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Even if government helped people—and he didn’t think it did much—government should never, Mike felt, erode the spirit of a community. He had grown up in a dense circle of aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, all within walking distance from each other on the Armelise Plantation. Now in his sixties, Mike felt happy to live in a community as close and cooperative as the one he had known as a boy. For a man who could lose himself for hours in the garage assembling a two-seater Zenith 701 airplane from a kit, and who described himself as “to myself,” such a community brought cheer. The sociability of Bayou Corne brought him out of himself. It wasn’t the simple absence of government Mike wanted, it was the feeling of being inside a warm, cooperative group.

–Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild