Arlie Hochschild Strangers in Their Own Land Review

Following the 2016 plebiscite on the UK'south membership of the European Matrimony, a new map of Britain appeared. All the areas of the country that had voted 'Exit' were marked in blueish, while all those that had voted 'Remain' were marked in yellow. The virtually obvious elements of the emerging cultural and political geography were unsurprising. Scotland and virtually of Northern Ireland were predictably yellow, as was London, where 'Remain' recorded its highest shares of the vote. Nigh of rural England and Wales were blue. But beyond these big blobs of color, something more subtle and sociologically intriguing could be traced as well.

One interesting miracle was the large blob of yellow, which ran westwards out of London towards Oxford and Bristol. This is a highly networked region, well-connected to Heathrow aerodrome and attractive to strange directly investment by multinational corporations. Microsoft, for case, has a base of operations in Reading, located along the highly prosperous Thames Valley. Expect even more closely at the map, and something else appears: Amidst big seas of blue, there are flecks of yellow representing smaller cities such equally Leicester, Exeter, Newcastle and Norwich. And one affair these cities all possess is a academy.

Of course there is a risk of reifying geographic and cultural divides, and one should be wary of hasty theorisation. The presence or absence of a academy did not crusade an area's vote 1 way or the other, and does not explain the result. Withal, a slight pattern is nonetheless discernible which invites reflection. Universities are continued to i another at a global scale, operating with forms of abstract noesis and esoteric languages, non entirely dissimilar financial services. They employ people who specialise in 'knowing that', but non necessarily in 'knowing how'. They generate trust on the basis of formal credentials and empirical records, not on the footing of identity or shared myth. Information technology is a cliche encouraged by conservatives that academics are all left-leaning liberals who are obsessed with 'political definiteness'. But it must surely be the instance that the spatial and cultural horizons of an academic's mean solar day-to-24-hour interval working life are more extensive than average, even if that is only experienced via narrow channels of peer review, conferences and e-mail. Universities are multinational environments. Like the highly-trained 'knowledge workers' located in that xanthous hulk between London, Bristol and Oxford, academics regularly travel overseas as office of their piece of work and potentially operate in a global labour market, producing knowledge that is every bit valid in Shanghai as it is in New York.

Confronted by that blue and yellowish map of 'Brexit Britain', UK-based academics might be forgiven for request themselves the following: are we now the enemy? Is a commitment to generalizable theory, evidence and method at present a trigger for antipathy? In her study of rural Wisconsin, The Politics of Resentment, Katherine Cramer discovered that the privileges of academic life, together with the status universities confer, had indeed generated considerable resentment in marginalised rural communities. Asked their views of University of Wisconsin-Madison, one replied:

They don't want annihilation to exercise with ya. They retrieve they're smarter than ya. Got that book learning. People go to higher they come out dumber than they went in. They got the books there, those books, it's not like the experience (Cramer, 2016: 126).

In an age of populism, this sense of breach cuts both means. I accept enough of not-British Uk-based friends and colleagues who have felt isolated and vilified since the referendum. At the time of writing, it is not clear what the time to come holds for European union citizens resident in the UK and this doubt wreaks social and psychological harm. Understandably, those affected past this practise non split up their emotional response to Brexit from their political, sociological and economic analysis—partly considering they can't, and partly because they don't see why they should. They are angry and hurt. Meanwhile, the just academics I know who saw the referendum result coming are those who had themselves spent long periods living in those big seas of blueish. In all manner of ways, everything has suddenly got rather personal.

The political upheavals of 2016 have provoked much debate amongst social scientists and commentators regarding the nature and causes of 'populism'. This discussion is only completely honest if it includes a degree of reflexivity, that is, if information technology considers the extent to which intellectualism, theory, abstraction, aggregation, expertise and Cartesian detachment take played some part in provoking the populism nosotros encounter today. Academics can generate all the theories they like nigh events such equally Brexit or Trump, but nosotros are also inescapably office of this story, whether that be equally the privileged 'aristocracy' which populists are venting their resentment towards, or every bit the victims of a new anti-global politics which seeks to re-build national boundaries, or equally something else birthday. What might that 'something else' look similar? Arlie Russell Hochschild provides one shining case.

