Strangers in Their Own Land: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Louisiana native Mike Schaff drives Hochschild around the old plantation where he grew up, showing her where his family and community members used to live. Schaff tells Hochschild about Louisiana’s shift from “an era of sugar, cotton, and mule-drawn plows” to an economy dominated by oil. In the past, he explains, his community was tight-knit; even though they were often needy, nobody needed government help to survive because everyone could rely on one another. But now, Schaff feels like “big government” has gotten in the way.

Mike Schaff proclaims his loyalty to the Tea Party. Hochschild first met him at an environmental rally where he was speaking. A few years before, a huge sinkhole “robbed” him of his new home, and a “lightly regulated drilling company” caused the catastrophe. Despite this, Mike still favors “drastic cuts” in environmental protection spending, and Hochschild is “puzzled” by his beliefs.

Hochschild suggests that her confusion might stem from an “empathy wall” between her and Mike. (An empathy wall is “an obstacle to deep understanding of another person” that prevents people from challenging their existing beliefs and relating meaningfully with the other side.) They come from opposite political bubbles: Hochschild is a liberal professor from Berkeley and, when she told Schaff about her background, he responded that people from Berkeley “must be communist!” But Mike’s welcoming, “soulful” demeanor made conversation easy, even though neither of them had ever really known people from the other party.

Hochschild notes that “partyism” (prejudice based on political party) is now the greatest dividing line in American society. Americans from each side increasingly move to the same places and follow separate news media; even belief in climate change is now determined by politics more than anything else.

But Hochschild argues that “this split has widened because the right has moved right, not because the left has moved left.” She cites historical examples of previous Republican administrations that favored more infrastructure spending, higher tax rates, and closer relationships with labor unions than today’s Republicans would ever accept. Now, Republicans want to cut entire federal agencies because they no longer trust the government to help improve their lives. Hochschild wants to connect with members of this “more rapidly shifting and ever stronger right.”

Hochschild sees Louisiana as an “extreme example” of the phenomenon she calls the Great Paradox: although conservative “red states” have “more teen mothers, more divorce, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrollment” than liberal blue states, conservative states tend to reject government programs to address those issues. Louisiana is one of the worst offenders—it ranks second-to-last in health and child well-being, and quality of life is lower there than elsewhere in the country for black and white Americans alike.

Red (Republican) states like Louisiana also receive more money from the federal government than blue (Democratic) states, but many Louisianans Hochschild meets—including Mike Schaff—want to keep that federal money away. Like Schaff, many Louisianans deny climate change science even as their state loses coastline and defend the Wall Street-backed corporate monopolies that are increasingly outcompeting their own small businesses.

Hochschild considers Alec MacGillis’s popular explanation for the Great Paradox: MacGillis thinks that everyone votes in their political self-interest, but poor conservatives who need social programs vote less often than wealthier ones who truly benefit from shrinking the government. Hochschild wants to disprove this thesis by showing that affluent whites in red states still vote against their political interests. She wants to “pick out a problem that affluent voters in poor red states do have, and to show they don’t want government help for that either.” She chooses environmental pollution as this “keyhole issue”—a lens through which she can come to understand the Great Paradox from the viewpoint of conservatives.

Hochschild explains how the growth of Southern conservatism since the 1970s has made the region “the geographic heart of the right.” The rightward trend has been especially strong among white Southerners; in Louisiana, only 14% of whites voted for Obama and more congressional representatives have joined the Tea Party Caucus than any other state.

Hochschild was lucky to find a contact in the southwest Louisiana town of Lake Charles: Sally Cappel, a Democrat whose lifelong friend Shirley Slack is a Tea Party supporter. Sally and Shirley keep keys to each other’s houses, but they watch different news channels, married “like-minded” men, and seem to have little interest in changing each other’s minds. To Hochschild, their friendship “models what our country itself needs to forge: the capacity to connect across difference.” 

Hochschild examines common theories about “the rise of the right.” Liberal scholars suspect that corporate donors are orchestrating grassroots Tea Party activism, and while Hochschild agrees that “purchased political influence is real,” she believes that it is too convenient an explanation for the political beliefs of individuals like Mike.

Other scholars believe that the Tea Party emerged from specific Southern regional traditions and cultural values. Hochschild agrees that the South prides itself on resistance to the federal government and that its voters worry about the country moving away from traditional Christian morality, but she finds these theories insufficient to explain the Tea Party’s rise without “a full understanding of emotion in politics.”

More fundamental than geography or culture are liberals’ and conservatives’ competing “feeling rules.” Liberals think people should feel “happy for the gay newlywed, sad at the plight of the Syrian refugee, unresentful about paying taxes,” but conservatives resent these expectations, which seem to attack their own notions of how they should feel about other groups. By seeking the “deep stories” behind people’s political beliefs—the “story that feels as if it were true” on each side of the aisle—Hochschild believes she can understand “the shoulds and shouldn’ts of feeling,” as well as Republican politicians’ powerful appeals to conservatives’ feeling rules.

Hochschild’s research started with focus groups in Sally Cappel’s kitchen, which built into a broader network of relationships with Louisianans from every walk of life who invited her to come visit their churches, homes, and community gatherings. Ultimately, her five years of research resulted in “4,690 pages of transcripts based on interviews with a core of forty Tea Party advocates and twenty others from various walks of life,” some of whom Hochschild chose to follow more closely.

Hochschild’s subjects varied widely in areas like their commitment to church, adherence to mainline Tea Party views, and suspicion of the poor and President Obama. But Louisiana was still a world apart from Berkeley, from the aisles of Bibles in its bookstores to its lack of foreign films and recycling bins to its residents’ prayers before dinner. She came to see the Tea Party as a culture: “a way of seeing and feeling about a place and its people.”

Hochschild compares the list of registered student organizations at Louisiana State University—which focus on religion, agriculture, the military, and conservative politics—to the left-wing activist groups at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches. She notes that conservative iconography is everywhere in Lake Charles—most striking are the numerous memorials to the Confederacy. Race pops up “everywhere in the physical surroundings, but almost nowhere in spontaneous direct talk.”

Before setting off for Louisiana, Hochschild re-read the “Tea Party bible,” Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Rand argued that “greed is good” and helping the poor is morally wrong. From her reading, Hochschild expected Tea Party conservatives to have a “selfish, tough, cold” worldview like Rand’s—instead, she discovered “warm, open people who were deeply charitable to those around them, including an older, white liberal stranger writing a book.”

Hochschild remembers meeting gospel singer Madonna Massey at a Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana meeting. Madonna proclaimed her love for conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh (who is best known for his fiery rants against the left) because he criticizes “femi-nazis” and other liberal groups that tend to look down on the South. Hochschild realized that Madonna, who is “a gifted singer, beloved by a large congregation, a graduate of a two-year Bible college, and a caring mother of two,” saw Limbaugh more as a “firewall against liberal insults” than a role model. While Hochschild had found “good people at the center of this Great Paradox,” she still could not understand how they would vote for a harsher government and more pollution in their own backyards.