Strangers in Their Own Land: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

Behind the stories she is hearing, Hochschild sees a deep story. A deep story is a “feels-as-if story” rather than a story about facts or judgments. Hochschild argues that only a deep story can offer a picture of how “the party on the other side sees the world.” Deep stories come in many varieties and they matter in many contexts: for instance, lovers seek to understand each other’s perspectives on the world and diplomats try to understand how other leaders imagine their national stories. Hochschild’s version of the Tea Party’s deep story “focuses on relationships between social groups within our national borders.”

Hochschild likens this deep story to waiting in line for the American Dream that lies just over a hill on the horizon. For older white Christian men, the line seems to be barely moving or even moving backwards. Many of the people behind them in line are “people of color—poor, young and old, mainly without college degrees.” The American Dream is about progress—economic progress as well as social status and security—but it is “so hard to see” from where white conservatives stand. This community has seen its economic opportunities dwindle, and although Louisianans refuse to complain about their fate, they are “beginning to feel stuck.” Much of the country has abandoned their Christian moral values, and hard work no longer seems to guarantee success.

The line is not necessarily fair—in fact, people seem to be cutting in line, breaking the rules, and taking advantage of affirmative action. It seems to Louisiana conservatives that even Barack and Michelle Obama rose up the ranks unfairly, overtaking the whites who were “supposed to be so much more privileged.” Some even think that the Obamas “must have” gotten federal money but show no gratitude for their success and  have “no right to feel mad” about minorities’ disadvantages in America.

It feels like women are “demanding the right to the men’s jobs” and “overpaid public sector employees” get better job security, pay, and pensions for their easy, unnecessary work in the government. Immigrants cut ahead, too, whether they got a “special visa” to enter the country or “snuck in” illegally, and their cheap labor lowers American wages. Obama is letting refugees in, but most are young men—maybe even terrorists—who are “poised to get in line ahead of you and get their hands on your tax money.” And the government even protects animals like the brown pelican, the Louisiana state bird that nearly went extinct because of pollution—even this bird is “in line ahead of you.” While these groups are unfairly cutting in line, it feels like “it’s people like you who have made this country great.” Despite the line cutters’ complaints of discrimination and oppression, white Christian men resent them and eventually “close the borders to human sympathy.”

How are these groups getting ahead? It appears that “President Barack Hussein Obama” is on the line cutters’ side, waving to them and “telling you that these line cutters deserve special treatment,” something “the real story” on Fox News disproves. Obama “is their president, not your president”—he “seems ‘fishy,’” as though “secret strings were pulled” by the government to help him succeed. Perhaps he is even a Muslim. Can white Southerners feel pride in America if its president is against them, if they feel like “strangers in their own land”?

Hochschild sees this deep story as a “response to a real squeeze,” namely the tension between the ideal of progress and that progress’s increasing difficulty. On the one hand, the American Dream encourages people to feel “hopeful, energetic, focused, mobilized” about their chance at progress. But, on the other, “the Dream Machine” has ground to a halt for the bottom 90 percent because of “automation, off-shoring, and the growing power of multinationals.” White men born before 1950 are “the first generation in American history” to see “lifetime downward mobility,” and many even give up and stop looking for work. Aging Southern conservatives start to realize their American Dream may not come true—and they can only blame themselves, even though they also face discrimination due to their age.

Hochschild met a 63-year-old man with a “cherubic smile” whom she calls Bill Beatifo. Beatifo was a successful salesman for 16 years, but got then fired because, as a long term employee, he was making more than his company would have to pay a new hire. He found that other sales firms refused to hire him at his age and turned to other options, ultimately going on unemployment for the maximum 99 week period before finding a job that paid $10 an hour—the same wage he made as a college student 40 years before. He is still looking for other part-time jobs and has tried side projects from “non-FDA-approved magnetic shoe inserts” to investing in “a company that was ‘about to produce’ a medical device he hoped to sell to hospitals.” But Beatifo remains convinced that his investment in the medical devices will eventually make him a millionaire.

