Estranged: In US, both sides feel lost, left out

In the 2016 election, Donald Trump tapped into a sentiment strongly held by white working-class voters that America had changed so much around them that they felt estranged in their own country.

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild described that feeling among conservative voters in Louisiana in her 2016 book, “Strangers in Their Own Land.” In pre-election polling, that belief strongly predicted support for Trump among working-class whites. And in postelection analyses of those voters, the same sense of estrangement kept coming up.

But for all its associations with Trump voters, the mood appears to have spread over the last two years. In a series of competitive congressional districts where The New York Times has been polling the midterm electorate, nearly half of Democrats say they feel this way — slightly more than among Republicans.

Forty-seven percent of voters who approve of Trump say they feel like strangers in their own country, while 44 percent of those who disapprove of him say the same. Nearly half of women feel this way. About 60 percent of African-Americans and Asian-Americans do. A majority of voters say this in West Virginia coal country and in a deeply conservative Kentucky district. But the feeling is also common in the highly educated suburbs of Orange County, Calif.

The seven districts polled on that question — talking to 3,555 likely voters in California, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota and West Virginia — are not representative of the entire country. But they contain communities that are pulling ahead in America and those that are falling behind, as well as places that mirror the nation’s demographic future and its past.

The findings echo other polling on the question since Trump’s election. And together, the results suggest a rare political moment when Americans on all sides worry that they don’t recognize what the country is becoming.

“Normally, even in a politically polarized society, one side wins and they’re content,” said Stephanie McCurry, a historian at Columbia University. “It’s the other side that feels shut out of power.”

The moment now reminds her of the 1850s, when Northerners and Southerners were locked in a morally imbued fight over the nature of American values — and whether America was at its core a slave-owning society. Many Northerners were horrified by the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which effectively declared the United States such a place. Southerners were horrified by Northerners’ reaction to it, McCurry said.

“At that point, what you’re looking at is this sense of powerlessness all around about the ability of any institution to mediate not just a political conflict, but a conflict of fundamental values,” she said. “That’s maybe something like what we’re dealing with right now.”

The Senate’s rancorous fight over Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, she added, has similarly added to pessimism about resolving these conflicts.

In the two years since Trump’s election, protesters and politicians on the left have lamented the erosion of values around tolerance and diversity. On the right, they have continued to mourn the loss of religious and traditional family values at the center of American life.

Hochschild identifies as a liberal herself, and after Trump’s election, she said one of the conservative voters she described in her book sent her an email.

“She said, ‘Well, I guess it’s now your time to feel like a stranger in your own land,’” Hochschild said. She acknowledges that she has felt this way of late, as she has watched Trump declare the free press the enemy of the people and question the independence of the judiciary. “I had no idea we could come this far this fast and challenge things I thought were basic,” she said. “It feels like some pillars of our culture are being shaken, stress-tested.”

That is precisely the feeling she had described in Louisiana.