Stolen Pride
Stolen Pride by Arlie Russell Hochschild
Reviewed by Pia Eisenhardt 🙏
“Hochschild is the grande dame of American sociology, and after Trump’s election in 2016, she trained her sights on his voters, writing one of the most nuanced, empathetic books on the subject, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, based on in-depth interviews with Trump voters in rural Louisiana. The metaphor used for the simmering populist anger is that of people who feel that they’ve been left behind, patiently waiting in line for their turn, only for other people (meaning, minorities) to jump the queue.
Last year saw the publication of Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right. Trump margins are consistently largest in rural areas, and Stolen Pride applies the same feature journalism style on Appalachian Kentucky, by any measure one of US’ poorest regions (a lot about the US makes more sense if you think of it as the world’s richest country with a third world country - measured by any UN development indices - embedded within it).
Economists tend to focus on the monetary economy, but there’s an overlooked and equally important ledger, namely that of pride (as in “dignity”) and humiliation. In a culture where individual success is lauded, the flip side is that lack of success is internalized as shame, and that dynamic is most at display in economically deprived rural areas. Or put another way, emotional narratives may turn out to be a stronger driver of voter sentiment than macro economics, and while not all Trump voters believe that the 2016 election was stolen in a literal sense, the more symbolic theft feels very real: something that was theirs by right was snatched away by the very same people who deny them their dignity, and in this framework, the appeal of Trump is that he holds out the promise of pride restored, or at least an emotionally satisfying retribution.
The great strength of Hochschild’s work is her willingness to just listen, and by listening to the fears, hopes and dreams of Trump’s rural voters, she renders them human rather than caricature, no mean feat in today’s hyper polarized atmosphere.”