Reddit reviews Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
We found 13 Reddit comments about Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Strangers in Their Own Land Anger and Mourning on the American Right
Trump is playing us.
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Reminder: internal leaks from the trump campaign say explicitly that "attacks on their candidate (trump) and his supporters further solidify his base and even push people towards him" according to focus groups.
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The simple fact is that his supporters want to believe in him, and don't want to admit they are wrong about him; and they will go as far as they possibly can to avoid doing so.
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Trump knows this, and knows that he can maintain the sector of public support that he has by manufacturing threats and creating a doom and gloom narrative in order to keep people rallied behind the us (him and his supporters) vs. them (bad hombres, liberal media, inner cities-- see his recent claim about the murder rate in Philly) dynamic that made him so popular as a candidate.
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Trump also knows that most of his supporters are feeling attacked, and that the divide was already strong between his supporters and their opponents, and that there is really no middle ground. He knows that they don't want to admit they are wrong. In fact, recent science suggests that your political beliefs become a part of your identity. And so people aren't going to back down when they perceive that they themselves are being attacked, because it makes them too vulnerable.
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So what can we do about it? We've got to work on decreasing the divide that he is trying to create and that he needs in order to function. As I said before, when people feel they are attacked, they dig in and embrace their positions until they are forcefully and incontrovertibly proven wrong (and Trump is literally removing the tools for proving them wrong by creating questions about the most basic facts).
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Here is my strategy:
I would argue that the reason his supporters have turned to these sources and tactics is because it's become so important for them to score a "win" against their enemies that they are willing to entrench themselves in positions that they otherwise wouldn't dream of taking.
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Making these hardcore supporters less defensive is the first step towards initiating a level-headed debate. I would also stress that it's important not to assume you know beforehand their position, and because of that, to assume that you are right before you've had the argument. Hear out their position and listen fully, don't immediately try to argue it down. A lot of these people are just tired of being stereotypes as idiots for the views that they hold and being unheard.. It's just about making a choice between what feels good (and is counterproductive) and what will ultimately move things forward. Maturity is the ability to delay instant gratification for long term fulfillment-- a similar idea applies here.
TL;DR My claim is that focusing criticisms (i.e. no malice) on Trump and not his supporters will make it easier for his supporters to see the truth because they will not be on the defensive, and consequently they will little by little give up their support of him. And that's all that really counts moving forward: not revenge, not rubbing it in anyone's faces, just working against Trump.
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More resources:
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I would also recommend this book for anyone interested in what I've said here. Credit /u/veringer for mentioning it to me.
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an interesting comment from /u/ingsocinnerparty on Joe Biden:
I just read this really insightful bit of advice from Joe Biden in The New York Times:
> Biden wasn’t shocked that Hillary Clinton lost. He had noticed before the election that Trump was connecting with the people he grew up with in Pennsylvania. This shaped his thoughts on how Democrats should respond. When the subject of Trump came up aboard Air Force Two, Biden referred to a well-worn story about how, as a freshman senator, he saw Jesse Helms, the archconservative North Carolina Republican, ripping into a piece of disabilities legislation. Biden was furious about it and began attacking Helms to Mike Mansfield, the Democratic Senate majority leader. Puffing on his pipe, Mansfield asked Biden if he knew that Helms and his wife had adopted a disabled 9-year-old boy no one else would take. “Question a man’s judgment, not his motives,” Mansfield instructed.
> Biden, who was invited by Helms decades later to give his eulogy, is convinced that absorbing Mansfield’s advice is what allowed him to work with Senate Republicans during the Obama years, to negotiate the approval of the New Start nuclear-arms-reduction treaty, the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the expansion of the earned-income tax credit, among other accomplishments. His approach to Trump, he said, wouldn’t be fundamentally different. “It falls in that category,” Biden told me. “It’s one thing to say: ‘I think the proposal on the following is a serious mistake. I think it’s gonna do the following damage.’ It’s another thing to say, ‘The guy’s a fucking idiot, and he is an egomaniac who’s a whatever.’ ”
Well, to some people it does. The cluster of traits that generally defines these people (and the alt-right) IME:
If you have an Audible account, spend a credit on this:
Altemeyer reads the book himself and does a great job explaining his life's work for laypeople. It's not a collection of journal papers and shouldn't be read with that critical of an eye, but he does go into some detail on sciency things.
