A Post-Election Reflection on Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right

Yves here. KLG discusses how sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s latest book on the deep shame of working class people who have lost productive and decent-paying jobs explains why many voters turned to Trump, as opposed to Democrats determined to shame them even more.

KLG’s overview:

The discombobulation, not to mention continuing collective nervous breakdown, caused by the second coming of Donald Trump is the result of fundamental misunderstanding of the very reason for Trump’s recapitulation of the Presidential career of Grover Cleveland. The arguments seem interminable but our differences are explainable.

Arlie Russell Hochschild continues her explanation in Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, which extends the analysis in her previous Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.

To use a distinction not often appreciated, the demonization of Donald Trump by an ersatz American Left mistakes the agent of the disordered state of American politics for the cause of that disorder. Arlie Russell Hochschild first visited St. Charles, Louisiana in an effort to understand our predicament. Now she has visited Pikeville, Kentucky and produced a narrative that explains much, to those who will listen and take heed of the message. Sometimes I do wish we did not live in such interesting times but that is not a choice.

By KLG, who has held research and academic positions in three US medical schools since 1995 and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean. He has performed and directed research on protein structure, function, and evolution; cell adhesion and motility; the mechanism of viral fusion proteins; and assembly of the vertebrate heart. He has served on national review panels of both public and private funding agencies, and his research and that of his students has been funded by the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health.

The recent election is cause for thought, across the board.  I come from a lineage of the working class that includes many men and women Hillary Clinton would place firmly in her basket of deplorables.  As a reminder, from Timemagazine, dated 10 September 2016:

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic (sic)—you name it.  “And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

She said the other half of Trump’s supporters “feel that the government has let them down” and are “desperate for change.”

“Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well,” she said.

I have never had too much trouble understanding the political economy of why my people are in this basket and why they have come to their sometimes-shared beliefs and attitudes about our politics and our economy.  This has been a work in progress since long before I had ever heard of Bill and Hillary Clinton.  However, my success has been nil at explaining to other members-in-good-standing of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) why these faulty Americans just will not get with the program.

The sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild (ARH) has written two books that explicitly address this conundrum.  The first is Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016).  To tell this story very well, ARH lived within the community surrounding Lake Charles, Louisiana, not too far to the west of the Cajun Heartland of my father’s family where I have many cousins working in many trades.  A one-sentence summary might be: “These people of Southern Louisiana have worked long and hard, but they are still losing ground by the day.  They are unhappy about this.”  But strangely they seem to be unconcerned that the petrochemical industry has turned what was in living memory a wildlife paradise on land, in the air, and in the water into a sacrifice zone.  I recommended this book at the beginning of President Trump’s first term in hopes that some glimmer of understanding might dawn on my friends.  I don’t think it worked then, and I doubt it will work now with the second book.  But another attempt is worth the effort.

Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right (2024) has just been published.  I intentionally finished reading it on Election Night rather than paying close attention to the results until Wednesday morning.  In yet another outstanding work on the human fundamentals of our political economy, ARH made herself part of the community of Pikeville, Kentucky.  There she covers all the deplorables, those who are viewed through the Clinton lens as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic” plus those who “feel that the government has let them down and are desperate for change.”  As post-election commentary has shown over the past two weeks, Senator/Secretary Clinton’s “understanding and empathy” from the PMC and their political leaders has been slow in coming.  Mostly because it is unlikely to ever come.  I digress but this material is easy to find.

Pikeville is the county seat of Pike County in the far eastern corner of the Fifth Congressional District of Kentucky.  KY-5 (interactive map including all of eastern Kentucky that along with adjacent areas of West Virginia is Appalachian coal country) has been represented in Congress by Hal Rogers since 1981. At age 86, Representative Rogers is the dean of the House of Representatives, and the Daniel Boone Parkway is now named for him.  KY-5 ranks 435^th of 435 districts, dead last, in the nation in “Well-Being Index.”  It is also a beautiful and thoroughly misunderstood part of the United States.

