Strangers in Their Own Land
Strangers in Their Own Land

Author: Arlie Russell Hochschild

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2018-02-20

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1620973987

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The National Book Award Finalist and New York Times bestseller that became a guide and balm for a country struggling to understand the election of Donald Trump "A generous but disconcerting look at the Tea Party. . . . This is a smart, respectful and compelling book." —Jason DeParle, The New York Times Book Review When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, a bewildered nation turned to Strangers in Their Own Land to understand what Trump voters were thinking when they cast their ballots. Arlie Hochschild, one of the most influential sociologists of her generation, had spent the preceding five years immersed in the community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, a Tea Party stronghold. As Jedediah Purdy put it in the New Republic, "Hochschild is fascinated by how people make sense of their lives. . . . [Her] attentive, detailed portraits . . . reveal a gulf between Hochchild's 'strangers in their own land' and a new elite." Already a favorite common read book in communities and on campuses across the country and called "humble and important" by David Brooks and "masterly" by Atul Gawande, Hochschild's book has been lauded by Noam Chomsky, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, and countless others. The paperback edition features a new afterword by the author reflecting on the election of Donald Trump and the other events that have unfolded both in Louisiana and around the country since the hardcover edition was published, and also includes a readers' group guide at the back of the book.

Summary and Analysis of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
Summary and Analysis of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

Author: Worth Books

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2017-05-16

Total Pages: 48

ISBN-13: 1504044932

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So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of Strangers in Their Own Land tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book. Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader. This short summary and analysis of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right includes: Historical context Chapter-by-chapter overviews Character profiles Detailed timeline of events Important quotes Fascinating trivia Glossary of terms Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work About Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild: Renowned sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild seeks to understand why some American conservatives continue to vote for policies that ultimately harm them. She traveled to Louisiana to complete a five-year study, talking to members of the Tea Party and attempting to breach the “empathy wall” that stands between conservatives and liberals. A compassionate observer, Hochschild pursues the heart of the “deeper story,” blaming the narrative—not her subjects—that informs these peoples’ choices. She particularly examines the long history of environmental pollution in the region and the state governments’ failure to address it—a failure that this political faction refuses to condemn. Strangers in Their Own Land is a compelling analysis of one of the most important factors in American culture today, and Hochschild’s measured and empathic approach leads her readers toward a greater understanding of their fellow citizens. The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.

Psychoanalytic Insights into Social, Political, and Organizational Dynamics
Psychoanalytic Insights into Social, Political, and Organizational Dynamics

Author: Seth Allcorn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-08-16

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1000423166

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• Offers a deeper exploration of social, political and organizational dynamics, through applied psychoanalytic theory. • Focuses on the complexity of political life in the United States 2015-2020 and embraces sense making of the chaotic world of alternate facts, conspiracy theories, reality TV politics, hoax pandemics to help explain the ‘Age of Trump’. • Offers psychodynamic insights into the unconscious undercurrents of contemporary culture and politics in the US

How the Liberal Arts Can Save Liberal Democracy
How the Liberal Arts Can Save Liberal Democracy

Author: Steven M. DeLue

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-06-06

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1498575374

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Currently, liberal democracy is threatened by authoritarian movements, not just in the United States but also in societies around the world. The liberal arts helps to arrest these tendencies because of the support by citizens in liberal democracies for the values the latter shares with the liberal arts: autonomy and freedom. Autonomy is the capacity to make reasoned decisions about a host of political, social, and personal matters—independent of external parties who seek to control our lives for the sake of their ends and at the cost of our freedom. But autonomy depends on people being able to enter into discussions—what I call discourses of mutual respect—designed to test ideas in public against facts and good reasons. This discourse is facilitated by an enlarged culture through which individuals identify what they hold in common and by which individuals work to understand their differences. Now, authoritarian regimes reject autonomy because it empowers citizens to designate the boundaries and content of political authority. Liberal democracies, in contrast, embrace autonomy because it is the basis for the political institutions that provide civic equality—and through it—the freedom of citizens to control their destiny. Yet, ironically, an enlarged culture and the discourse of mutual respect that, together, sustain autonomy are not likely to be produced within a highly partisan political atmosphere of a liberal democracy. Still, a liberal democracy is open to the importation of these elements from the liberal arts. Thus, saving liberal democracy from authoritarianism depends on a robust liberal arts presence in society. What reforms of the liberal arts are needed to make this objective possible? Much rides on the answer to this question. For the fact is that if the liberal arts recedes to a whisper, liberal democracy is likely to be defeated by the authoritarian’s bluster-filled and always nihilist roar.

Contesting the Far Right
Contesting the Far Right

Author: Claudia Leeb

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2024-04-23

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 0231559704

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Why have so many people responded to the insecurity, exploitation, alienation, and isolation of precarity capitalism by supporting the far right? In this timely book, Claudia Leeb argues that psychoanalytic and feminist critical theory illuminates how economic and psychological factors interact to produce this extreme political shift. Contesting the Far Right examines right-wing recruitment tactics in the United States and Austria, where people discontented with the status quo have turned to far-right parties and movements that further cement capitalism’s adverse effects. Leeb contends that Freudian psychoanalytic theory and early Frankfurt School Critical Theory provide analytical tools to explain this apparent contradiction in psychological terms. Living under precarity capitalism generates feelings of failure and anxiety, which people experience as non-wholeness, because it has become difficult if not impossible to live up to the fetish of economic, interpersonal, and bodily success, and the far right preys on such feelings. Its psychologically oriented propaganda tactics produce the illusion of wholeness and a positive sense of self while leaving the socioeconomic conditions that cause people’s suffering intact. At the same time, they remove the inhibitions that keep people’s repressed aggression and racist and sexist attitudes in check. To demonstrate the workings of this process, Leeb compares cases including Trump and the alt-right in the United States and the Freedom Party and the identitarian movement in Austria. At once theoretically rich and politically engaged, this book also offers ways to resist the far right and counter the psychological appeal of its propaganda techniques.