To describe Strangers in their Own Land every bit 'prescient' risks doing it a disservice, every bit if the book'south main accomplishment is in having predicted the political outbursts that occurred around the time of its publication. Hochschild acknowledges late on in the book 'looking back at my previous research, I run across that the scene had been set up for Trump'south ascent, like kindling before a match is lit' (p. 221). But the ethnography underlying the book lasted five years, meaning that it must accept begun in late 2010, initially provoked by a sense that 'blue states' and 'red states' were bifurcating in unprecedented and increasingly troubling ways, symptomized by the appearance of the Tea Party. For this reason, Hochschild selected Louisiana equally the site of her ethnography, partly because of the force of conservativism in the state, but likewise the widespread hostility to government. These traits be despite it being a state that depends heavily on Federal spending and ane which arguably benefits from Federal regulations (especially environmental and employee protections) more than almost. This apparent contradiction is what she terms the 'great paradox', the agreement of which provides her key inquiry problem.

Trumpologists have tended to focus more on the Midwestern states that swung unexpectedly to Trump in the 2016 presidential ballot (such every bit Michigan) and the former mining regions of Appalachia, where sheer despair seems to have outweighed the implausibility of Trump's policies. Louisiana doesn't provide the same keyhole into Trump's victory as such. What I think Hochschild does requite us, and what makes this far more than a book with political 'prescience', is a critical meditation on the relationship of the social sciences to those parts of 'society' that it is far easier to theorise than information technology is to truly know. This is knowing in the sense of the French discussion connaitre (in the way one knows another person), rather than savoir (in the way one knows a fact). And every bit with any interpersonal relationship, it makes demands of both parties, requiring them to overcome or take certain differences as they go. Other than the odd joke almost her being a Berkeley 'communist', Hochschild appears to have encountered relatively piddling suspicion (in dissimilarity to the above quote in Cramer's book), which is testimony to the patience and seriousness of her ethnographic project, likewise every bit to the conviviality of her research subjects. This is a story of how split cultural worlds might be brought into contact with one some other, not so much colliding (a metaphor that better describes more drive-by forms of social research, including those carried out by government) but edging hopefully if cautiously towards each other.

Hochschild tells us that she was inspired by Thomas Frank'due south 2004 book What'southward the Thing With Kansas? which had explored how and why working class American communities had voted confronting their economic interests since the 1970s. Frank's analysis is superb, but it besides reinforces some epistemological categories and binaries whose usefulness may now exist waning. Put merely, this comes down to a separation of 'economic' from 'cultural' (or 'moral') issues, the argument being that the Republican Party has brilliantly exploited the 'civilization wars' to push through an aggressively pro-concern economic agenda, including tax cuts for the very rich, persuading the white working class to vote for it through appealing to their 'values'. It is incommunicable to deny the cadre truth in this assay, especially when considering the George W. Bush-league era of the early on 2000s when Frank was writing. But Hochschild manages to get underneath the abstractions, to lived experiences which practise non split tidily into 'cultural' and 'economic' categories. At ground level, where Hochschild works, the economic, the cultural and the moral are impossible to disentangle. In that sense, Strangers in their Ain Land can be read as a slice of cultural economy and moral economic system, and a rebuke to whatever critical realists seeking to distinguish real economic interests from credo.

