I read this book the week before the presidential election. I was a lot more able to follow the author on her quest for Empathy then. Yes, let's listen patiently as "nice" people repeat counter-factual nonsense and prejudice. Let's defer endlessly to their feelings of grievance and irrational, misplaced rage. Now, post-election, as the President-Elect queues up a team of anti-regulation, climate-change-denying, corporate profiteers to seize our country, I think these "nice" white Louisiana Tea Partiers are going to get their wish to be free of government protections. May their joy be short-lived. May the next hurricane wash them away, and the next sinkhole swallow them up. I will save my EMPATHY for the Brown Pelicans and the brown people of Louisiana, the imagined "line-cutters" who are INVISIBLE in this book except as paranoid formations of white fantasy (and nostalgic memories of kindly darkies in the good ol' days).Hurricane Katrina showed us how poor communities of color suffer even more greatly from the wretched neglect and depredations of a selfish, deluded, corpocratic state. They have the least mobility to move away from poisoned, ruined communities, and the fewest resources to advocate for change. Here is the passage from the book that has stayed with me most ominously: "One cultural contribution the South has made to the national right may be its persistent legacy of secession. In the nineteenth century, the secession was geographic: the South seceded from the North . . . The modern-day Tea Party enthusiasts I met sought a different separation: one between rich and poor. In their ideal world, the government would not take from the rich to give to the poor. It would fund the military and the national guard, build interstate freeways, dredge harbors, and otherwise pretty much disappear. So in the Tea Party idea, North and South would unite, but a new cleavage would open wide; the rich would divorce the poor, since so many of them were "cutting in line." . . [it is] a movement of the rich AND THOSE IDENTIFIED WITH THEM, to lift off the burden of help for the underprivileged. Across the whole land, the idea is, handouts should stop. THE RICHER AROUND THE NATION WILL BECOME FREE OF THE POORER. They will secede." (end of chapter 14, emphasis mine!)

I liked Hillbilly Elegy but this is the book we should all be reading if we want to understand the extreme polarization in this country from the point of view of the white working class. I think Arlie could have gone even deeper than she did, because she mostly wanted to focus on environmental issues and only barely brushes up against many of the moral issues and other ideas that are important, but the fact that these ideas would be novel to anyone confuses me and frustrates me, because these ideas are the things that I've been saying to anyone who might listen to me since Donald Trump was elected.Theres been a lot of talk in the weeks since the 2016 election about bubbles. A lot of liberals in large urban areas were angered by the suggestion that they, too, live in a bubble. They peacefully live next door to black people and immigrants and gay couples, so they cant possibly live in a bubble. But the thing is, they have no idea what life is really like in places like Coolville, Ohio or Lake Charles, Louisiana. And most of them dont care to. Places liked that are full of racist evangelicals who think Mexicans and Muslims are the devil and are too dumb to know theyre being poisoned by the factories they work in, so why should they care? Sure, I knew people who more or less fit that stereotype, but I knew way more people who didnt. The reality is way more nuanced than that. People back home might be living in a bubble if they arent willing to be open to the diversity of our nation, sure. They dont meet a lot of people who are different from them and so theyre never really forced to accept those differences. But that doesnt mean they are the only ones in a bubble.When I first moved to the wealthy suburbs outside of Philadelphia for grad school, one of the first things that hit me was how little the people I was meeting knew about life outside of their environment. I was experiencing some culture shock at how different the suburbs were from my hometown in poor rural Ohio, but I am absolutely convinced that if the tables were turned their culture shock would have been about a thousand times more head-spinny. Thats because their world was similar to the one thats reflected in the vast majority of pop culture that Id grown up consuming. TV shows take place in the city and the suburbs. The actual world that I grew up in was not really reflected back to me at all unless it was through a stereotypical hayseed or yokel meant to be the butt of a joke. But so many of my peers seemed completely oblivious to the fact that other parts of the country could be different unless they were making fun of "Pennsyltucky" rednecks. This book came about because Arlie Russell Hochschild, a bluer-than-blue liberal from Berkeley wanted to understand why rural Americans are drawn to the Tea Party message of smaller government when it seems counterintuitive. So she went to Louisiana, a state that consistently ranks near the bottom of every index in the country, to ask them. She wanted to construct what, as a sociologist, she calls their deep story. Essentially, thats how things feel to someone. Not necessarily the facts, but the emotion that they feel that drives their understanding of the world around them.The deep story that she draws from a group of conservative, white, largely working class people in Louisiana rings so true to me and what I heard from the people I grew up around in southern Ohio and West Virginia. Im a liberal who believes in things like civil rights and government regulation and assistance for the less fortunate, but I grew up with a lot of people whose deep story is more or less the same. And it boggles my mind that so many people are so incapable of seeing that story. Or, really, that they dont seem to get that listening to that story and understanding it doesnt necessarily have to mean that they have to agree with it or endorse it. You just have to stop applying your point of view and your life experiences to their lives.

The best book yet for those who want to understand the rise of the Tea Party and Trump. Arlie Russell Hochschild's work on emotional labor is the hottest thing on the social justice internet, but she's using her decades of experience and turning her lens on the Right and the emotional work that undergirds all of our political thoughts.