The author of Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right comes to DC on Mon., Sept. 9th, at 7 p.m.!
For all the efforts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we've ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. In Stolen Pride, Arlie Russell Hochschild argues that Donald Trump has turned lost pride into stolen pride and shame into blame, and that the result of his rhetorical alchemy has been to weaponize that shame and introduce a potent blend of anger and often violent rhetoric, undermining democracy and highlighting revenge.
Hochschild's research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation, where its residents faced the perfect storm. The city was reeling: Coal jobs had left, crushing poverty arrived, and a deadly drug crisis struck the region more powerfully than anywhere else in the nation. Although Pikeville had been in the political center 30 years ago, by 2016, 80 percent of the district's population voted for Trump. Hochschild's brilliant exploration of how the town responded in 2017, when a white nationalist march came to town — a rehearsal for the deadly Unite the Right march that would take place in Charlottesville, Virginia, just four months later — takes us deep inside a community that defies stereotypes.
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