Strangers in Their Own Land: Chapter 15 Summary & Analysis

During the last years of Hochschild’s research in Louisiana, something monumental happened. On one of these later trips, she went to a Republican presidential campaign rally and then asked her local friends what they thought of Donald Trump.

Hochschild sees that “the scene had been set for Trump’s rise” for three reasons: white conservatives feared redistribution because their own economic situation was already so precarious, they felt culturally marginalized, and they suffered a “demographic decline” relative to the rest of the country. The deep story also set the stage for Trump’s rising popularity: Louisiana conservatives felt like “a besieged minority,” united against the “line cutters” and their patron, President Obama.

It is the day before the Louisiana Republican primary, and Hochschild attends Donald Trump’s rally in New Orleans. Supporters bus in from around the state and flood into an enormous airplane hangar. “Two or three thousand fans” wave pro-Trump signs and proudly display their Trump merchandise. Nearly all are white, and many carry enormous American flags—Hochschild wonders whether their patriotic style is “ironic or earnest? Or both?”

Trump steps up to the podium and the audience starts a chant. He cites his rising poll numbers and then starts listing what “we” will do: protect domestic industries, make the country “great again,” build a wall on the Mexican border, etc. The audience cheers after each proposal. One man lifts a sign proclaiming the KKK’s support for Trump, and Black Lives Matter activists lead a larger group of protesters through the door. Eyeing one demonstrator in particular, Trump tells guards to “get that guy out” and wonders “why is this taking so long?” The crowd chants “U.S.A.!” over and over to drown out the protestors. At later events, Trump starts the chant himself, suggesting that “dissent is one thing […] but being American is another.”

After the speech, people flock to Trump for autographs and photos. One approaches with raised arms, “as in the rapture.” And the day after the rally, Trump wins the primary with 41% of the Republican primary vote. Over the rest of the campaign, “Trump tells his fans what he offers them”—including his greed and the triumph of white Christian culture over minority cultures (and especially Islam). Trump calls protestors “bad, bad people” and promises to cover his supporters’ legal fees if they “knock the crap out of” one. When another tries to rush the podium, Trump shows the audience how he would have attacked the man had he made it onstage. And Trump wants to abolish the EPA “in almost every form.”

Hochschild calls Trump an “emotions candidate” because he focuses on provoking emotional responses from supporters rather than proposing policy changes. He acts out the “emotional transformation” he promises his white Christian supporters, chastises his opponents because they fail to “inspire enthusiasm,” and presents his fans’ emotional response as “a sign of collective success.” He promises to convert his supporters’ discouragement into hope and their shame into pride, making them “no longer strangers in their own land” as if through magic.

Renowned French sociologist Émile Durkheim used the term “collective effervescence” to describe the “emotional excitation felt by those who join with others they take to be fellow members of a moral or biological tribe.” A group organizes around a powerful shared symbol, or totem, which in this case is Trump himself. That totem unifies the crowd—Trump begins to consider his followers a “movement” and promises that they will be uplifted. “Emotionally speaking,” the crowd gets an “ecstatic high.” People signal their solidarity with Trump and one another by wearing merchandise and agreeing to expel outsiders: the Muslims and Mexicans that Trump wants to keep out of the United States and the protestors he wants out of his rallies.

Another important dimension of Trump’s emotional appeal is that he rejects “politically correct” standards of speech for the public sphere. In doing so, he also rejects the liberal feeling rules that so frustrated his supporters. Ultimately, far-right conservatives felt both that “the deep story was true” and that liberals denied the deep story, telling them that their resentment was misplaced. They felt as though the left was using a “false PC cover-up” to silence their deep story, but Donald Trump finally lifted the constraints of that cover-up by stereotyping and mocking marginalized groups. This allowed conservatives “both to feel like a good moral American and to feel superior to those they considered ‘other’ or beneath them.”

Hochschild argues that this release from the rules of political correctness created a “high” that conservatives wanted to hold onto. Sticking with Trump became a matter of “emotional self-interest,” a factor that many analyses tend to ignore in favor of economic self-interest. Hochschild sees that her initial questions about the Great Paradox were framed in the language of economic self-interest, which “is never entirely absent,” but is nevertheless often overwhelmed by “the profound importance of emotional self-interest.” People will protect Trump to “protect [their] elation,” like a woman who talked about him continuously for six hours and fended off possible liberal concerns with a “shield of talk.”

On her last visit, about half of Hochschild’s friends in Louisiana backed Trump. Janice Areno and Donny McCorquodale were ardent supporters; Mike Schaff preferred Ted Cruz. Jackie Tabor, Harold and Annette Areno, Sharon Galicia and others Hochschild encountered were worried about Trump’s antagonizing personality but still willing to vote for him if he won the Republican nomination.

Many Louisianans appreciate Trump’s business success, exhibiting a faith in capitalism that Hochschild contrasts with the turn to socialism during the Great Depression. They also appreciate his outward hypermasculinity—he promises to vindicate “both fist-pounding, gun-toting guy-guys and high-flying entrepreneurs.” He was, Hochschild declares, “the identity politics candidate for white men.” And, as multinational corporations gain more power than many governments around the globe, right-wing political ideologies “focused on national sentiment, strong central rule, and intolerance for minorities or dissent” have spread like wildfire. Russia, India, Hungary, and Poland are now run by such right-wing parties, and similar groups are gaining traction even in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.