What it argues
Strangers in Their Own Land is Arlie Russell Hochschild's attempt to understand the American Right from the inside — specifically, why working-class white Louisianans who live in a state ravaged by the petrochemical industry vote for politicians who oppose the regulations that might clean it up. Hochschild is a Berkeley sociologist and a liberal, and she frames the project explicitly as an effort to scale what she calls the "empathy wall" — to understand how people who hold views different from her own have arrived at them and why those views feel not just reasonable but morally necessary.
The book centers on the petrochemical corridor in southern Louisiana, where industrial pollution has contaminated water, destroyed livelihoods built on fishing and hunting, and caused elevated cancer rates. The people Hochschild befriends are deeply aware of this damage. Yet most of them oppose federal environmental regulation, distrust the EPA, and support politicians who work to weaken both. The paradox is the book's engine.
What it gets right
- 1.
The 'deep story' — the felt narrative of displacement and disrespect — explains why many working-class white Americans support policies that seem to work against their material interests.
- 2.
Distrust of the federal government is not ignorance but often a response to real experiences: agencies that promise cleanup and deliver more delay, regulations that destroy jobs without delivering remediation.
- 3.
The sense of being displaced in the line toward the American Dream — watching others receive help one was never offered — generates the specific kind of anger Hochschild documents.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Arlie Russell Hochschild is a professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of several influential books on emotion, work, and American life, including The Managed Heart and The Second Shift. Strangers in Their Own Land, published in 2016, was a finalist for the National Book Award and was widely read as a key text for understanding the politics of rural and working-class white America. She has spent decades studying the intersection of emotion and social structure, and her fieldwork in Louisiana for this book took five years.
