In this episode of “The Opinions,” the editorial board director David Leonhardt talks to Arlie Russell Hochschild about why voters in Appalachia continue to support the president, despite the broken promises of Trump’s first term and looming cuts to social programs they depend on.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
David Leonhardt: I’m David Leonhardt, the director of the New York Times editorial board. Every week I’m having conversations to help shape the board’s opinions.
This week I’m talking with Arlie Russell Hochschild. She’s an eminent sociologist who a decade ago coined the term, “the great paradox.” It describes the fact that hatred of government often seems to be most intense among people who most rely on government. And that working-class voters are increasingly turning against policies and politicians that seem to benefit those voters.
Donald Trump’s second term has made the great paradox all the more relevant. He’s shutting down government agencies and his bill that he’s trying to pass through Congress would cut taxes for the rich while taking away health insurance from the middle class and poor. And yet millions of Donald Trump supporters continue to stand strongly by him.
I asked Arlie to come on our show and talk about all this. She recently wrote an essay for Times Opinion about her reporting in Eastern Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District and it’s a place where she spent years reporting for her book, “Stolen Pride.” Arlie Hochschild, thanks for joining us.
Arlie Hochschild: Thank you very much, David Leonhardt. Delighted to be here.
Leonhardt: Let’s start by setting a scene. I know you’re based in Berkeley, Calif., which is a very different place from Eastern Kentucky. Can you just talk to us about what Eastern Kentucky and towns like Pikeville, Ky., are like?
Hochschild: It’s beautiful. There are mountains around and what you can’t see is that there’s a lot of coal in them. This is the whitest and third-poorest congressional district in the nation. It’s got a history that you see as you’re driving around — closed mines and coal machinery, kind of like corpses.
Coal was a source of great pride for people. We kept the lights on. We won World War I and World War II. And now it’s gone, so you see a loss, you see a gone-ness. You see places where stores used to be. You see schools that are now closed. And when you get to talk to people, the first thing they’ll talk about is the past and how it was.
These days, the largest employer is not a coal mine, it’s the Pikeville Medical Center. A lot of the top doctors are actually recruited from India, Pakistan, other places, and the nurses are trained local women, usually women. So it gives you a feeling of something lost. And when you talk to people, that’s what you hear.
Leonhardt: As I was reading your essay, I started thinking about this chart that I’ve come to think of as the most important chart in American life today. It’s a chart that shows life expectancy for both people who have a four-year college degree and people who don’t have a four-year college degree. Life expectancy for people who don’t have a four-year college degree has essentially been stagnant for decades.
As I hear you talking about loss and the devastation in these communities, I thought of that chart because I do think it’s really important to think about just how deep and profound and real the problems in places like Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional district are. It seems to me it’s rational for people there to feel quite angry.
Hochschild: I think that is a fascinating statement and to pause on how it is we respond to loss. A lot of the lives lost are due to the drug crisis that came in when coal went out. It’s taken the lives of the young. These are part of the so-called “deaths of despair.” Look at the obit page of the Appalachian News-Express and you’ll see a hearty picture of a young man in his 20s or 30s, dead. But it doesn’t say the cause of death because there’s shame attached to dying that way.
People feel shame to have a son who killed himself. And you have to back up: Why did he kill himself? Well, he was given a choice: Either take a low-paid service job — which is available in Pike County, but they call them kind of girlie jobs, you can’t really support a family on that — and feel ashamed of that, or they take Route 23 off to Cincinnati and they can’t find a good factory job there and come back ashamed.
So there’s loss. But what to do with loss? It involves kind of a mourning and shame. And that created a setup for Donald Trump to direct feelings of loss and shame into anger. When he came to Kentucky’s Fifth, he came with policies and he came with a story. As for the policies, his first term brought them nothing. But he also brought a story, and that was a story about how to shape feelings into rage.
I think he did this through a four-moment, anti-shaming ritual. The Democratic half of America reads one half of the ritual and I think the Republican half of America reads the second part of the ritual.
Moment 1, in that ritual: Donald Trump says something transgressive, like, Haitian immigrants are eating your pet cats and dogs. Moment 2: the punditry shames him. Moment 3: Donald Trump becomes the victim of the shamers. ‘Oh, look how they’re looking down at me. They’re picking at me. They’re criticizing me. Don’t you, my followers, know how terrible that feels? Don’t they look down on you too? Actually they want to do to you what they’re doing to me, but I’m taking your shame on my shoulders.’ So he’s the victim. He’s the Christ-like figure of taking your shame away, carrying it himself. And moment 4: very un-Christlike, he is the retribution and the revenge at the shamers.
I feel like the Democratic half of America has been listening to moment 1, the transgressive statement, and 2, the shaming, and thinks the story ends there. But the Republican half of America hears the taking of the shame and the retribution. So I think the end point is anger, David, but it’s a journey we need to trace that gets it there. I don’t think they start with that.
Leonhardt: I want to play tape of a conversation that you had with a man named Roger Ford, who’s a resident of Eastern Kentucky. He’s in his late 50s and he leads an energy startup. You asked him about a poll in which most Americans described Trump’s first three months in office, this second time around, as chaotic. Here’s what Roger had to say about that.