If you don't have an Audible account or don't want to spend $, the book is also available for free as a PDF:
The very superficial TL;DR is that there are just a lot of people whose personalities fall on the authoritarian side of the spectrum. And, the bullet points listed above are explained/connected (at least generally) by right-wing authoritarianism:
> a personality and ideological variable studied in political, social, and personality psychology. Right-wing authoritarians are people who have a high degree of willingness to submit to authorities they perceive as established and legitimate, who adhere to societal conventions and norms, and who are hostile and punitive in their attitudes towards people who don't adhere to them. They value uniformity and are in favour of using group authority, including coercion, to achieve it
There are other related concepts like self-righteousness and social dominance orientation, but for the most part this book helps "the rest of us" categorize, describe, and understand this significant fraction of people. For the practical cultural tacticians, the author also discusses his research as it relates to how to bridge the gap and foster more mutual empathy with authoritarian personalities. He also outlines the differences between authoritarian followers and leaders -- which when read with the full knowledge of what's unfolding now is sobering.
As a follow up to this, I would also recommend "Strangers in Their Own Land" which touches on similar points, but comes at from a much more anecdotal and hands-on way. I'm not naturally political or unconsciously persuasive, so I really enjoy books like this that I can snap in to my tool kit and at least help shine some light on observations that often make no damn sense.
Tja, jeg følger Fox News på facebook. De er nok det mest sobre højreorienterede medie i USA, hvilket egentligt er rimeligt vildt når man ser på hvor sindssyge de egentligt er.
Problemet er lidt at vælgerne i USA er så sindssygt splittede, og at der ikke rigtigt findes noget sted som ikke er en del af den ene eller anden lejr. Specielt i dag når Trump går ud og anklager medier han ikke kan lide for at være fake news. Men hvis du bare vil have en indsigt i vælgerne kan jeg anbefale Strangers in Their Own Land. Det er en antropolog som har været ude og tale med folk fra højrefløjen i USA for at finde ud af hvorfor de stemmer som de gør - den blev skrevet umiddelbart før valget og er ekstremt relevant ift. forstå Trumps vælgere.
I'm referring to this sentiment that women, minorities, immigrants have "cut ahead in the line" while whites have been ignored among the rural right; Arlie Hochschild and others have reported on this belief and it seems to underlie a lot of the Trumpist sentiment.
My point was...well...maybe those groups are getting ahead because they don't expect their jobs to just miraculously come back? Because they're worse off in general and are more motivated to do things to improve their condition?
Although I haven't read it, I suspect that this is similar to what Arlie Hochschild discusses in Strangers in Their Own Land. Though I think it applies more broadly to culture than just jobs.
https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Their-Own-Land-Mourning/dp/1620972255
I just started reading this one. She spent five years in the deep south doing interviews with people to understand their perspective at an emotional level. Very good so far.
Pretty much straight out of Strangers In Their Own Land. Of course, many of those people just hate the federal government (all government, really) no matter what.
I've been reading Strangers in Their Own Land. It does a good job of making you understand why specifically white republican southerners would want to vote for Trump. They have basically being used and lied to by politicians and corporations for decades, and they realize the American Dream they've been clinging to is basically no longer working (it was, in a way, decades ago). So you can feel some empathy for them.
But at the same time, it nicely goes over how they've repeatedly shot themselves in the foot, over and over again, and still are with Trump. Louisiana (where all the interviews in the book are) is near the bottom as the poorest, most polluted, less educated, less healthy state (it has other things going for it I'm sure, but that's besides the point). And at the same time, its population is largely voting for people who would bring in more chemical plants, defund public schools, defund health care, etc.
I think if you grow up surrounded by a certain mentality, and don't have access to as many resources and are constantly being manipulated or lied to, you know something is wrong, but you don't necessarily understand the best way to fix it. And things just suck so bad that you may want to jump on the first good-sounding thing you hear, like some guy who'll "create jobs" or "clean the swamp". You'll buy lottery tickets, or vote for a guy like Trump.
