With slightly more than a month until Election Day, the polls show that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are basically tied. Political scientists, historians, and other experts are describing the 2024 presidential election as one of the closest in modern American history. For those outside of the so-called MAGAverse, Trump’s popularity, even after more than eight years, remains a riddle. Unfortunately, the future of American democracy may be decided by their inability to break the Trump Code. The mainstream news media’s failure to decipher Trumpism has repeatedly led them to normalize the wantonly corrupt ex-president’s extremely malignant behavior.
In her new book “Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right,” leading sociologist and author Arlie Hochschild has taken on the task of trying to explain Trump’s powerful appeal for and power over “white working class” voters and other downwardly mobile Americans. She argues that Trump speaks to their grievances, pain, rage, and feelings of lost pride, manhood, purpose and honor.
Ultimately, as Hochschild explains in this conversation, to defeat Trumpism and the larger neofascist movement will require that the country’s responsible political leaders, news media, and other elites and influentials become “emotionally bilingual” so that they can better hear and understand how and why a large swath of the public is economically alienated, angry, and feeling left behind from the American Dream and the good life.
Arlie Hochschild is a Professor Emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to “Stolen Pride,” she is the author of many books including “Strangers in Their Own Land,” “The Managed Heart,” and “The Second Shift.”
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length:
The forty or so days until the election are going to feel very slow and very fast at the same time. It is all so disorienting and maddening. How are you feeling? How are you making sense of it?
I am focused on the election. I am caught between anxiety and concern because the election is too close right now. Harris and Trump are neck and neck and in recent polls, Trump leads by a bit in the battleground states. In the last 100 years there has not been an election as important as the one between Trump and Harris. If we take Trump at his word, he’s talking about changing the Constitution and making himself a dictator. As a country we are not as alarmed as we should be by Trump’s threats, because he has so flagrantly broken so many rules of politics and life. The scary thing is that we’ve become used to it.
Many on the Democratic side are still baffled by Trump’s enormous appeal. That’s a big problem too because we really need to know what we’re up against. We need to break the code that Trump is speaking as the leader to his followers. People outside of the MAGA movement all too often throw up their hands and say Trump is nuts and his followers are duped. But when we leave matters there, we’re not looking at what’s dangerous about Trump and his movement. Once we really tune into what Trump is saying and get why his MAGA devotees are so loyal to him then we can come to understand what is happening. This will not make any non-Trumper more relaxed, but it will help us see the danger in what’s happening and better gauge what to do about it.
Once we tune into what Trump is saying — i.e., become emotionally “bilingual” — we can get why he has gained MAGA loyalists among the 42% of non-BA-holding whites, and even an increasing proportion of Black and Latino men — and why the Dems have lost them. Why are poor Appalachians – whose parents and grandparents were FDR Democrats — I wondered, voting 80% for Donald Trump?
I am a product of and a proud member of the Black working class. That background and growing up with white working class people have given me great insight into Trump and his appeal that many of my colleagues from more upper class, if not rich white, backgrounds lack.
Your working-class background gives you access to an important mode of communication — one that many if not most journalists and reporters do not yet have. One of the reasons I wrote “Stolen Pride” is to help us all become bilingual by understanding the language and logic of Trump and his appeal. You can take what Donald Trump says literally, and by doing so miss what is being said emotively. In red states, and Appalachia in particular, that I write about in “Stolen Pride,” there is a story of struggle, loss, poverty and addiction.
“He dismissed Trump but saw little for himself in the Democratic Party. He was pointing to a missing bridge.”
Pike County, in Kentucky’s fifth congressional district, is the whitest and second poorest district in the nation. Only 13% – less than half the national average — have BA degrees. Of those aged 20 to 64, only some 58% are working or looking for work. In a once proud, thriving coal region, a higher-than-average number live alone, are in poor health or have died of drug addiction. After the coal industry collapse, men worked local jobs for seven, eight or nine dollars an hour —“high-school” or “girly” jobs, as many saw them — wages too low to support a family. Some left town for Midwest industrial towns, but came home empty-handed, and felt shame at that. Then they got on welfare and felt shame at that. Or they got into drugs and felt shame at that. A once-proud people, shamed.
That story in my opinion can be generalized more broadly to a national story about the large percentage of Americans who are white and lack college degrees, and who are now downwardly mobile. Over the last two decades, noncollege whites have suffered a decline in wages and property. So, they’re worse off than before. But they’ve also become worse off than both whites with BAs, and Blacks with or without BAs. So, they feel headed downward.