How, then, can we make sense of 'the dandy paradox', if not in terms of the traditional categories of the 'culture wars' or 'false consciousness'? How can information technology be reasonable (if not quite rational) and understandable to oppose the very regime services and interventions which might credibly improve people's physical and economic wellbeing, preserve their much-loved natural habitat and defend them from opportunistic businesses? This is a question which resonates well beyond Louisiana, indeed well beyond the United states of america. It is one of the primal sociological and political questions posed past the Brexit referendum, the consequence of which is frequently described as an astonishing act of 'self-impairment', admitting in a primarily economic sense. Hochschild's ethnography traces many visceral and visually striking examples of other forms of harm, which could have been prevented if only environmental regulators were better empowered and if ruthless companies had been restrained. Fish are no longer the same colour every bit they used to exist in living memory; the croaking of frogs has fallen silent. Fracking has caused a sink hole to open up upwards, offer the about literal sit-in of the natural limits to extractive manufacture. All the same Washington DC remains the villain in the optics of her inquiry subjects, and simply rarely big business.

Equally she gets within their world, Hochschild discovers a fierce sense of morality that, oddly enough, is more at ease with destructive commercialism than it is with liberal policy or regulation. It's not that her interviewees don't know that business has caused the pollution and threatens their health and safe. But business concern is honest about its role. As one tells her 'a visitor has a job to practice; it'southward making things people want and need. Just like people have to go to the bath, plants do too. You can't only say "don't practise it"' (p. 166). Pollution is equally natural equally urination; the Ecology Protection Bureau is in denial. It is widely accepted that business is greedy, but there is something naked about this. Another tells Hochschild that information technology is inevitable that polluters should try to 'cover their ass' (p. 108) and avoid accepting liability. Those living with the twenty-four hours-to-day reality of pollution don't want to be lectured by experts or regulators about risk and welfare, when they've experienced the physical and environmental harms at offset-hand.

This beast realism about capitalism contains ample truth within it that is not so different from the harsh perspective of, say, Georges Bataille, for whom at that place is always an 'accursed share' which suffers the consequences of endless accumulation. While liberals and environmentalists seek out 'win-win' policy solutions, which balance 'efficiency' with 'equity', or 'growth' with 'sustainability', these Louisianans throw serious doubts about such happy outcomes. The accumulation of wealth involves extraction, and there is not an space supply of natural or human resources to extract from. Consumption requires destruction; take chances-taking requires occasional catastrophe. That'southward our economic reality. It'southward not pleasant, merely permit'southward not pretend otherwise. This might audio nihilistic, merely there is an underlying moral logic of reaping what you sow, in a game of existential survival. Odd as it may sound, there may actually be something that the environmental movement could acquire from these reports, regarding the moral economic system of resource extraction and how the consequences are felt. For these people, there is nothing abstract or statistical near natural destruction: it is a visceral, material fact of daily life. Many are climate change deniers, but they are far from oblivious to what industry is doing to the non-human world, and arguably far more immersed in this painful reality than 'we' who look at satellite images of polar ice-caps on CNN. We discovered the 'anthropocene' in recent years, while they've dwelt there all along.

Commercialism, from this perspective, is punitive, selfish but honest. It delivers the goods and the occasional harms you expect. Government, meanwhile, is kind, donating merely dishonest. It fails to deliver on its promises. Those in Washington who speak of consumer protection, environmental protection and 'fairness' non only threaten to harm employers (including all those egregious polluters), they are incapable of applying these norms in any consistent style. Ultimately, their plans are all merely talk. Every bit Hannah Arendt remarked, rage is more often provoked past a sense of hypocrisy than 1 of injustice. Hochschild reveals complex webs of moral-economical obligation operating within religious congregations, families and communities. There is enough of what David Graeber calls 'baseline communism' at work in these Louisianan communities. But the Federal government is viewed as an anathema to all this, facilitating malversation and worklessness, allowing people to renege on their moral contracts on which true American community is built. It is a threat to what survives of a traditional moral order, and, unlike capitalism, the damage it does is intentional, driven by the moral relativism of liberals. One of Hochschild'south many fascinating observations is that 'government besides functions every bit a curious status-making auto. The less you depend on it, the higher your status' (p. 114).