Beyond economic opportunities, “cultural honor” is also in short supply for older white Louisiana men: “cultural doors” started opening for line-cutting minorities during the 1960s and 1970s, even while those minorities seemed to be taking whites’ jobs. Since the Recession, it looks like the government is giving minorities even more undeserved opportunities. In response, conservatives moved right.

Southern white conservatives also find themselves disparaged in the national media, called names like “‘Crazy redneck.’ ‘White trash.’ ‘Ignorant Southern Bible-thumper.’” Movie and television characters represent them “in unflattering ways,” recycling many of the same stereotypes used against blacks in the early 1900s. Where can white Southerners find a sense of honor to hang their hat on? Work is paying less and less; they get no “points” for their race, gender, or sexuality; Southern “regional honor” is disparaged in the national eye, which also looks down on church, and the aging are neglected as “attention is trained on the young” in America. Southern Christian conservative whites feel like a minority group, too, but “dread at joining the parade of ‘poor me’s” who proclaim their victimhood.

Hochschild sends her story to the people she has met, and they strongly affirm her picture of their predicament. Mike Schaff says, “I live your analogy,” and Lee Sherman tells Hochschild that she has “read my mind.” Some add to the picture: minorities are cutting because of whites’ tax dollars; perhaps whites should band together and form their own line. Other academics who interviewed Tea Party voters also found similar attitudes.

Many of Hochschild’s Louisiana acquaintances feel sympathy fatigue. At first, they are sympathetic to marginalized groups, but they soon begin to think they are “being had.” They give charitably, but the needy do not appreciate them and are not even “trying to better themselves.”

Hochschild sees race as a critical undertone to the Tea Party’s resentment. Many of her acquaintances explicitly talked about Muslims and Mexicans but refused to discuss the black communities that make up 26% of Louisiana’s population. They feel they are accused of being racists even though, “by their own definition, they clearly were not.” They think of racism as explicit hatred for blacks—Mike Schaff even admits to being a “former bigot” who “used to use the ‘N’ word” but stopped in 1968.

Hochschild offers a different, sociological definition of racism as “the belief in a natural hierarchy that places blacks at the bottom, and the tendency of whites to judge their own worth by distance from that bottom.” This means racism is not just about “personal attitudes,” but it also lies in “structural arrangements—as when polluting industries move closer to black neighborhoods than to white.”

Hochschild explains that many of her older white Tea Party interviewees only encountered black people through media representations that hide the complexity of black life. They see the “rich mega-stars of music, film, and sports” but also the image of blacks as “a disproportionate part of the criminal class” and the image that “blacks were living on welfare.” But they never see black people “standing patiently in line next to them waiting for a well-deserved reward.”

Gender also plays a key role in the Tea Party’s deep story—every woman Hochschild interviewed had needed to work at some point in their lives, but most would have preferred to become homemakers and they base their political beliefs on their desire to do so. While they form a minority of the Tea Party movement, the women Hochschild interviewed were much more likely than the men to see the benefits of government social programs. They “seemed to sense that if we chop away large parts of the government, women stand to lose far more than men” and they were less likely to think welfare recipients were “gaming the system.”

Although Hochschild recognizes that the right seldom uses the term, she conceives the feeling of being cut in line as “an expression of class conflict.” In the past, she notes, such conflicts were usually between management and workers—both black and white—who would strike together for better wages and working conditions. Today, while the American left sees the 99% fighting the 1% over wages and tax policy, the right sees a fight between “‘makers’ and ‘takers’” over social services.

Tea Party members “thought about the government and the market in the same way others think of separate nations,” seeing the free market as holding the promise of the American Dream and the government as interfering with that promise. But, in reality, they miss the way corporations are gaining more power and paying workers less. Hochschild thinks this explains why conservative small business owners support policies like new bankruptcy and contract laws that actually help big corporations outcompete small ones. But the people Hochschild met believe they are siding with big businesses against the government—even Lee Sherman still holds stock in PPG. Finally, Hochschild wonders what kind of “deep story self” sustains the Tea Party’s “extraordinary determination” to fight the government on the market’s behalf.