Audio clip of Roger Ford: It looks like chaos. He’s coming at you from six directions all at once. But it is not chaos. It is very methodical. It’s all about making the deal. I draw correlations with what he’s doing right now, Arlie, with what was proposed at the end of World War II between Churchill and Roosevelt.
Leonhardt: I absolutely take the point that he’s channeling the anger and the shame, as you say, of millions of Americans and that they have real reason to feel that anger and shame.
What’s less clear to me is why it has worked for so long. We’re talking now about a decade that Trump has had a chance to make a difference, to improve their lives and he has largely failed to do so. Yet Roger, and many people like Roger, stand by President Trump. Why is it that the last decade of experience has not loosened their loyalty and caused more of them to look at him as now part of the problem?
Hochschild: That’s the key question here and to answer it, I think we need to learn to be bilingual, in the sense of reading one language is rationality and the other is emotion. We need to read what’s happening emotionally, because the part of America that have been the losers of globalization and automation has looked to both the Democrats and the Republicans for answers to their local problems and have not found answers. So they have, in desperation, turned to a charismatic leader.
We keep looking for real policies. That’s not the thing. Trump offers a veneer of policies and a story, and we’ve got to tune in to the effect of that story on people who feel like the world’s melting and sinking. And the question is how people on the left can emotionally re-gear and re-energize themselves.
Leonhardt: Yeah, I think you and I are both really trying to understand this anger in a searching, empathetic way. I mean, it is the core of your work and your work has helped me think about these things. I assume you would also agree with me that there is a fundamental disconnect from reality in a bunch of the things that we’re hearing from these Trump supporters.
Roger Ford said that Trump is acting like Churchill and Roosevelt did after World War II. I don’t think that’s true, and yet, when I try to extend my empathy, I think about the huge number of Democrats over the last few years who also looked at something that was obviously not true, namely that Joe Biden could still be president of the United States and was not too old and was not aging in obvious ways. They persuaded themselves of a story that clearly wasn’t true and we now know really wasn’t true.
I wonder if you’ve ever thought about some of the parallels between the false stories that Democrats tell themselves and the false stories that people in Eastern Kentucky tell themselves.
Hochschild: Yes, I think you’ve articulated it very well. And actually, I think the stories on the right are easier to ridicule, but the stories on the left are more serious and seriously wrong.
There isn’t a kind of a mobilization on the left center that I think we need and part of the false stories that the left is telling itself is, ‘Oh, I don’t need to think about this. This will go away. Four years later, we’ll have our turn and we’ll go back to normal.’
And increasingly, I think that’s not the case. There are lots of kinds of denial. I’ve gotten really interested in denial. You know, this isn’t happening yet, or thinking it’s not so bad and it will end. The left is very inward turning. It’s talking to itself. It’s more bubble-ized and in that way too, it’s not facing the music.
Leonhardt: I think an example of that is how the left has talked about race in the context of Trump. Initially, there was a view that Trump’s appeal was overwhelmingly about racism, and I want to be clear, Trump traffics in racism. But what we’ve seen over the last decade is real increases in support for Trump and the Republican Party among Latino voters, among Asian voters and among Black voters. What do you think that is about and how have you thought about the rightward shift of Americans of color during the decade of Donald Trump?
Hochschild: Yeah, I think they are identifying with a strength, that there’s a pragmatic, let me go with the winning guy thinking. That’s part of it. I also think that at the heart of that are a lot of men who feel in crisis. I think part of that is men of color feeling like, ‘Gosh, we’re downwardly mobile too.’ And it could be — this is a scary thought, OK, so arm yourself for scary thought —
Leonhardt: OK.
Hochschild: — that the rise of A.I. could do to the middle class — a lot of men in it — what the loss of coal did to the blue collar class. So we have to think about resilience in the face of loss and the appeal of the strongman and what lies behind it. We have to remember that America isn’t the only place this is happening in.
I think globalization really scrambled the status systems of the world’s big countries. White men, especially, are feeling lost. Their whiteness doesn’t cash in for much and their maleness and heterosexuality doesn’t either. So those are hard-to-talk-about losses that lead them to feel like, ‘Hey, I’m a loser in a winner’s game.’
Leonhardt: The last section of your Times essay really takes squarely this question of what should the Democratic Party do and what can it do to win more support. And honestly, it should be an important question even for many moderates and conservatives because, at this point, the Republican Party is increasingly authoritarian and so if you believe in democracy at this point, we have only one party that is clearly pro-democracy.
So I want to spend a few minutes talking with you about your thoughts on what Democrats are doing wrong and what they can do better. To do so, I want to play another recording for you. This one comes from a Democratic House member named Marcy Kaptur. She’s in Ohio — a state right over the border from Kentucky — and she just keeps winning re-election in a district that Donald Trump has won.
Audio clip of Marcy Kaptur ad: America has gotten off course. The far left ignoring millions illegally crossing the border and trying to defund the police. The far right, taking away women’s rights and protecting greedy corporations at every turn. I’m Marcy Kaptur and I’m fighting for what matters to us: Like stopping illegal immigration, bringing our jobs home, and growing new jobs right here.