KY-5 and Pikeville have suffered the perfect storm of globalization over the past forty years of neoliberalization.  Because of offshoring, automation of coal mining in deep mines plus the mortal sin that is mountaintop removal, and the decline in union coal jobs, the people of KY-5 are poorer and sicker than in any other Congressional District in the United States.  Over the past 20+ years the opioid epidemic has taken a further grim toll on KY-5.  Thus, the people of KY-5 do generally believe “the government has let them down and are desperate for change.”  As well they should be, and they are not alone.  In a poll taken 1964, 77% of the American people trusted the federal government to do the right thing.  In 2023 that number had declined to 16% which is no surprise to anyone except, apparently, national Democrats.

The key to Stolen Pride  is stated early and explicitly:

Just as Americans live in a material economy, we also live in an equally important pride economy.  For while pride and shame feel personal, the roots of these feelings lie in larger social circumstances…I discovered many bases of pride – regional pride, work ethic pride, bad boy pride, recovery pride.  But what happens when a community’s primary source of pride – well-paid jobs – leaves, or when old skills and folkways become useless and devalued.  What happens – in the absence of real solutions to real solutions – feelings of loss and shame become the “ore” for which politicians prospect? (italics in original)

The opening of Stolen Pride  describes the plan of a group of white supremacists to march through Pikeville and the reaction of the community to this.  The rationale of the white supremacists went something like this: These people are our people, and they will receive us with open arms as their brothers (sisters were apparently rare in this particular group).  It didn’t turn out that way; more on that later.

But what about pride?  Pride is the first of the Seven Deadly Sins and those carrying rocks on their backs in Dante’s Purgatory (The Singleton translation is back in print in a fine edition!) understand their predicament.  But the root of proud from the Late Latin (OED, XII, p. 705) means “to be useful, to be of value.”  With the loss of well-paying coal mining jobs in the KY-5 economy, “structural shame,” which is beyond the control of the individual, has led directly to “personal shame.” [1]  As ARH notes, the invisible hand of Adam Smith “has been the hardest on the populations who believe in that hand,” i.e., the working people of KY-5 and the rest of the nation who view their success or failure in personal terms, and “easier (for now) on populations (the PMC) that call (insincerely) for activist welfare policies as part of the mix” of an effective politics.

Structural shame leads to “personal shame.”  The loss of a good job (which one “never gets over” in the words of one Pikeville resident) leads almost always downhill, as the next job cannot support the worker’s family, who then leaves for work elsewhere as a last resort.  The worker most often returns as a failure and may begin using drugs.  This exacerbates the sense of personal shame.  S/he is then called a deadbeat because is not supporting his or her family. [2]  And so it goes. But not always.

This sequence is described in Chapter 6, “Bootstrap Pride.”  After hitting bottom Alex Hughes saw an ad from a company called InterApt in Louisville, Kentucky.  He was picked for the program and “learned to code” (This can be a solution!) in a public-private partnership, one of the few that actually worked, with the Appalachian Regional Commission.  The ARC was established in 1965 before the Johnson Administration and the United States became hopelessly mired in Vietnam.  The ARC has continued to do good work, even as the people of Appalachia wished this were not necessary.  As Alex puts it:

The company pay would be enough to cover all of my bills, and I’d learn a needed skill, and I left for Louisville…It was a whole new experience being paid to learn.  My fellow students became close friends.  We helped each other and got very good; a lot of my fear and pessimism dropped away.  Honestly, it transformed me.

As it should have.  As summarized by ARH, “Now well paid, happily remarried, a baby newly arrived, new offers coming his way, Alex didn’t have to move shame in or out; he felt proud.”  As he should have.  He had pride in who he was, someone useful to himself, his family, and his community.  Yes, when we as a community, large or small, take care of one another, life works.  Still, the American Dream (James Truslow Adams, 1931) works only when nothing goes wrong for a member of the working class.

