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

21 " Virtually every Tea Party advocate I interviewed for this book has personally benefited from a major government service or has close family who have. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

23 " The Measure of America, a report of the Social Science Research Council, ranks every state in the United States on its “human development.” Each rank is based on life expectancy, school enrollment, educational degree attainment, and median personal earnings. Out of the 50 states, Louisiana ranked 49th and in overall health ranked last. According to the 2015 National Report Card, Louisiana ranked 48th out of 50 in eighth-grade reading and 49th out of 50 in eighth-grade math. Only eight out of ten Louisianans have graduated from high school, and only 7 percent have graduate or professional degrees. According to the Kids Count Data Book, compiled by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Louisiana ranked 49th out of 50 states for child well-being. And the problem transcends race; an average black in Maryland lives four years longer, earns twice as much, and is twice as likely to have a college degree as a black in Louisiana. And whites in Louisiana are worse off than whites in Maryland or anywhere else outside Mississippi. Louisiana has suffered many environmental problems too: there are nearly 400 miles of low, flat, subsiding coastline, and the state loses a football field–size patch of wetland every hour. It is threatened by rising sea levels and severe hurricanes, which the world’s top scientists connect to climate change. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

25 " We, on both sides, wrongly imagine that empathy with the “other” side brings an end to clearheaded analysis when, in truth, it’s on the other side of that bridge that the most important analysis can begin. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

27 " The Greek word “nostalgia” derives from the root nostros, meaning “return home,” and algia, meaning “longing.” Doctors in seventeenth-century Europe considered nostalgia an illness, like the flu, mainly suffered by displaced migrant servants, soldiers, and job seekers, and curable through opium, leeches, or, for the affluent, a journey to the Swiss Alps. Throughout time, such feeling has been widely acknowledged. The Portuguese have the term saudade. The Russians have toska. The Czechs have litost. Others too name the feeling: for Romanians, it’s dor, for Germans, it’s heimweh. The Welsh have hiraeth, the Spanish mal de corazon. Many "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

29 " The more at risk a person is to exposure to hazardous waste, nationwide, we discovered, the less likely a person was to be worried about it, and the more likely to be a conservative Republican. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

31 " In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the state legislature set up the Southeast Flood Control Commission to come up with a plan for protecting Louisiana from floods. They concluded that the best course of action was to fill in the canals and repair the shore. Since this was a task the oil companies had in their contracts agreed to do, and had not done, in 2014 the commission did what had never been done: it sued the ninety-seven responsible oil companies. Governor Jindal quickly squashed the upstart commission. He removed members from it. He challenged its right to sue. In another unprecedented move, the legislature voted to nullify—retroactively—the lawsuit by withdrawing the authority to file it from those who had done so. A measure (SB 553) called for costs of repairs to be paid, not by the oil companies, but by the state’s taxpayers. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

33 " Not only have the country's two main political parties split further apart on such issues, but political feeling also runs deeper than it did in the past. In 1960, when a survey asked American adults whether it would "distrub" them if their child married a member of the other political party, no more than 5 percent of either party answered "yes." But in 2010, 33 percent of Democrats and 0 percent of Republicans answered "yes." In fact, partyism, as some call it, now beats race as the source of divisive prejudice. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

35 " The Righteous Mind, for example, Jonathan Haidt "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

37 " Issued in February 2012, and still online as of May 5, 2016, the report was written by one set of state officials for another. After a chilling description of a “cancer slope factor,” the report continues, in a matter-of-fact tone, to advise the recreational fisherman on how to prepare a contaminated fish to eat: “Trimming the fat and skin on finfish, and removing the hepatopancreas from crabs, will reduce the amount of contaminants in the fish and shellfish,” the document reads. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

39 " Finally, we came to Madonna's basic feeling that Limbaugh was defending her against insults she felt liberals were lobbing at her: "Oh, liberals think that Bible-believing Southerners are ignorant, backward, rednecks, losers. They think we're racist, sexist, homophobic, and maybe fat." Her grandfather had struggled as a desperately poor Arkansas sharecropper. She was a gifted singer, beloved by a large congregation, a graduate of a two-year Bible college, and a caring mother of two. In this moment, I began to recognize the power of blue-state catcalls taunting red state residents. Limbaugh was a firewall against liberal insults thrown at her and her ancestors, she felt. Was the right-wing media making them up to stoke hatred, I wondered, or were there enough blue-state insults to go around? "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right