Question 1

What is the "deep story" that Hochschild identifies?

Accepted Answer

Hochschild coins the term 'deep story' to describe the narrative — beneath facts and policy arguments — that explains how life feels to her Tea Party subjects. The deep story she develops for Louisiana conservatives goes like this: you are standing in a long line, waiting patiently for your turn at the American Dream, when people start cutting in line ahead of you. These line-cutters are Black people benefiting from affirmative action, immigrants on welfare, women who get government help, and other groups that the government has elevated above you through its programs. You have played by the rules, you have been patient, and you are watching the country you grew up in change in ways that push you further from the front. And then the president — Barack Obama — tells you that you should feel guilty about your resentment, that you are the problem. This story, Hochschild argues, captures an emotional truth for her subjects regardless of whether its factual claims are accurate, and understanding that emotional truth — rather than dismissing it as racism or selfishness — is necessary for understanding the political alienation she is documenting.

Question 2

How does Strangers in Their Own Land compare to Hillbilly Elegy?

Accepted Answer

Strangers in Their Own Land and Hillbilly Elegy (2016) were both published in the year before the 2016 election and were both widely read as explanations of white working-class conservative politics. But they are very different books: Hillbilly Elegy is a personal memoir that emphasizes cultural explanations for Appalachian poverty (personal responsibility, family dysfunction), while Strangers in Their Own Land is a sociological study that emphasizes structural explanations (deindustrialization, environmental devastation, corporate capture of regulatory systems) and is more sympathetic to its subjects' analysis of who is responsible for their situation. Hochschild's Louisiana Tea Party members are not poor and dysfunctional in the way Vance's family is; they are middle-class people who feel economically and culturally threatened, and Hochschild is particularly interested in how they came to support the political party that has consistently undermined the environmental regulations that would protect them from the oil company pollution destroying their bayous.

Question 3

What does Hochschild find about environmental politics in Louisiana?

Accepted Answer

One of the most striking findings in Strangers in Their Own Land is the apparent paradox of Louisiana Tea Party members who support deregulation of the oil industry even though the oil industry is poisoning their bayous, killing their pelicans, and depressing the local economy. Hochschild investigates this paradox thoroughly and finds several explanations. Some of her subjects don't believe the environmental damage is as severe as environmentalists say. Others believe the economic benefits of oil extraction outweigh the environmental costs. Some believe that individual property rights should allow landowners to make their own decisions about pollution even if it affects their neighbors. And some have a fatalistic relationship to the concept of nature — believing that the environment has always been damaged by human activity and that there is nothing to be done about it. The paradox reveals, Hochschild argues, how effective the conservative political project has been at making people distrust the regulatory state as an instrument of liberal elites rather than as a protection for their own interests.

Strangers in Their Own Land Reading Order

Complete Strangers in Their Own Land Book List