This part of Alex’s account is particularly important: “It was a whole new experience being paid to learn.”  Alex was astonished by the entire turn of events, during which he was essentially a well-paid apprentice.  But how many members of the PMC went to college with family money followed by professional school funded by the same or graduate school on scholarship or with a graduate fellowship?  Or had that critical unpaid internship because their family could afford it?  My scientific wild-ass guess based on a long career in academic science is 95%, minimum.

By getting the help he needed Alex Hughes transformed his life and that of his family.  But there is another part of the story, also not understood by the typical denizen of the PMC.  According to ARH:

800 applicants applied to this program

50 were accepted (6.2 %)

35 graduated (4.4%).

What happened to the 94% of applicants who were not accepted to the program?  Most of them were undoubtedly qualified, but one company cannot be expected to carry the load of retraining for good jobs that are not enough to make a dent in the neoliberal deindustrialization visited upon working people.  At the same attrition rate, which with many of those dropouts were undoubtedly due to circumstances beyond the control of the apprentice, this program could have provided the livelihood for several hundred applicants if the market could bear them.  In comparison, the acceptance rate at Harvard in 2024 for the Class of 2028 was 3.6%.  InterApt did better than that, and the good they did was transformative.  But we as a polity can and must do much better.  “Learn to code” worked for a few, but we cannot retrain our way out of the Slough of Neoliberalism.

Stolen Pride  began with the white supremacists’ application for a permit to march on Pikeville.  As David Maynard, who grew up in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, put it as he was driving down the road where he lived as a child in an extended family, where “life expectancy drops…twenty or thirty years” as you proceed up the hollow:

You know that white nationalist guy…he’s coming to Eastern Kentucky because he thinks we are poor, dumb white hillbillies who don’t know any better than to follow him…I am poor and I am dumb and I am white…So, he’s coming for who he thinks I am…(but)…I have my own opinions.” (italics  in original).

And these include strong, articulate views of the “similarities of the lives of poor Blacks and poor whites (“‘hood and holler” as he put it; this was also the theme of Charles Booker’s unsuccessful campaign against US Senator Rand Paul in 2022) – a similarity that…was being ignored by both parties.” Comparison of the KY-5, the whitest Congressional District in the country (94%) with NY-15 in the Bronx, 2% white and mostly Black and Hispanic is instructive:

The two districts differ in average age (KY-5 is older), number of people working or looking for work (fewer in KY-5), and number on disability (higher in KY-5).  But life chances in both can be iffy, and through no fault of the people who live there.  No one chooses when and where s/he is born.  The American Dream is valid “only if nothing goes wrong” for the working class.  And when living on such a thin margin, something is likely to go wrong, in both Eastern Kentucky and the South Bronx.  As an aside, one of the more affecting treatments of the similarities of both regions is Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America (2019) by Chris Arnade.  I am ambivalent about Arnade, but this book, in its text and photographs, presents the “back row” of America in naked detail.  Can a member of the PMC even imagine living on less than $40,000 a year for his or her family, around one hundred dollars a day in disposable income, before taxes?

The recurring message throughout Stolen Pride, for those willing to understand, is that people are just people and most of the time they will do the right thing.  The book began with a white supremacist thinking he would find fertile ground in KY-5.  He was wrong.  Yes, racists and bigots of every stripe are widely distributed.  But the white supremacist Matthew Heimbach found no purchase in Pikeville, Kentucky.  The people of Pikeville, many of them Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables,” proactively protected their Muslim community from anything Heimbach and his minions had in mind. These interlopers thought they would be welcomed.  They were mistaken.  They came and they went and then disappeared from Pikeville without a trace.  The people of Pikeville endure.  Heimbach ended up in straitened circumstances he brought upon himself.