Sociologists take a habit of invoking metaphysics to explain what they cannot empathize. Whether it be 'ideological superstructure', the 'spirit of capitalism' or some intangible value substance, it is tempting to reach for something invisible and intangible when people are interim against their apparent interests. By the aforementioned token, evangelical Christianity provides secular liberals with a way of understanding the political success of conservatism over recent decades, a kind of 'othering' that has contributed to the bifurcation that Hochschild is determined to transcend. Interestingly, God and theology play a surprisingly marginal role in her account. Christianity is in there, just as a set of 24-hour interval-to-day practices and obligations, not as something unworldly. There is a strong sense of tradition and of right and wrong, simply information technology is accredited to place, family unit, America and retentiveness more than to the bible or Jesus Christ. It provides a necessary style of navigating prosaic everyday dilemmas, hardships and injuries. It makes sense of the world for them, only as sociology does for Hochschild and her readers. The ingredients of this sense-making apparatus are rarely exotic or mystical, which makes me wonder if the political influence granted to evangelism over the past thirty years might have been exaggerated to a certain extent. The church is i feature of this moral-economic mural, simply so is work, family, luck and nature.

The term Hochschild introduces to capture this significant-making facility is 'the deep story', which 'tells us how things experience' (p. 135). This appears in the center and pivotal chapter of the book, and she offers a version of her research subjects' 'deep story' based on a unproblematic metaphor of waiting in line. America is a harsh country, but it eventually offers rewards to those who are patient, disciplined and determined. In that sense, the American dream is like waiting in line: It isn't merely a free lunch, just takes respect, self-control and resilience. Withal for all way of reasons, to do with welfare, immigration, globalisation and identity politics, the rules of waiting in line no longer seem to be properly upheld, at least from the perspective of these poor rural Louisianans. Some people are cutting in, sometimes the line seems to be moving backwards, and those overseeing the line (federal authorities) don't seem to accept any recollection of how long some people accept been waiting nor whatsoever respect for their powers of self-bailiwick. Liberals seem to feel far more sympathy for the person who tin't expect, than they do for the one who can. Worst of all, they make it obligatory for everyone else to share that sympathy ('political correctness').

Hochschild tries out this metaphor on some of her interviewees and discovers some remarkable resonances. 'I live your analogy' says ane. 'You have read my mind', says some other. This is the moment in the book where the author's tenacious quest for empathy suddenly pays dividends. She later uses 'the deep story' to make sense of Trump: Here was a human who channelled the rage of those waiting endlessly in line, and promised–finally—to grant them their dues, get them to the front and clamp down on those cutting in. From the perspective of her own 'deep story', of course, those 'line-cutters' are minorities struggling against centuries of systemic oppression or people fleeing something far worse than poverty. She suspends her ain judgement admirably well, although this suppression of critique and empirics carries risks with it also: She follows their emotional story through various twists and turns, which include crypto-racist value judgements. Hochschild handles this with dandy intendance, but the question inevitably arises of what the vocation of sociology should exist in this respect.

The plow to 'the deep story' is a vivid ways of helping the reader over the 'empathy wall' that Hochschild fabricated it her claiming to scale. But I was curious to know exactly what status we should accord to such a narrative. It's not quite psychoanalytic, but nor is it a myth that is told past the community'south members. It appears like a kind of theoretical fiction, possibly not unlike a Weberian 'platonic type' that is introduced by the sociologist to create a common world with research subjects. A benchmark of a valid 'deep story' might therefore be that it is recognised by its inhabitants, while also being communicable to non-inhabitants, performing a pragmatic, Habermasian role of rescuing a common public realm. Perhaps the sociologist becomes a hybrid of psychoanalyst, translator, anthropologist and public intellectual (or fifty-fifty a relationship counsellor!) whose powers of patient listening and re-framing help to knit worlds dorsum together again. The book ends with a letter to liberals and then another to Hochschilds now friends in Louisiana, inviting each to consider the other's betoken of view. Of course this is no replacement for the hard graft of politics, much of which goes on in the grubby world of Washington DC, but it is a modest stride towards repairing deep-ready enmities. It would be interesting to know whether there is show of information technology working (on either side of the 'empathy wall'), in the time since the book'south publication.

