I recommend this book to anyone interesting in learning about different perspectives, whether it be that of the author or those of her subjects, but I suggest looking elsewhere if you are seeking additional building blocks to reinforce your political views. Hochschild's project, based on her experiences as a liberal sociologist getting to know Louisiana Tea Party supporters over a five-year period, fascinated me simply because she used a tool viewed with great disdain these days - listening - but it offers no sweeping explanations or interpretations of national politics.
Strangers In Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild (April 2020)
I was chatting about something unrelated to this book a few days ago when I stumbled into an amusing observation - when policy goes wrong, some people will blame the elected politician of the moment while others will blame the very idea of government. There are plenty of colorful analogies - is the bad diagnosis the fault of one doctor, or the hospital? When your medium-rare steak is indistinguishable from a hockey puck, is that the cook's fault, or should you blame the entire restaurant? At some point I'll write more about the larger idea here of how we apportion blame to either a culpable individual or the larger system that enabled the individual.
In the context of this book, the question that kept coming back to me was jobs. What is the effect on people when they constantly see companies create jobs in a community while governments lurk on the city limits with a tax bill in hand? I think this is a massive factor in the way people come to form their views on government. My personal experience is that my employment prospects don't change due to size or influence of government, but I've never seen a large chunk of my city's jobs go away thanks to an international deal, a national policy, or a local regulation. If the government creates a problem for me, I'm much more likely to blame someone in charge and look to some policy action (including voting) as a way to do it right next time. On the other hand, if I saw the world differently, it probably would make no difference to me who was in office because the office itself was the issue. There's a similar but less formed thought in my head regarding vaccines and the way some people are inexplicably against the very idea. This is impossible to relate to using my life experiences, but I might feel differently if I were accustomed to being lied to by governments.
Another aspect of the book that caught my attention was Hochschild's reference to class conflict. My hunch is that American society has blurred its class lines to the point that conflicts go unseen by most eyes, and perhaps in a sense this makes them effectively nonexistent (certainly so if you compare it to the prominence of conflicts along racial, economic, or religious lines). But when I think in the context of how policies are created and enacted, it clarifies the way class battles play out through political ideology. The specific note I wrote down stated that when government takes money from working people and redistributes it to the idle, it creates a battleground for conflict between the blue-collar and the poor. The thought leaves little room for acknowledging more complex viewpoints, such as when a government uses redistribution as a way to accept culpability for keeping people in poverty, or whether those being taxed desperately need the money being taken out of their paychecks or communities. In a country where some estimate half the tax benefits go to the 20% of richest Americans, we need to do better than using policy to force our hardest working groups to support others who are in a crisis moment.
There were a couple of ideas in this book that have lingered in my mind. First, I'm curious about the way Hochschild frames a certain premise of the book as a 'paradox' - that although red states would likely benefit from more government assistance, they tend to vote against it. It's clearly a paradox... if you believe people should vote entirely based on some academic model of economic self-interest. So why not write a book about all the rich liberals who voted against Trump, even though it probably would have been to their economic self-interest? It's a paradox if you don't agree? It's always problematic to start on a premise that describes everyone yet applies to no one (or is it the reverse?) so although I liked the end result of this project, I'm not going to give extra credit for the starting premise.
The second thought was about bullying in general, a consideration sparked by a comment that blue states sometimes mock, belittle, or insult red states. It reminded me of my own discomfort with a certain style of comedy, one that mocks the victim rather than the con artist, because the third rail of such jokes is always a power discrepancy. Hochschild notes that she didn't meet anyone who used the same inflammatory language associated with Fox News, so why are its viewers apparently subject to criticism from those who assume the news outlet is a mouthpiece? It just comes back to power and the logic of the bully, who will always do the easy thing; it's far easier to make fun of someone for watching a TV show than it is to attack the presenting network.
One of my final notes would fascinate me as its own book - what do left and right have in common? I wrote down getting big money out of politics and the need to reduce the prison population; Hochschild also added that among younger generations there is consensus about the environment. I'll add my own editorial that infrastructure seems to be a shared priority. It would be a fascinating experiment to see what would happen over a few years if the focus turned to investing in areas of joint agreement rather than the current tug-of-war over perpetually competing priorities. For now, I think my personal next step from this book is to continue looking for additional consensus issues.
Footnotes / endnote / book notes
Here's the link to my reading notes from this book, mostly a collection of insights or opinions related to the subject matter. I must say, this was a classic TOA book, in the sense that I could take down comments even from parts of the book I found uninteresting, or disconnected from the larger themes.
