In Blue America, from Berkeley and Brooklyn to Durham and Austin, talking about Trump supporters has become an addiction that, like checking your phone, asserts itself in moments of weakness or inattention. Meals begin with promises that this time we will talk about something else. Then, faithful as a bad habit, conversation turns back to troubling questions: Who are these people? What are they thinking?



STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN LAND, by Arlie Russell Hochschild The New Press, 368 pp., $27.95

HILLBILLY ELEGY, by J.D. Vance Harper, 272 pp., $27.99

There’s plenty of cause for worry. Trump claimed the Republican presidential nomination on an identity politics of white, nominally Christian nativism that has not been so explicit in American politics for many decades. Even if his blustering, scattershot campaign flames out in November, as many have expected or hoped, it will be survived by the millions who supported him, many enthusiastically. If they continue to embrace some version of Trump’s nationalism, what will that mean for the shape of the political landscape? For the rest of us, accepting the right’s white identity politics as part of normal life, year in and year out, is a bleak prospect. So is treating perhaps a third of your fellow citizens as beyond the pale of normal politics. Anyone who is not a Trump enthusiast should hope that there is some other way to address his supporters, and for them to understand themselves.

Yet when liberals talk about Trump voters, they are often driven to conjecture and make-believe. The question, “Do you know anybody who is for Trump?” is answered by some variation on: “A few people I know on Facebook, some from high school; maybe my husband’s uncle, but we don’t really talk about it.” And then it’s back to, “Who are these people?” The conversations themselves are symptoms of a country whose political segregation runs through our neighborhoods, workplaces, and social media.

Arlie Russell Hochschild, an eminent left-liberal sociologist, and J.D. Vance, a Republican ex-marine and recent Yale Law School graduate with Appalachian roots, have thrown two rather different bridges over this divide. Hochschild, who lives in Berkeley, must have heard dozens of these tail-chasing conversations. Maybe it was their hermetic quality that inspired her new book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, a combination of travelogue and sociological analysis that distills several years of visits to rural and small-town Louisiana. There, Hochschild gets to know Tea Party supporters, most of whom become Trump supporters by the end of her research, and works to understand the world view that organizes their politics.

Vance grew up in Rust Belt Ohio, in a family from eastern Kentucky coal country. His memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, must have begun in stories he had to work out during earnest, not entirely comprehending conversations with his New Haven classmates: Where do you come from, J.D.? (Middletown, Ohio, but really we’re from Jackson, Kentucky.) What do your parents do there? (My dad is a sort of off-the-grid Pentecostal who gave me up for adoption when I was a kid. My mom has boyfriends and serial husbands, and works as a nurse when she’s not too strung out on prescription drugs or heroin. My grandmother raised me with a Bible and a gun. What does your dad do in Greenwich?) Hochschild is a cultural interpreter by vocation. Vance has become one out of necessity.