Summary and Analysis of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right: Based on the Book by Arlie Russell Hochschild

by Worth Books

So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of Strangers in Their Own Land tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book.   Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.   This short summary and analysis of Strangers in Their Own Anger and Mourning on the American Right  Historical contextChapter-by-chapter overviewsCharacter profilesDetailed timeline of eventsImportant quotesFascinating triviaGlossary of termsSupporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work  About Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell   Renowned sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild seeks to understand why some American conservatives continue to vote for policies that ultimately harm them. She traveled to Louisiana to complete a five-year study, talking to members of the Tea Party and attempting to breach the “empathy wall” that stands between conservatives and liberals.   A compassionate observer, Hochschild pursues the heart of the “deeper story,” blaming the narrative—not her subjects—that informs these peoples’ choices. She particularly examines the long history of environmental pollution in the region and the state governments’ failure to address it—a failure that this political faction refuses to condemn.  Strangers in Their Own Land is a compelling analysis of one of the most important factors in American culture today, and Hochschild’s measured and empathic approach leads her readers toward a greater understanding of their fellow citizens.   The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.  

59 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 16, 2017

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked this summary of the book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016) by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Given that it's 2025 now and the American Right just put the rapist back into the White House for a second term, who is now also a convicted felon and civilly adjudicated fraudster, libeller, and sexual abuser, and who is busily destroying America's post-World War II alliances along with science, democracy, and everything else that matters, a number of authors have tried to understand how this happened. This book is a summary of Hochschild's attempt to do that. Hochschild's book originally came out in 2016, before anyone could have known the full scale of the catastrophe that Hochschild's interlocutors were going to unleash - not once, but twice.

Hochschild evidently found that among her sample of Trump supporters in Louisiana, many of them are poorly educated and devout. I couldn't tell from this Summary whether Hochschild knows anything about the science of human intelligence differences. If she does, then she'd understand "poorly educated" to be a reliable proxy measure for "low IQ". And the behaviors and attitudes she describes have "low IQ" written all over them.

Unfortunately, science at the moment can do next to nothing about this. An adult's IQ is roughly as fixed as their height. Education can make a person more knowledgeable, similar to the way that physical exercise can make a person more physically fit. But very little can be done to increase a person's individual pattern of response to education or exercise. The more cognitive or athletic ability a person has, respectively, the better results they will get from the respective training, and the more they are likely to enjoy it and be rewarded for it. But most people simply lack the innate capacity to become a college professor (like Hothschild), or an Olympic athlete, no matter how hard they might train.

So while Hochschild makes a heroic effort to "empathize" with her Trump-voting Louisianans, it's hard to imagine a route to a solution therefrom. The simple fact is that millions of Americans - sufficient to win national elections - lack the critical thinking capacity to recognize Trump's constant lies, nor can they understand why a man who is such a transparently obvious liar is unfit to be in charge of anything. No amount of "empathizing" with another person's struggles - struggles which themselves result to a large degree from their own innate cognitive incapacity - can magically increase the person's cognitive capacity. By analogy, we can empathize with cancer victims, and that's a nice gesture, but it does nothing to cure cancer. To cure cancer, or low IQ, we need science to figure out exactly what the causes are, and identify points where treatments may productively intervene. Some progress has been made on the cancer front, but science has barely gotten its boots on with the low IQ problem. It's hard to say what an eventual answer might look like, but gene editing might be able to help, at least for the future people we'll create.

For an introduction to the science missing from the summary and presumably from the original book, see:

* Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are
* Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality
* Genes: A Very Short Introduction
* Genomics: A Very Short Introduction
* In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence
* Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction (newer 2020 edition)
* Intelligence: All That Matters
* The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
* The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
* The Neuroscience of Intelligence
* The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature

For an introduction to the technology that might eventually transform the human species into something that can operate competently, see:

* CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans (2021)
* A Crack in Creation: The New Power to Control Evolution
* Creating Future People: The Ethics of Genetic Enhancement
* Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People
* Genomics: A Very Short Introduction
* Humanity Enhanced: Genetic Choice and the Challenge for Liberal Democracies
* Rewriting Nature: The Future of Genome Editing and How to Bridge the Gap Between Law and Science
* The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
* The Unnatural Selection of Our Species: At the Frontier of Gene Editing

Imagine a future world in which the average person's cognitive trajectory has them earning college degrees at age 10, like this girl is doing. I'm guessing that when everyone becomes that smart, the markets for religion and for demagoguery will be tiny.

Until then, good luck, I guess.

[Cheryl Wilfong · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little too short

The summary is good enough. I wouldn't spend $3.50 for 30 minutes of reading though. Its a little too short.