On an unseasonably hot day in April 2017, a caravan of vehicles full of white supremacists rolled into Pikeville, Ky. The neo-Nazis, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and other self-described racists were emboldened by the election of Donald Trump and dressed to the hilt with jackboots, shields, sunglasses and firearms. They had come to recruit from America’s whitest congressional district, which is also one of its poorest and most conservative.
In “Stolen Pride,” the Berkeley professor emerita Arlie Russell Hochschild uses reactions to the white supremacist march as a window into the political and sociological shifts that have transformed the country. As she writes, “It occurred to me that a close look at this vulnerable patch of red America — Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District — might offer clues to red America as a whole, and indeed to the winds of white nationalism blowing around the world.”
“Stolen Pride” is a sequel to Hochschild’s lauded “Strangers in Their Own Land,” which focused on working-class Louisiana supporters of the Tea Party during the Obama administration. That earlier book arrived in the months before Trump’s 2016 presidential win and was held up as key to understanding the constituency that had sent him to the White House. In her new book, Hochschild delves into Appalachia, the American region featured by Trump’s vice-presidential pick JD Vance in his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
This means that “Stolen Pride” will almost certainly be used by commentators to decode the sentiments of conservatives this election too. (Indeed, Hochschild herself launched this process with a recent essay in The Wall Street Journal.) What differentiates “Stolen Pride” from the glut of other commentary on Trump voters is Hochschild’s sustained attention to the economic and cultural factors influencing their emotions — especially their pride and shame. As Hochschild sees it, the residents of Pikeville are trapped in a “pride paradox.”
“On one hand, rural KY-5 Republicans felt fierce pride in hard work and personal responsibility,” she writes. “On the other hand, their beleaguered economy” — hollowed out by the decline of the coal industry, globalization and other economic shifts that favor urban Democratic America — “greatly lowered their chance of success and vulnerability to shame.” Trump, Hochschild theorizes, offered these voters a way out by telling them to be proud of themselves and blame others — liberals, immigrants, the federal government — for their failures.
In “Stolen Pride,” Hochschild updates the core of her previous book, what she calls her subjects’ “deep story” — the emotional narrative that they use to explain their lives. In this story, Hochschild explains, white, blue-collar conservatives feel that they had been waiting in line for the American dream only to have Democratic constituencies — educated women and minorities, for example — cut ahead of them. In “Stolen Pride,” Hochschild elaborates that those voters saw Barack Obama as a bully helping the line-cutters advance. Trump then emerged as the “good bully” who was strong enough to fight back.
Hochschild argues that Trump swindled the people of Pikeville by tapping into their frustrations as Democratic urban areas became more prosperous. Their losses created “a sense of plausibility” that things — Hochschild lists Appalachian land, good jobs, community and, finally, their pride — had been taken from them. The president’s rhetoric, she writes, tilted their “emotional needle from ‘loss’ to ‘stolen,’” and wove their indignation “into a master narrative.”
At its best, “Stolen Pride” has an authority earned through seven years of research. Hochschild knows the class difference between living on a ridgeline and at the bottom of a holler. She cites the lyrics of the subgenre hillbilly rap, academic studies, extensive political polling data and local historical plaques. In profiling subjects from Pikeville’s many social strata — from a white nationalist to a recovering opioid addict to the local imam — Hochschild achieves a kaleidoscopic effect, in which the viewpoints of residents do merge, as she intended, to effectively represent the whole.
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. Letting them work through their complicated circumstances and feelings in interviews that run for pages results in the opposite of sound bites and allows the people of Pikeville to come alive rather than flattening into political tropes.
Ironically, I have to reduce such long passages to a single quote to fit this review, but it’s worth highlighting the shading and nuance her interviews convey even briefly. “If you’re white and poor, people think, ‘What’s wrong with you that you’re stuck at the bottom?’” one financially struggling white man told Hochschild as he grappled with the “pride paradox.” “If I just look at my own life, I came from nothing and I got to nothing and I’m not a victim of racism because I’m white. So, to most Americans, I’m less than nothing. If it’s such a privilege to be born a white male, what could explain me except my own personal failure?”
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. She mentions how a pastor was radicalized by the QAnon conspiracy theory on the Telegram app, but such online worlds, which can become realer for their believers than the physical world, aren’t captured here with the same concrete specificity as what’s happening on the dusty back roads of small-town Kentucky. And her portrayals of the wounded masculine pride and white nationalism that she suggests drive some Trump voters can feel chilly, distanced by sociological and psychological analysis; in person, such emotions are palpably volcanic.
I finished “Stolen Pride” nagged by the sense that she wasn’t giving us the full picture — most of all, of her own place in it as a retired professor from the University of California, Berkeley embedding in Pikeville to explain its residents to themselves and the nation. It’s a position that I suspect triggered at least some stereotypes that conservatives have about liberals thinking they know better. And yet her ethnography is frictionless. There is none of the grinding of opposing viewpoints so common during this contentious political time. There is little sense of what they thought of her and her project.
Instead, Hochschild has produced a seamless election-season-ready explanation of conservatism that might be just a little too neat. What, I kept wondering, would her subjects say was her “deep story”? And would including that viewpoint in her book have destabilized its carefully engineered explanations? If America is increasingly divided into two countries, one liberal and one conservative, what would it have meant to compare their two deep stories in one narrative rather than have one side tell the other how it is?
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