One thing makes bad job news worse — a strict culture of individual responsibility — or what I call a pride paradox. Many in eastern Kentucky are living in economic free fall. But at the same time, they hold to an individualism-based culture of pride. If they succeed, they can say, “I worked hard and can and feel proud. But if I fail, I didn’t work hard enough, or in the right way, and I deserve shame.” They are sitting ducks for undeserved shame.
Trump has brilliantly prospected for white, blue-collar shame, found it, converted shame to blame and set it on fire.
What does it mean to be working class? How is the white working class different from the Black and/or brown working class? That is important because Black and brown working-class people, like Black and brown folks more generally, reject Trumpism even though they too are experiencing economic precarity and downward mobility — if not more than their white peers. How do you explain that divergence?
There are a number of definitions of “working class.” The one I use here is a person who does not have a bachelor’s degree and works with his or her hands. Being “working class” in this era also means an experience of diminishing social capital and access to higher jobs and upper mobility. There is a great deal of denial about what working class people are experiencing in this country.
The Democratic Party has dropped its earlier civil-rights-based, union-based, cross-racial, cross-ethnic narrative. It’s not on the airwaves. It’s not even much in the talk on college campuses. That’s what’s missing — a track to an alternative politic focused across ethnicity and race on issues of social class. There is more to say about race, but the discussion should begin with poverty and include everyone who suffers from it.
In “Stolen Pride,” I describe former vibrant mining camps where Black and white pro-union workers punched into and out of work together. In the 1940s Harlan County had over 8,000 Black coal miners and their families, Kentucky being, for many, a stopover in the Great Migration to the industrial North. In 1917 US Steel recruited coal miners from 38 nations. Such recruitment strategies were likely designed to divide and rule and thereby dampen union activism, but such coal camps were more diverse than many middle-sized American towns today.
Unions used to act as the middleman between the white working class and the Democratic Party and I noticed a link between a dad’s – or even granddad’s — membership in the union and a grandchild’s lean toward the Democrats. But I met even more poor whites who were either pro-Trump — or turned off by him but felt disinvited from the Democratic Party by “identity politics” that they felt excluded them as “privileged” when they felt — and were — poor.
One man, who is white and high school educated, described himself as “trailer trash” and told me, “Compare me to a Black guy I knew in high school who came from a ghetto in Louisville. What’s the difference between him and me? I’m poor; he’s poor. I’ve got drugs all around me. He’s got drugs all around him. I’ve got cousins who are in jail. He’s got cousins who are in jail. I didn’t get beyond high school. He didn’t get beyond high school. What’s the difference between him and me, except the music — I’ve got twangy country string music; he’s got rap.”
He went on: “I feel naked. I am white. I am poor. I’ve always lived here. I am not middle class. But society says I am white so I must be privileged. Society also says if you are middle class, you must have worked hard. If you are Black and poor, racism must have stopped you. But I am white and I’m still poor. So, I must be less than nothing because it is somehow all my fault.” He dismissed Trump but saw little for himself in the Democratic Party. He was pointing to a missing bridge.
What role does pride play for the white working-class people in Pikeville, Kentucky, and other parts of red state America (and elsewhere) who support Donald Trump?
I think we live in both a material economy and a pride economy. In politics, sometimes the material economy matters more, and sometimes the pride economy matters more. Trump made all sorts of promises to Appalachians. He promised to bring back coal and other “great” jobs. But between 2016 and 2000, coal jobs continued to drop. Great jobs did not come in. His tax cuts didn’t help these poor whites. So, there was no rise in the material economy.
But guess what? Trump helped those same poor and working-class white people feel proud and seen again. He talked about national pride and Making America Great Again. His voters feel that language and take it personally. Yes, Trump is lifting them up psychologically and emotionally by putting other people down — in particular, nonwhites and others deemed by him and the right as not being “real Americans.” But that psychological and emotional wage in the pride economy is very real and very powerful — sometimes, even more than the wages paid in the material economy.
For the people you spoke to, what does it mean to be “a real man?”
In mining country, a coal miner was like a decorated GI. He faced danger and took risks. He felt he was contributing to society by keeping the lights on and providing energy to win wars. He worked hard and felt proud of his blackened face. He provided well for his wife and kids. Sons were also proud to follow their dad into the trade. But now all these liberal environmentalists were suddenly blaming guys like him for climate change and calling coal a dirty industry. As an unemployed man, or a low-wage worker or as a migrant out of Appalachia looking for a better job, he’d taken a hit in male pride.
How do the people you got to know and learn from in “Stolen Pride” rationalize and explain their support for Donald Trump given that he has not improved their economic and material lives?
