Her compassion is tangible. The most effective of her myriad tools is simply listening to those whose life stories don’t often get heard in the national conversation ... Hochschild gets a lot right. Still, as an investigative journalist who covers the MAGA movement, her portrayal of Trump’s America sometimes felt incomplete to me ... Hochschild has produced a seamless election-season-ready explanation of conservatism that might be just a little too neat.
Hochschild merges empathy with acumen, but the new book does not read like a breakthrough, the way its predecessor did ... The literature on politics, emotion and the White working class has deepened since 2016, to the point where Hochschild herself now struggles to say something truly new.
She pays close attention to what we tell ourselves, what we do and don’t express about the circumstances of our lives, and how our emotional logic fares against the facts of forces beyond our control. She is alert to cultural narratives that run against or beneath what appears in the news. In this sense, Hochschild’s is a sociology about absence and its many costs ... A book that shows how gaps get filled by meaning of one kind or another.
