [is] the overriding source of support for Donald Trump” and the Tea Party, Hochschild suggests that many (but not all) of the people she interviewed in Louisiana “tacitly agreed” with a belief in natural racial hierarchy. The majority of those Hochschild asked about Charlottesville were disgusted by the violence and eager to condemn Nazis and the KKK. Ray Bowman shows her a dagger with a Nazi symbol on his wall, explaining that his uncle took it off a dead Nazi soldier during World War II.

But Hochschild’s interviewees “also had feelings for which they found no place in the liberal world.” They do not believe they have systematic privileges because of their whiteness—a view Hochschild finds understandable, given their declining economic opportunities. Bowman simultaneously condemns the “idiots” who flew “the American, Confederate and Nazi flags all together” but also feels that the first two of those represent the honor of his Southern “homeland.”

Hochschild concludes that Louisianans’ hostility to “unitary,” explicit racism is undermined by the racist “subnarratives” they still believe. They will condemn the KKK but hold onto “smaller stories” about Confederate pride, whites’ victimization by affirmative action, the black athletes who decide not to stand for the national anthem, and black Americans’ laziness or criminality. The underlying problem with these subnarratives is “the absence of historical context,” and while those who believe them disavow explicitly racist beliefs, these smaller stories may still “gather in some new way downstream.” This reflects what Hochschild calls “a powerful truth—life had been hard for them and it could get a lot worse.”In other words, Louisianans’ “economic anxieties exacerbated—and sometimes ran deeper than—purely racial ones.” And these racial anxieties aren’t just about Louisiana’s large black population—Hochschild’s acquaintances also worry as Muslims and Mexicans start moving into town.

These Louisianans believe that liberal Americans’ “race consciousness was itself a form of racism” and feel that liberals define them by their whiteness. Ray Bowman worries that his son will have difficulty finding a job at Citgo due to affirmative action, which “doesn’t make Ray Bowman a ‘racist’” but still misrepresents the bigger picture that economic opportunities are dwindling for everyone besides the wealthiest Americans. Back in a wealthy residential section of Berkeley, Hochschild notes that property values have risen so sharply that “it would be impossible to afford a place nowadays” without a high-paying job, and so upper-middle class white and Asian liberals who wanted racial integration actually ended up self-segregating by income. This class status, Hochschild argues, blocks them from understanding Southern whites’ deep story. She concludes that class “loom[s] large” over political polarization in America today.

Hochschild’s interviewees also disagree about the Robert E. Lee statue that the Charlottesville protestors wanted to protect; some thought it should go in a museum, others agree with Hochschild that a statue of Frederick Douglass should be erected alongside it, and others—like Janice Areno—worry that taking down one statue would cause a slippery slope whereby liberals can “go for the next and the next.” While race “goes deep and looms large,” Hochschild argues that “economic anxieties” and moral values compound its effects, even though both are problems black Southerners also tend to face.

Louisiana conservatives also see women as “line cutters”—men tend to place them in the “separate mental categories” of daughters, wives, or competitors at work. And they worry about Mexican immigrant workers and “Muslims building local mosques that would teach sharia law.” But Hochschild notes that Mitt Romney and Donald Trump won the same proportion of the white vote and she concludes that “Trump’s election did not hinge on a new appeal to extreme racist groups.”

Hochschild mentions a few other letters she received: a man from rural Virginia who stumbled on a Confederate grave while hunting wondered whether he was really any different from the soldier “except for the time in which fate placed us,” and a Kansas woman noted the declining number of dairy jobs in her area. A student who was the first in her family to attend college wrote Hochschild that she felt “strong differences” from her family that grew up “seared by a fear of poverty.” To Hochschild, all these stories reflect the belief that “a precious way of life, like the nation itself, was being left behind.” And this is not just in the United States—around the world, right-wing movements blame outsiders for their “feeling of being strangers in their own land.”