"At least he's different... he says he can make things like they were back in the day... hopefully he can." Because you just can't understand how you can't make horse-buggy builders jobs again, or see how things might get better in the future via renewals instead of oil. When your life is shit, you think short term, not long term. And you're angry because your town has been going downhill for decades, while the coasts have been on the uphill or at least steady for years now, even for minorities living there or immigrants that just got there.
So yeah, they're shooting themselves in the foot. But it's hard to straight out laugh at them. And we shouldn't, if anything because if they have a capacity to sway elections and have an influence on federal policy (and because we shouldn't be dicks to other people, in general).
I think Trump is a good inoculation against a lot of bad policies. I don't understand why any country (including Canada, where I live) would want to invest heavily in oil, rather than shift towards renewables as fast as possible, but maybe we need a great case study of why certain policies are just plain bad. It leaves room for the next guy who takes office to swiftly reverse a lot of those horrible policies, and swing the pendulum forcefully the other way. Hopefully. And I guess you guys will need the support of those white republicans if you're ever going to achieve that.
>This is demonstrably false.
Those maps seem a bit out of date or lacking in data because Ireland has gay marriage and the UK has legalized abortion until 20+ weeks. In most western countries it's not the issue that it is in the US, and that is a fact. At most you have moves like that in eastern european nations that still have a strong catholic presence, but France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal and the scandinavian/nordic countries have all moved on, and that most of the european population right there.
>With the exception of gun control, there's not a single issue on which the republican party is to the right of where it was 20 years ago.
Obamacare was the GOP's plan in the 90s and Romney's plan as governor.
>that did not stop the left from calling them buffoons.
Comedian Jon Stewart mid-joke and wonkette.com wow. The point I was making by saying that McCain and Romney weren't buffoons, if you want me to explain, is that at least they were qualified to be presidents and had grasp of policy. Doesn't mean they didn't have a bunch of idiotic moments, notably 47% and Sarah Palin
>No he didn't, but that doesn't stop you from saying it.
We're just gonna have to disagree on that and exchange clips of Bush's most famous quotes.
>it was used to describe all three.
Mittzkrieg? seriously?
Palin is not McCainn.
And Bush... okay you know what Bush brought back torture and expanded the national security state to hitherto unseen levels. Plus the deception around Iraq. I can see why that word might have been through around back then. But I'd still say there was no broad-based campaign calling him a fascist.
Ted Cruz was called that after the word entered the mainstream with Trump. "trying to out-fascist Trump"
>The democratic VP was a proud drug warrior. This is not a republican vice.
Yeah democrats played into it 100%, doesn't deny my point at all (it started with Nixon and Reagan for a start).
>that you claim discourse is racialized doesn't make it so.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1620972255/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_16?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE
>How dare republicans refuse to endorse an organization that calls them racist! What are they thinking?
All I want is republicans to produce policies and rhetoric that addresses police brutality. Don't even need to embrace BLM. Just need to not call them a hate group and jump on the #AllLivesMatter bandwagon.
You might enjoy the book Strangers in their own Land. It's a bit lengthy, and not entirely unbiased, but it's a decent sociological look at people in the rural south and why they hold beliefs that are directly contrary to their interest. The author specifically looks at rural louisiana where industrial pollution is destroying the communities of people who mourn their loss of nature while also voting against government regulation, and she talks to various people to build up a sense of how to resolve this apparent conflict. It's an interesting read.
Yes, it is and you can read a bit more about the neo free market movement here.
>Hochschild moves beyond the truism that less affluent voters who support small government and tax cuts are voting against their own economic interest." -- O Magazine "By far the best book by an outsider to the Tea Party I have ever encountered . . . a wonderful contribution to the national discourse. -- Forbes "An entry pass to an alternative worldview, and with it a route map towards empathy."
https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Their-Own-Land-Mourning/dp/1620972255
Or here.
>Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers?
The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against “big government” led to the ascendancy of a broad-based conservative movement. But as Jane Mayer shows in this powerful, meticulously reported history, a network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system.
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical/dp/0385535597
As an LA native, it's easy to forget just how politically diverse California is. I was reminded of Hochschild's excellent book Strangers in Their Own Land. Hochschild, a Berkeley professor, interviews several families in rural Louisiana to explore the vast gap between the concerns of urban and rural voters. They echoed the same sentiments as the rural Californian OP.