A further question I had concerned the specificity of 'the deep story'. As told past Hochschild—ventriloquizing her interviewees—it is an American story, merely I suspect that it would resonate in many of the de-industrialised regions in the adult globe where populist conservatives have recently fabricated significant in-roads. The conventionalities (in defiance of all evidence) that welfare and regulation exists primarily to do good immigrants, criminals and fraudsters is one that 'feels true' for large swathes of European populations, who have never been granted a replacement source of economic pride since the decline of manufacturing and mining. Social scientists across the Western world are now having to grapple with the challenges and questions that Hochschild has confronted, just there are multiple ways of doing so. Many of them strengthen binary divisions, reinforcing the sense of 'the white working form' as a separate and unreasonable subculture (The Economist mag even went as far as introducing a 'white working class' alphabetize in early 2017). Others offer superficial defences of 'nativist' concerns, arguing that people are entirely justified in opposing minority rights, welfare and immigration. This only serves to alienate liberals from their communities, having the opposite result of turning u.s.a. into 'strangers in our ain land'. Neither of these options is very inviting, however few of us have the luxury of spending 5 years on an ethnography, or indeed the tenacity to do so. If folklore is coordinating to therapy (being what Les Back terms a 'listener'southward fine art'), maybe we need a psychodynamic middle basis between Freudian analysis (unearthing 'deep stories' over v years) and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (drive-past social research via polling and focus group).

How sociologists can and should arroyo their young man citizens is partly shaped by the health of the public realm more broadly. Hochschild has deliberately gone in search of beau Americans who are most aggrieved with the direction of their country, and have least in common with the values and perspective of a Berkeley sociologist. She provides enough of caption for why this has happened, dating back to the 1860s, and including the terrifying monopoly of Fox news in bourgeois communities. The height of the 'empathy wall' is partly, therefore, a symptom of endemic failures in other aspects of the 'American experiment', especially in relation to media power and lobbying. The latter is non a topic that comes up in Hochschild'south discussions, but information technology is a political failure that validates at least some of the hostility the Louisianans feel towards Washington DC. Later all, one of Trump's nigh famous campaign slogans was 'drain the swamp', though of course he has done quite the opposite since taking office. If democracy were healthier, if media were less manipulative, perhaps empathy wouldn't exist worth quite and then much sociological effort. I realise that's a counterfactual, but it indicates something about the condition of folklore in relation to public life: as the latter becomes corrupted, the sometime must delve further into the individual realm in search of some future public.

On the other hand, Trump'south unexpected victory in Nov 2016 potentially casts another light on the politics of empathy and 'deep stories'. As has been tirelessly discussed in the liberal media, Trump seems to have no regard for facts, in the modern empirical sense of the term. As Hochschild explains, a deep story removes fact, and Trump is a principal of this, even while he does nothing to really help those people patiently 'waiting in line'. There is nothing necessarily politically complicit about empathising with how something feels to another (Hochschild, i assumes, is no less liberal now than she was in 2010), but nor does this project necessarily offering very much political resistance of any kind. Populism is producing curious new alliances, as indicated by those yellow blobs on the map of the United kingdom, where academics, bankers, business lobbies and homo rights activists are all suddenly on the same side of an argument. Sociologists tend to treat 'positivism' as a pejorative term, but if the alternative is 'Trumpism' and so most would rather go into bed with the behaviourists and the statisticians. Again, in that location's the unwelcome binary, the like of which Hochschild wants to avoid. But what does empathy offering in this unpleasant new state of affairs? I'm curious to know what the underlying political or public delivery is here. Possibly the message offers more to scholars who are already died-in-the-wool positivists (including non-sociologists) than to those who are already attuned to bug of perspectivism, culture and the social structure of knowledge. But would such scientists be open to such a dialogue? They might exist more sympathetic to Hilary Clinton, when she described many of Trump'south supporters as a 'basket of deplorables'. This is where Hochschild'south brief 'letter to a friend on the liberal left' becomes crucial.