Hochschild asks why, according to her interviewees’ deep story, the line for the American Dream has “stalled or moved back.” Whereas Louisianans who increasingly see black celebrities and athletes in the public eye may conclude that “blacks have enjoyed spectacular success, leaving whites behind,” these public images are misleading. Hochschild explains that “average blacks have not gained relative to average whites in education, jobs, or wealth.” Black representation at universities has actually declined, the black-white income gap has not changed, and black families suffered significantly more than whites during the Great Recession. And it is important to remember that “the history of the United States has been the history of whites cutting ahead of blacks” through slavery, Jim Crow laws, the New Deal and even the GI Bill, which disproportionately excluded African Americans. Today, systematic hiring discrimination continues—a 2003 study found that whites with prison records were more likely to get a callback than blacks without them.

Women have seen measurable gains in education and income over the last 35 years, but they continue to make far less than men for the same work. And, despite Louisianans’ fears, “between 2009 and 2014 more Mexicans left the United States than entered it.”

Who, Hochschild asks, are “the real line cutters”? She concludes that they are robots. Automation disproportionately threatens the unskilled oil jobs on which Louisianans largely rely, and a McKinsey study suggests that “half of today’s work activities could be automated by 2055.” Automation is the leading job killer in manufacturing, and men who get displaced from that industry can often only find new work in lower-paid service jobs traditionally held by women and black Americans. Robots eliminate ongoing labor costs, increase productivity, and never sue their employers—so businesses increasingly turn to them, but their negative effect on American livelihoods is largely overshadowed by their status “as a sign of progress, growth, greatness.”

The year after Strangers in Their Own Land was published, all the incoming students at Louisiana State University’s Honor College were assigned the book as summer reading. Hochschild spoke to the students at the beginning of their first semester and knew that many grew up in the conservative communities she had researched, with parents who worked in petrochemical industries. She wondered what she could say to them and decided to tell them what she would do in their shoes.

As a student interested in the government, Hochschild said, she would try to understand Americans’ distrust in government and compare the American government’s failures with other countries’ successes in the same realms. As a student interested in business, she would ask whether there is truly a trade-off between cleaning up the environment and continuing to expand industry. As a student interested in protecting the environment, she would study the current EPA cuts; as a student interested in psychology, she would investigate why oil workers reject climate science while their CEOs acknowledge it; and, as a student interested in law, she would try to work with the judge who blocked further drilling in Lake Peigneur after 2016.

In her speeches to other audiences, Hochschild emphasizes the “four pillars of activism” that liberals can use to help heal the current political divide: fighting to preserve the institutional checks and balances in American government; encouraging Democrats to address “people like those in this book” as well as those already on the left; making an effort to build relationships with people from other regional, religious or class backgrounds, who are so often disparaged in liberal circles; and talking with Republicans “about race, robots, government and more.” In fact, Democrats’ “political bubbles” are actually more insular than Republican ones: more Trump supporters have friends who supported Clinton than vice-versa.

One complication is that some liberals, like pundit Frank Rich, have tried to shut down this kind of dialogue since the election. Hochschild argues that “Rich confuses talk with surrender and empathy with weakness.” In fact, many voters went for Obama and then Trump; many Trump supporters—a quarter—felt positively about Bernie Sanders and some initial Sanders supporters even switched to Trump. Hochschild sees a handful of “potential crossover topics,” including “getting money out of politics, rebuilding our infrastructure, avoiding nuclear war,” that could form the basis of relationships across partisan lines. There are many grassroots cross-partisan groups, and Hochschild has worked with one in particular: Living Room Conversations.

Hochschild sees a recent decline in intermixture among “Americans who differ by class, race, and region.” Whereas the draft, labor unions, and public schools offered this mixture in the past, she argues that “today we need to find new ways to get acquainted across our differences,” perhaps through national service or domestic high school exchange programs. She admits that this may be an unlikely dream, but by putting those from differing backgrounds into touch, Hochschild thinks America can confront “the questions that so bitterly divide us” in order to “begin to slowly rebuild a nation in which no American—right or left—need ever feel like a stranger in our own land.”