Review: Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

How did Trump get elected? That's the question I've been trying to answer with the books I've been absorbing since the election. Hillbilly Elegy was a man's memoirs through Kentucky and Ohio. Vance described broken families held together by poverty and honor culture. He blames the problems of the white poor on themselves.

But what about the Tea Party? What about the South? They've voted Republican since the Southern strategy. The South was not broken by a China shock or engineers putting them out of work. Hochschild attempts to that answer for these people by "climbing the wall" and she does that through the keyhole issue of environmentalism and the keyhole state of Louisiana.

You see, Louisiana is a state that reflects the South: it is the most poorly educated, most impoverished, and laughably pro-business state, just as the South is an impoverished, poorly educated and pro-business region. It also has horrible environmental catastrophes happen on a regular basis. For much of the Gulf coast the Deep Horizon disaster was a new event, but, for the Pelican State, it was just another collapse.

The Tea Party is anti-government, that is a given. Yet, as Hochschild gets her Louisianan confessors to pronounce, it's the corporations that continually screw them again and again. It is the chemical companies that dispose their waste in the bayous and kill all the animals. It is the oil company that creates giant sinkholes. The waste management corporation is the one that gives an entire community cancer.

The answer Hochschild gets is that Louisiana, the South, and the Right in general, has a "Deep Story". The story can be summed up in a sentence: the government is helping people of color, women, and corporations a boost in the line of the "American dream". All the problematic beliefs of conservatives are connected to this narrative.

Honestly, the book is amazing because it tests your patience, but not Hochschild's. Every time a person speaks, you want to throttle them with facts and figures. You want to declare, "That isn't how the universe operates!" and yet you can't. Your left to feel sorry that their entire family has been killed by a company upstream dropping toxic waste, or to pity the mayor doing everything to employ his people by the company that will be importing the workers they actually need.

No, you can't reason with the words Arlie is capturing. You are forced by every encounter to realize that these people have a different worldview in ways that defy what us in our bubble normally consider. They don't just think the world is 4000 years old, they feel it. They don't just think that Obama was suspicious, they feel it. They value obedience and discipline, not creativity or spontaneity or intelligence. Whereas my friends in Boston value the pursuit of truth, my friends in New York value the pursuit of art, and my friends in Washington value the pursuit of compromise and nuance, those in the chapels value bowed heads, those in the heartland value compliance, and those in the fields value inexplorable honor.

Those of my friends who claim "this is an issue of economic anxiety" or "it is race, stupid" are missing the bigger picture: the separation is ultimately a fundamental separation of values.