To answer that question, we have to look at politics as felt, and sometimes the best way to convey feeling is through a deep story. So, if you’re a Trump voter, here’s your deep story: You’re waiting in a long line leading up to the American Dream. The line is not moving. You’re not looking at the long line of people behind you, instead you are just looking ahead, and you see you’re not moving. Then you see people you perceive as “line cutters”: women, Black and brown people, immigrants, refugees, and well-paid public servants. You notice a bad bully in line who is helping these undeserving line-cutters. But — hey — there is the good bully, who is going to help people like you. Yes, he has flaws, but he is still your bully: Donald Trump.
People on the left are aghast and decry the bully and yell about how he or she is a bad person. The Trump voters and other people on the right set all that aside because Trump is a charismatic leader defending them, their “good bully.” That’s how one of many explained things to me, and others agreed with him.
The mainstream news media and political class, even after eight years, continue to fall on the fainting couch when Trump does or says bad things. They are waiting for a breaking point where Trump does something so horrific that his MAGA people and other supporters will abandon him. Guess what? It will not happen.
“Trump is standing up for people like us.” Trump presents himself as a fighter for his MAGA people and the “lost” and “forgotten” white Americans. That is why they love him. Some I spoke with feel like the Democrats have — in the realms of opportunity and recognition — shut white men out. However much they dislike Trump, they see him as their best option. As for Trump’s damage to democracy, it’s not on their radar.
What was Pikeville, Kentucky like during the time you were there? In many ways, it was a microcosm of the Age of Trump.
When I first arrived in Pikeville, I gradually realized I was looking at a perfect storm of events. Coal jobs were leaving, and a drug crisis was coming in. “Deaths of despair” — which Anne Case and Angus Deaton write about in their book by that name — are a fact of life here.
Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
In 2017, white supremacists were going to march through the town, a trial run for the deadly march that was to follow months later in Charlottesville. I talked to many people during that time for the book — city leaders, the potential victims of that Nazi march such as a Black civil servant who had lived in Pike County a lot longer than most people, and a Holocaust survivor who was a lawyer. I also talked to the Imam of a small mosque. And yes, I talked extensively to one of the organizers of that hate march too. I interviewed regular people on both sides of the political divide to try to get a feeling for the pulse of the community. I have to say that of all the people I talked to, the most insightful were the recovering addicts who had kind of been out of the culture for a while and were not trying to come back to normal society. I talked to people in Pike County for seven years and one of the people I talked to fit into a neat box. In both 2016 and 2020, 80% voted for Trump, but that left 20% who were horrified at Trump, or felt ignored by the Democrats, and many used to vote Democratic.
What you are detailing is a story of why so-called white pride and other white victimology and white identity politics have become so powerful in the Age of Trump and the global democracy crisis.
Donald Trump appeals to “white pride” by telling his followers that the Democrats look down on people like you. Trump also plays on white grievance politics by telling his followers that “I am lifting you up. You white men, I’m the only one looking out for you. The Democrats have been taken over by women and minorities. They don’t care about you. I do.”
Trump accuses the Democrats of identity politics by favoring women and minorities, but his mantra of “make America great again” boils down to identity politics for white men. I talked to guys who said, “neither party focuses on social class or poverty. How did that get squeezed out of the conversation?” Reverend William Barber — a Black minister writing about white poverty –- has been heroically trying to address this exclusion –- but I don’t think we’re hearing it enough in Harris’ speeches.
How are you making sense of JD Vance and his “Hillbilly Elegy” narrative?
One Trump voter told me, “Vance is a drag on our ticket.” Others accepted Vance but don’t like him, mainly because his book criticizes hillbillies for their “bad choices” and flawed culture and celebrates his own desperate escape out of it.
Ironically, Vance’s speeches invite America’s women to take a path that would trap them in the very same circumstances that led his own mother — pregnant at 13 to become the trapped, depressed, addicted single mother she became — all of which shaped the traumatic boyhood Vance hated and fled. But speaking now as the vice presidential candidate on the Trump ticket, Vance advises America’s women to have babies — to avoid the stigma of being “childless cat ladies.” Otherwise, he says they won’t grow up to care about America’s future.
He also tells women to have their babies young — don’t wait until you need in vitro fertilization. Then if she has an unwanted pregnancy, don’t look to him or the Republican Party for any help. Should she become depressed and turn to drugs, again, Vance would seem to be saying, “more bad choices.” He says nothing about public dollars for drug recovery, job retraining, or other social services. So, while celebrating his own great escape from his mother’s trauma, it seems Vance’s views and policies, if enacted, would return all the rest of the nation’s women to the same bleak “choices” faced by his 13-year-old mom.
Read more
about this topic