Strangers in their own land

I would recommend finishing this book, because otherwise, you may just be enraged the whole time, and rather than increasing any empathy you may inclined to have for the conservative inhabitants, you may find yourself wanting to leave them to their polluted, dying, hopeless swamp. The last chapter was the most helpful though.
I had high hopes for this book and I did come away feeling a little more kindly, maybe. But some of my previous intuitions were just solidified and even amplified by her clarity. Conclusions:
1. While offering peace and community, the magical religious thinking so favored by the characters is SO DESTRUCTIVE and silly.
2. Why do they feel like they are entitled to more than anyone else, including blacks and women? They seem to have replaced Christian humility with unmitigated pride, and a belief in their privilege that was never really fair in the first place.
3. They are slavishly devoted to wealthy interests, and 'loyal' to their destroyers- I don't get it. How cancer could kill your whole family and you still believe the EPA should be disbanded.

If I am still unable to understand why logic and objectivity are so elusive in Lake Charles, I could feel that hardship, exhaustion, disappointments and maybe even the pollution could leave people feeling tired, emotional and confused. Maybe they are too busy to think. Many of the characters seemed likable as well, with one or two exceptions (the ridiculous middle-class woman from Chicago for example, that believed she was made up of Adam's rib or the business woman with all the elephant paraphernalia.)
I also understood that objectively, everyone has some myopia in their life.
I am not sure if an empathy bridge will ever be built, but at least somebody tried. I wish a right-winger would try a similar experiment, as I would love to read it.

The book is good in what it sets out to do. Provides deep stories on certain big issues and incidents through the lens of die hard Tea Party folk. It explains notions of honor and faith on that side of the political divide pretty well, and it's an illuminating read for that alone.

Her choice of Environmental protection as the keyhole issue to understand the Tea Party and the divide was an interesting choice, a clean way to highlight her fundamental question. But I felt as an issue, it felt like a safe choice; the biggest ramifications of the divide are on issues of race, welfare, and capitalism, which she shirked from.

I picked this up right after Coates' 'Between the World and Me' and his recent piece on Trump 'The First White President' for a reason, to try and understand the context of race in the Left-Right rift. The book doesn't address that at all. Just a small section alludes to it, and you need to read a lot between the lines in that section; and I found myself using Coates' reasoning, because she didn't proffer any.

Her characterization of the lower and middle class White South is very good and illuminating, and is backed up by a lot of research and in-depth interviews. The sheer work gone into this book is evident, and makes it a very good read. Her exploration of the role of the Church, the important of local community and how that is contrasted with community built by public funds is one of the many excellent things about the book.

Given her keyhole issue of Environmental Protection, it's an excoriating take on the ravages of capitalism and the destruction it leaves in its wake. Their faith in the free markets, in spite of the damage it has wreaked, tells a story of its own, one that's explored with great care.

Read this to understand the construction of culture in the Deep South, their imagination of it, and how it determines the social terrain which defines their framing and take on the issues.

Hochchild creates The Deep Story that forms the center of the novel. She explains the Tea Party, the shift of the working class to the right and why whites don’t like Obama through The Deep Story, which seems to be what sociologists do — gather information about a phenomenon and make stories to explain it. The story is good, but I have a critique or two.

Her story goes wrong when she says that lower-middle class whites don't like Obama because he achieved the American dream before they did. She admits that these same people don't have a problem with black celebrities. Obama is one. Tea Party types don't have a problem with black NFL players making millions, but they have a seizure when one of them doesn't stand for the anthem.

The issue is not about other people getting ahead. It's about being told what to do. Tea party types don't have a problem with Condi or Colin Powell or Clarence Thomas but they were on thier side and not tell them what to do. Tea party males don't want a woman to tell them what to do either, that's why they loathed Hillary. The only acceptable type of person to tell the what to do is a old white male from a higher status than them.

The reason why this is a problem is that Hochschild underlying story paints the tea party as entitled and jealous. Instead of simply resisting authority.

Hochshild tries to draw some parallel on the left with the Occupy movement. The problem with Occupy and Bernie is that they criticize the greed of the private sector. If they read the Big Short or Meredith Whitney's research report or talked to anyone near the street they'd realize that the Jimmy Caynes and Dick Fulds and their lieutenants had no clue about the CDOs and the sub prime. 2008 was cause by incompetence and not greed. Wall Street needs regulation from greed and incompetence.

We do need to come together but it has to be for making an authority we can all live with and not letting everyone get ahead. Ahead never ends - there is always more in the materialistic view of things. All these people she interviews have a house, some have owned multiple homes. They have cars, food, and family. How are they not already living the American dream. What do they think is on the other side of the hill? The American dream shouldn't be about consumerism or materials. It should be achieving a level of freedom and independence. That's what we have to come together over. Her friends and herself miss that.

Also she has a way of writing indirectly and repeating the same facts in the same chapter. Her prose could have been cleaner.

I will give it four stars because she does a great job on her keyhole issue - pollution in Louisiana. There are some other good insights like the church with gym and weight-loss program. She listens patiently to her subjects as her subject repeat some really bad lies the right has told them from the number of babies black women have to the trade off between jobs and the environment.

I read this to try and, as the author mentions throughout the book, climb over my empathy wall. I want to understand Trump voters; I want to understand what motivates lower middle-class folks to vote against their interests. I want to understand what motivates nature lovers to support candidates that want to dismantle the EPA. To say "republicans vote that way for religious reasons" may contain a tidbit of truth, but it certainly reduces a highly complex web of causes into an overly-simplified catch phrase. This can diminish the humanity of the "other," and isn't that one of the root problems facing our country and world?
This book was fantastic for so many reasons: the author filled much of it with an environmental history of rural Louisiana, all of which was completely unknown to me. Most of the interviews were framed within this environmental context, most of the interviewees speaking against the EPA.
I can't say I understand these folks, but I am closer than I was before reading this.
I'd suggest that in addition to protesting, contacting legislators, and standing up against racism/bigotry/sexism/xenophobia, we need to employ judicious use of empathy. Simply reducing Trump voters to "dumb hillbillies" builds no bridges, expands no minds, and misses the "deep story" behind our current political climate.
To be clear, I'm not defending Trump voters– I simply want to better understand them, to try to comprehend how somebody could vote for the guy... because around half the country did, and they are humans that deserve some effort to be understood.
As a popular recent meme says, Trump voters have better coverage than Verizon. "Can you hear us now?"
Yes, we can, and I'd suggest we need to listen. As a humanist I'd suggest we must.