And this brings us to the message I take from Stolen Pride: Loss Shame, and the Rise of the Right  –  There is No Politics but Class Politics, as shown so very clearly in this collection of essays by Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr.  Matthew Heimlich counted on what he thought was the operative identity politics of Eastern Kentucky.  He had reason to think this would work.  Our politicians of the Uniparty use identity politics to divide us.  As David Maynard said to ARH, “On the news you hear a lot of talk about race, but not a thing about poverty” when what residents of both “hood and holler” have most in common is the “pain of poverty.”  This is where I believe the subtitle of Stolen  may miss the mark slightly.  The politics of the current Right is a large part of the book, as it should be.  But the working class has not so much moved right as it has moved away from the feckless politics embodied by the current iteration of a Democratic Party that resembles nothing a pre-Nixon Democrat would recognize as their political party.

Identity politics is nothing but the politics of distraction and misdirection that solves nothing while making practitioners attached to both wings of the Uniparty feel good about themselves and sanguine about their political futures.  Whether they are in power or out, the difference in status between Majority Leader and Minority Leader lies primarily in the size of their respective offices and the number of staff they command.  On the other hand, identity politics is a dead end for the working class that will narrow to a point where it becomes impossible to turn around and perhaps too difficult to back out if we are not careful.

Yes, racism and sexism and xenophobia exist.  But they are the symptom rather than the cause of our very real predicament.  The percentage of white people who live in poverty is less than that of Black and brown people, while the absolute number of the former is larger.  An endless and largely fruitless argument about this is exactly what our politicians desire, now and long into the past, especially in the United States.

Stolen Pride  is an exemplar of the qualitative research coupled with superb narrative that we need desperately if we are to escape the bonds of neoliberalism.  When the stress caused by displacement and unemployment is relieved, our artificial differences become less significant.  When we finally have a functional social democracy in which everyone will be cared for, even the “deadbeats” among us, these differences will pale rapidly in comparison to our similarities. Think, for example, Alex Hughes and his coding, multiplied by millions.

And the thing is, when that happens the PMC will still maintain pride of place in its own hive mind and the rich will still be rich, while everyone, including the rich, will be much better off, as shown by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett here and here.

Win, win, win.  This really is not all that difficult or complicated, even if it impossible now.  We have work to do.

 

Notes

[1] Coal eventually provided high-paying jobs in Appalachian coal country, and for a long while, thanks to John Lewis and the United Mine Workers of America.  This history is long and sad.  If you can find it, Harlan County USA (1976) directed by Barbara Kopple, is one of the best documentary films ever made.  See also Matewan, the feature film directed by John Sayles.  Coal was essential to industrial development.  The ultimate consequences of what Andreas Malm has called Fossil Capital have been known for a very long time.  But what coal has mostly done on the ground in Appalachia is siphon “wealth” out of the mountains.  This was described in heartbreaking detail by the late Harry Caudill in Night Comes to the Cumberlands. There were other roads not taken.  As Wendell Berry noted in an early essay, people in the mountains had the tools and knowledge to sustainably produce furniture using the practically inexhaustible hardwoods of Appalachia.  Alas, to my knowledge only one native furniture manufacturer hangs on, stubbornly: Vaughn-Bassett of Galax, Virginia; their story is told here.

But deep mining of coal is not necessarily the local environmental catastrophe that is mountaintop removal, a particularly evil version of open-pit mining.  As ARH notes, most of her interlocutors are ashamed that hundreds of their mountains have been flattened so that coal can be scooped up after the so-called overburden (trees and soil of one of the most productive and diverse terrestrial ecosystems in the world) pushed into the valley (hollow, pronounced “holler”) thereby fouling the land and the water in place and downstream.  Coal operators feel differently to this day and are likely to remain unrepentant until the coal is gone (though most of it already comes from Montana) or a runaway climate makes that irrelevant.  The coal-black Friends of Coal license plate is very popular in Kentucky. However, the working people of Appalachia often rightfully feel like the productive and diverse “overburden” that is pushed off the mountains to get at the coal underneath.

[2] Both men and women are protagonists throughout Stolen Pride.  The successes often naturally involve the mutual support and understanding of partners and their families.  Other outcomes, not so much.