That the private sector, improperly regulated, had played a major role in causing the financial crisis, and that the oil and chemical companies were polluting their towns and their waterways because of inadequate oversight, mattered less to Hochschild’s subjects than a desire to leave the free market free to operate. Government, its adherents believed, was the problem, and the private sector the solution. The Tea Party, Hochschild comes to understand, is a delayed response to the financial crisis of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama as president. So why were those same voters intent on supporting candidates who promised to dismantle the federal Environmental Protection Agency? Louisiana, home to numerous oil and chemical companies, suffers from rampant pollution, and many of the rural residents she speaks to have endured dire consequences, from illnesses to lost homes, as a result.

Hochschild is intent on heightening the contradictions, digging into the anti-government, anti-regulatory impulses of her subjects and uncovering the exposed places where they might benefit from a bit more regulation. Trapped in their competing Fox News- New York Times bubbles, Americans increasingly lack the means or the desire to communicate with each other, and Hochschild sets out to offer her services as a translator, reporting to coastal elites on the frame of reference that motivates the populist right.

Arlie Russell Hochschild, sociologist at University of California, Berkeley, took it literally, and for her insightful new book, Strangers in Their Own Land, she travelled from her liberal Bay Area enclave to conservative Louisiana to understand what motivated local adherents to the Tea Party movement.

The question, when posed, is often intended to be more rhetorical than interrogatory. It is the question argued and parried and debated at dinner tables up and down the east and west coasts of the United States: what are they thinking? What motivates more than 40 per cent of American voters to support a billionaire real-estate developer and reality-television personality with a paucity of policy ideas and a surfeit of anger-management issues to be president of the United States?

Arlie russell hochschild books