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

She's a liberal who has spent years talking to people who politically disagree with her in an attempt to understand what she calls their deep story.

And then you constructed something that you call a deep story. It's a story that you say feels emotionally true. It captures, as you say, the hopes, fears, pride, shame, resentment, and anxiety of people.

So, when people sort of internalize the story, the story, this feeling that you're waiting in line, that people are cutting in line, and that the people who are supposed to be minding the line and maintaining order are in some ways betraying how the line is supposed to operate, that this deep story, when you ran the story by the people you met and befriended, many of them told you that you had captured something that felt true to them.

Many of the women you spoke with obviously endorse the conservative deep story. But you also point out that in some ways they are the victims of this deep story, that the deep story in some ways is resentful of women for being in the workplace, advancing in the workplace, perhaps at the expense of men.

It feels like you're laying out for me something that is actually a paradox. Many of the people you spoke with, they're older, they're mostly white. Many of them are men. They tell you they feel like they're strangers in their own land. But that's also the way the African American man who gets repeatedly pulled over by the police also feels.

You know that book Strangers in Their Own Land?

I haven't read it, but I kind of I know the thesis.

Yeah, you know the thesis.

Yeah.

After Arlie Hochschild published her book, Strangers in Their Own Land, Anger and Mourning on the American Right, just before the 2016 election, it came to feel prescient.

In my latest book, Strangers in Their Own Land, I got very interested in something I call the deep story which is a way of thinking about emotion.

So the companies with the money that the state gives them in this, I think it was $1.6 billion that was in the last five years- In Louisiana? Offered to companies, yeah, to come in with that public money that came from taxes.

There's a passage in the book that I, in Strangers in Their Own Land, that I just, this is just an example of this. And maybe this is the person you're talking about, you know, Harold, someone in the state always seems to come down on the little guy.

You in Strangers in Their Own Land near the end you say you write a letter to a friend on the liberal left.

In my latest book, Strangers in Their Own Land, Anger and Mourning on the American Right, I got very interested in something I call the deep story, which is a way of thinking about emotion.

What I came to feel and realize is that both the left and the right have different deep stories.

So what is a deep story? A deep story is what you feel about a highly salient situation that's very important to you. You take facts out of the deep story. You take moral precepts out of the deep story. It's just what feels true.

The metaphor for the right-wing deep story that I describe in Strangers is that you're waiting in line for the American dream that you feel you very much deserve.

And then they felt like strangers in their own land.