Strangers in Their Own Land: Chapter 16 Summary & Analysis

Although political disagreements and visible cultural differences set up the empathy wall, everyday personal interactions can swiftly knock it down. Instead of seeing others through political affiliations and disagreements, Hochschild suggests that healing the American political divide requires setting politics aside, viewing others as people first and political actors second, and focusing on the resonances, however minor, between otherwise discordant views.

While blue state oil spills are rarer and get more attention from media and activists, they still tend to recede into history in people’s minds while their concrete effects can continue for decades. Broadly, then, Hochschild’s keyhole issue demonstrates private interests’ long-lasting, often invisible effects on public freedoms. Her letters are a pithy attempt to help each side overcome the empathy wall and experience the other’s viewpoint, however partially and momentarily.

Hochschild wants liberals to move past their surface-level image of conservatives by recognizing the animating values behind their decisions. She wants coastal liberals to see principled but downwardly mobile people trying desperately to save their communities and ways of life, rather than the spiteful, prejudiced people like Rush Limbaugh they see in the media. Hochschild’s book is essentially an extended version of this call for liberal empathy, so she keeps this particular letter rather short.

Hochschild first wants conservatives to understand that left versus right does not mean and has never necessarily meant government versus private sector. In fact, government regulation can facilitate rather than stymie an effective private sector, and especially improve the lives of workers like them. She hopes the right-wing Louisianans can come to see the public sector as defending workers and their communities rather than attacking businesses and the free market.

Liberals and conservatives are both mired in fear that the government will dismantle the world they have built by regulating too little and too much, respectively. By showing how public infrastructure can create rather than fragment community, Hochschild encourages conservatives to look beyond states like Louisiana, where government often does little beside collect taxes and green-light pollution (and so citizens appropriately dislike it). Instead, she wants them to see places where the government actually carries out its goals of facilitating opportunity and meeting basic needs for all without preventing the wealthy from enjoying the fruits of their success.

The populist wings of the left and right both want better wages for American workers, but neither has fully come to terms with the way that corporations now often have more power than governments because they transcend national borders, decreasingly rely on American labor, and buy government loyalty when they can (as much in the United States as anywhere). Hochschild thinks that businesses will never consistently put their workers’ wellbeing over profit unless they are forced to answer to the public good, which means that governments need to find ways to bring businesses’ profit motive in line with that public good. This is why, notably, the left’s “high road” proposal is not actually about regulating away options and opportunities, as the right seems to think; rather, it is about giving people and businesses the resources to innovate.

In trying to view Berkeley from Louisianans’ eyes, Hochschild wonders whether they would focus on the differences that confirm their stereotypes or see the city’s similarities with their own communities. Would they see the progressive Berkeley city government as a caring institution that looks out for its citizens like a church does or a nightmarishly authoritarian regime forcing people to be “green?”

Although the Arenos feel they are living evidence of the pollution’s health impacts (they both survived cancer, and many of their relatives died), they are not surprised when the government sides with polluters yet again. The same untrustworthy government managed to botch the cleanup effort, and even if the lawsuit had succeeded, there is nothing the Arenos can do about the private chemical industry’s continual expansion around them.

Life goes on for the other Louisianans—Hochschild emphasizes that they are more than just characters in a story, but people living only half a world away from her readers.

By giving these updates at the end of her book, Hochschild also shows that her relationships with the people she met in Louisiana endure, exceeding their original premise of research. In a sense, she also challenges the traditional academic image of an impartial scholarly observer who treats their subjects as part of a bounded “field” separate from their own everyday life; rather, the field of American politics is part of Hochschild’s everyday life, as well as the lives of most of her readers.

No matter how hard Mike Schaff fights for his ideal retirement home on the water, pollution seems to keep catching up with him. No matter how much he cares about the environment, his political party seem to offer him no choice but a vote against regulation. The Great Paradox continues—not because Mike doesn’t care about pollution or even want some sort of regulations, but because the only candidates who match the rest of his views have financial interests in extractive industries.

The poignant image that closes Strangers in Their Own Land shows Harold Areno gesturing to a past he treasures and a future he earnestly anticipates. He continues to remember and hope for a clean environment, even if he is denied one in the present. Meanwhile, his confidence that he will meet Hochschild in heaven demonstrates that her quest to build empathetic, trusting, meaningful, and enduring relationships with people like Harold, whom she has little in common with, has been a resounding success.