Leonhardt: I think that’s a fascinating clip for two big reasons. First of all, she talks about growing jobs, not benefits, which connects to the dignity point you and I have already been talking about. But she also talks about some issues that are traditional weaknesses for the Democratic Party, particularly immigration.
You talked about denial. I think one form of denial among the Democratic Party is that if only they can change the subject to economics and keep all of their socially liberal positions, they can somehow persuade people to vote for them. And I don’t think that’s what you see when you look at Democrats who actually win places that Donald Trump does, like Elissa Slotkin, the Michigan senator whom we had on the show a couple weeks ago.
I’m curious, from what you’ve heard in Kentucky, do you agree with my view that the thorough social liberalism, elite liberalism of the Democratic Party is a major problem in places like Kentucky and Louisiana and even in places like Ohio and Michigan?
Hochschild: Yes, I agree with you and what I would add is that there is surprising room for crossover. Let me tell you what I mean. The very man that you gave a clip of, Roger Ford, he told me, “You know what, we really need a new party, a kind of a more moderate party.” What he is especially interested in is renewable energy. Here we are in the center of coal country and he’s a guy who’s for renewable energy. Now he gives no credit to Joe Biden for giving 75 percent of billions of dollars of government funds to red states to build battery factories and solar panels, but that’s an issue he cares about. A lot of other people there, too, think, “Hey, that’s a chance for us.” So it’s crossover territory.
The most popular guy in Pikeville, Ky., predicts the weather and he organizes rescue for people who’ve been flooded out of their homes. That’s an opportunity for the left to say: “Hey, that is a real issue. Good for you. You’re doing a good, proud thing right there. The Democratic Party can help you. It can support you.”
Leonhardt: And it’s an example of a communal solution, which traditionally is the real centerpiece of political left thought, which is that if we come together, we can do things that we can’t do individually.
Hochschild: That’s right.
Leonhardt: The Marcy Kaptur ad that we played was very heavily focused on immigration. You and I are recording this on Thursday, June 12, during a week with protests in Los Angeles and the Trump administration’s extreme response to them.
You just mentioned that Roger Ford, one of the people you interviewed, has talked about this idea of a party that represents the broad middle. I’m curious if you imagine a kind of sensible middle policy that is less open than Joe Biden’s border policy and less nasty than Donald Trump’s policy. What might that look like?
Hochschild: It would use the word “control.” We control immigration. Now, we may, in our control, decide that it’s a good deal to have certain immigrants allowed in and to make a deal that people who were born here would be treated differently than those who weren’t. It would be our own kind of “art of the deal” to work out compromises. You would get most Americans agreeing with that, I think. But the word would be control.
Leonhardt: And as you point out, it’s not just both sides; There are a broad group of Americans who on many issues, I think including immigration, actually have a set of views that often makes sense, which is the idea that we should control our immigration system, we should admit some people and not everyone.
Hochschild: Yes.
Leonhardt: Let’s close by my doing something a little unfair, which is asking you to predict the future. It seems to me that while it is obviously true that Donald Trump has retained extremely high levels of support from the people who voted for him, it’s also true that American politics changes and often changes more rapidly than we expect in the moment. We didn’t see Donald Trump coming. And I don’t think we are in a permanent era of Donald Trump. We may well have entered a profoundly new political era. But there’s going to be a new politics. I think at some point, more people really will see that Donald Trump has failed to deliver on his promises.
When you think about the time that you’ve spent in Kentucky, and in other places that are similar, do you have any sense of the ways in which American politics might be most likely to shift over the next decade, given just how profoundly it’s changed over the last decade?
Hochschild: You’re asking not about what we could do; you’re asking about what will happen. And my answer is sort of putting those two things together.
I think a lot of what will happen depends on what we do. In other words, I don’t think there is some iron law of history that is unfolding and this is the era of autocracy and nothing to be done. No. I think what we learn is that there are a lot of failed efforts to establish fascism, and it all depended on what people did and how effectively people of conscience mobilize themselves.
I agree with what you’re saying — we’re not going back to the status quo ante. But now as a period, I think it’s all hands on deck, to actually help shape our future by actively joining the conversation, running for office, reaching out to other groups.
So to answer your question, what would this mixed beast look like? If the left continues to shun and castigate, and separate itself from the white, blue-collar class then I think we could slide further in the direction of autocracy. Because whatever the policies, these voters are following the story and the emotional payoff of that anti-shaming ritual. So we have to stop the story, reverse the story: Nobody stole your pride, we’re restoring it together.
Leonhardt: Well, I’m struck as you described that much of your political advice is: Don’t shun. Treat people with respect and empathy. Listen to them, talk with them — it also doubles as pretty good advice for leading a rewarding life. If we stop thinking about politics as something totally separate and instead think about it as part of our national life in all kinds of ways, maybe that’s part of how we start to get out of this very grim and worrisome period.
Arlie, thank you so much for doing this.
Hochschild: Thank you very much, David.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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David Leonhardt is an editorial director for the Times Opinion section, overseeing the editing and writing of editorials. @DLeonhardt • Facebook
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