Hans-Herbert Kögler’s Critical Hermeneutics
Hans-Herbert Kögler’s Critical Hermeneutics

Author: Kurt C. M. Mertel

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-06-02

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1350228656

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Providing a comprehensive engagement with the work of Hans-Herbert Kögler, this is the first volume to expand upon and critique his distinctive approach to critical theory: critical hermeneutics. In the current climate of crisis, the relevance and fruitfulness of Kögler's work has never been greater, as he fuses the philosophies of Michel Foucault, Hans Georg Gadamer, and his mentor, Jürgen Habermas, to respond to critical international issues surrounding politics, agency, and society. Working towards a truly non-ethno-centric and global conception of intercultural dialogue, an essential aspect of Kögler's critical hermeneutics is his account of selfhood as reflexive: socially situated, embodied, and linguistically articulated, permeated by power, but yet critical and creative. Leading international scholars, representing a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, build upon Kögler's approach in this volume and explore the methodological, theoretical, and applicative scope of critical hermeneutics beyond the Frankfurt School. In doing so, they address some of the most pressing issues facing global society today, from multilingual education to the urgent need for interreligious and intercultural understanding. Closing with a response from Kögler himself, Hans-Herbert Kögler's Critical Hermeneutics also offers an exclusive account of the philosopher's contemporary re-appraisal of the core tenets of critical hermeneutics.

Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame
Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame

Author: Patricia A. DeYoung

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-21

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 1000513041

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A masterful synthesis of relational and attachment theory, neurobiology, and contemporary psychoanalysis, Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame has been internationally recognized as an essential text on shame. Integrating new theory about trauma, shame resilience, and self-compassion, this second edition further clarifies the relational, right-brain essence of being in and with the suffering of shame. New chapters carry theory further into praxis. In the time of a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a global Black Lives Matter movement, "Societies of Chronic Shame" invites therapists to deepen their awareness of collective societal trauma and of their own place within dissociated societal shame. "Three Faces of Shame" organizes the clinical wisdom of the book into clear guidelines for differential diagnosis and treatment. Lucid and compassionate, this book engages with the most profound challenges of clinical practice and touches into the depths of being human.

Tyranny of the Minority
Tyranny of the Minority

Author: Steven Levitsky

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2024-09-17

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0593443098

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A call to reform our antiquated political institutions before it’s too late—from the authors of How Democracies Die “[Levitsky and Ziblatt] write with terrifying clarity about how the forces of the right have co-opted the enshrined rules to exert their tyranny.”—The Washington Post ONE OF THE CALIFORNIA REVIEW OF BOOKS’ TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • A NEWSWEEK BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR America is undergoing a massive experiment: It is moving, in fits and starts, toward a multiracial democracy, something few societies have ever done. But the prospect of change has sparked an authoritarian backlash that threatens the very foundations of our political system. Why is democracy under assault here, and not in other wealthy, diversifying nations? And what can we do to save it? With the clarity and brilliance that made their first book, How Democracies Die, a global bestseller, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt offer a coherent framework for understanding these volatile times. They draw on a wealth of examples—from 1930s France to present-day Thailand—to explain why and how political parties turn against democracy. They then show how our Constitution makes us uniquely vulnerable to attacks from within: It is a pernicious enabler of minority rule, allowing partisan minorities to consistently thwart and even rule over popular majorities. Most modern democracies—from Germany and Sweden to Argentina and New Zealand—have eliminated outdated institutions like elite upper chambers, indirect elections, and lifetime tenure for judges. The United States lags dangerously behind. In this revelatory book, Levitsky and Ziblatt issue an urgent call to reform our politics. It’s a daunting task, but we have remade our country before—most notably, after the Civil War and during the Progressive Era. And now we are at a crossroads: America will either become a multiracial democracy or cease to be a democracy at all.

The Opposite of Hate
The Opposite of Hate

Author: Sally Kohn

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Published: 2018-04-10

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1616207280

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“A stunning debut by a truly gifted writer—an eye-opening read for both liberals and conservatives—and it could not come at a better time.”—Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Option B, with Sheryl Sandberg What is the opposite of hate? As a progressive commentator on Fox News and now CNN, Sally Kohn has made a career out of bridging intractable political differences and learning how to talk respectfully with people whose views she disagrees with passionately. Her viral TED Talk on the need to practice emotional—rather than political—correctness sparked a new way of considering how often we amplify our differences and diminish our connections. But these days even famously “nice” Kohn finds herself wanting to breathe fire at her enemies. It was time, she decided, to look into the epidemic of hate all around us and learn how we can stop it. In The Opposite of Hate, Kohn talks to leading scientists and researchers and investigates the evolutionary and cultural roots of hate and how incivility can be a gateway to much worse. She travels to Rwanda, the Middle East, and across the United States, introducing us to former terrorists and white supremacists, and even some of her own Twitter trolls, drawing surprising lessons from dramatic and inspiring stories of those who left hate behind. As Kohn confronts her own shameful moments, whether it was back when she bullied a classmate or today when she harbors deep partisan resentment, she discovers, “The opposite of hate is the beautiful and powerful reality of how we are all fundamentally linked and equal as human beings. The opposite of hate is connection.” Sally Kohn’s engaging, fascinating, and often funny book will open your eyes and your heart.