I want to finish by offering a slightly dissimilar estimation of Hochschild'south findings, which is not in whatsoever way a contradiction of hers, indeed it emerges entirely from reading the book. Merely it is rooted more in questions of political economy than of affect. Every bit I read Strangers in their own Land, I kept wondering if this was also a book about the modern business organization corporation and its discontents. The power of corporations lies in their ability to constantly evade tidy categorisation, to switch between moral and amoral rhetorics as it suits them, while oft behaving immorally every bit they do so. They are vast bureaucracies, yet they are also risk-taking 'enterprises'; they are huge collectives, withal also legal 'persons'; they are competing in a market, while eliminating or buying the competition; they exist in an apolitical infinite called 'the economic system', while routinely shaping or blocking legislation via lobbying networks; some of their senior managers are amongst the richest people in the world, just somehow they never count as 'the elite'. Here lies another 'great paradox', which may not be unrelated to the ane Hochschild is interested in. Every time y'all endeavor to smash downward the condition of corporations in one mode, they morph into something else.

And then much of the hurting and the hope experienced by Hochschild's discussants come down to the whims of corporations. Corporations arrive offering jobs, though never quite every bit many as get-go hoped, and so leave behind a trail of pollution and unemployment. For complicated reasons, this is viewed as natural and unavoidable, whereas efforts to regulate it differently are unnatural and implausible. One of these reasons is that via the unhelpful umbrella concept of business, any modest businessman or anyone struggling to make a buck is able to sympathize with these vast hulks of extractive majuscule. Absurdly, all parties are perceived as equals, equally if the BP oil spill in the gulf of United mexican states—a direct effect of toll-cut due to pursuit of shareholder value—was on a moral plane with the minor-calibration mistakes or grey market activity of a cocky-employed homo struggling to get by, purely because both operate in some abstraction called 'the market'. Part of the perceived hypocrisy of regulators is they come down hard on miscreants who they are able to catch and punish, and get out alone those who they can't—i.east. multinationals, with legal muscle and political connections.

These issues are all present in Hochschild's narrative, and ascend at the end of her telling of 'the deep story'—though largely as issues that are absent from that story. Big business is not 'waiting in line' along with everyone else, merely nor does it manipulate the line co-ordinate to its own moral prejudices like government does. It exists in some parallel deep story called 'the free market', which is perceived equally fair in and of itself. The problem with both 'deep stories' is that still hark back to a nineteenth century, pre-managerial economic world. If in that location were to be a revival of left-wing populism, of a sort that might entreatment to some of the Louisianans in Hochschild'due south book, some further re-narration of 'the deep story' might be required. A deep story that helped distinguish between corporate capital and small business organisation, between the fairness of market commutation and the rampant unfairness of oligopolistic control, needs unearthing. Strangers in their Ain Land is partly a story of how accurate ethical ethics become entangled with destructive and sometimes cocky-subversive political commitments, over long periods of fourth dimension. Hochschild'south souvenir is to help united states of america sympathise that. The disentangling is even harder, but one place to start would exist by illuminating the duplicitous moral logic of the corporate form.

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1. Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK

   William Davies

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Correspondence to William Davies.

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Davies, W. A Review of Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016: New York: New Press, 351pp). Int J Polit Cult Soc xxx, 413–420 (2017). https://doi.org/x.1007/s10767-017-9265-7

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• Published: 05 July 2017

• Issue Date: December 2017

• DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-017-9265-7

Keywords

• Deeper Story
• White Working Course
• Great Paradox
• Brexit Britain
• Yellow Blobs

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