Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right
Arlie Russell Hochschild
New Press, $30.99 (cloth)
White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy
Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Liveright, $22.99 (cloth)
White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy
Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman
Random House, $32 (cloth)
Sixty years ago, Life photographer John Dominis traveled to eastern Kentucky, where he captured shocking and raw photographs of deprivation—the target of President Lyndon Johnson’s recently announced “unconditional war on poverty.” Published in a feature photo-essay, the images humanized those who stood to gain the most from new federal aid programs.
The magazine minced no words describing the “dismal” quality of life in Kentucky. Some images show small cabins and homesteads dotting the landscape, ruined by the coal industry, like settlements on a hostile planet. Perhaps most painfully memorable are the more intimate images, taken in bedrooms and sitting rooms, featuring the faces of sick babies and young mothers. Here is a world, the viewer might think, totally inhospitable to life.
Many of the subjects Dominis captured—all of them white—were already on welfare or other available forms of assistance. But this aid proved insufficient when stacked against the economic collapse ravaging Appalachia as strip mining led to layoffs and further devastated the environment. The solution, the Johnson administration proposed, was job retraining, more education, and new infrastructure. Until welfare joined these more vital programs, Life argued, all Appalachians could hope to endure was “a life that protects them from starvation but deprives them of self-respect and hope.”
Four months later, Johnson traveled to the region himself, and this time an unemployed former coal miner and sawmill operator, Tom Fletcher, became the unwitting face of the campaign. In an iconic photograph published in Time, Johnson and Fletcher appear on the steps of Fletcher’s small cabin, their contrasting body language and attire a sign of the social distance between them.
The failure of the War on Poverty happened more quietly than its inauguration. In Appalachia, state governments heavily bureaucratized aid, creating disbursement problems and leaving funding vulnerable to siphoning off for other causes. State leaders, often close allies of industry, fomented unrest between “outsiders”—like the young people who served in the initially successful Appalachian Volunteers program—and the people they came to help. In the War on Poverty’s wake came successive generations of problem solvers less powerful than the federal government but no less self-assured that their expertise and efforts would set the world right. They also failed. Since the mid-1970s but especially during the Obama years, the Appalachian Regional Commission, created by Congress in 1965, has focused on “public-private partnership” grants and vocational retraining for jobs that don’t exist here and aren’t particularly well-paid where they do exist. Fletcher never escaped poverty, and neither have his descendants.
Appalachia didn’t take center stage in American politics again until the 2016 presidential race, this time anchored to the easy-to-sell but misinformed belief that the region was ground zero for the toxic politics taking root under the banner of Donald Trump. In the months following the publication of J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a media firestorm insisted that Appalachians—a flimsy proxy for the white working class at large—had declared war on the nation. This narrative had a grain of truth; some blue and purple parts of the region did go solidly red. But it seriously oversold the size and power of Appalachia’s electorate compared to other Trump strongholds in well-off cities and suburbs, like Staten Island.
Blissfully, the national media and pundit class declined to drink too deeply from this well during the 2020 race, but the narrative looks set to return with Trump’s selection of Vance as his running mate. Since being elected to the Senate from Ohio, Vance has fashioned himself a leader of a new right intelligentsia that is more socially regressive than its predecessors—and in many ways more powerful, thanks to its ties to ultra-wealthy men in tech like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. But if the recent Republican National Convention was any indication, Vance still believes in the power of Appalachia as a political totem. His speech leaned heavily on references to his now-infamous Mamaw and her hillbilly wisdom.
This spells good news for sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s new book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right. Best known for Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), a study of Tea Party members in long-red rural Louisiana, Hochschild now turns her attention to Trump supporters in blue-turned-red Pike County, Kentucky, which is part of the state’s 5th congressional district—the whitest and second poorest congressional district in the country—and not far from Breathitt County, where Vance has family roots. Hochschild wants to understand what has fueled the county’s rapid lurch to the right since 2008, despite its having gone for Democratic presidents in all but two elections stretching back to 1932.
Stolen Pride joins two other recent books on the politics of poor and rural white people: Reverend William Barber’s White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy, written with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman’s White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. Each aims to pull apart political messaging and its impact, noting where extremism has been embraced or avoided, and all three venture into the emotional dimension of politics—the way feelings like shame, resentment, dignity, and pride both shape and are shaped by the political landscape.
With Vance now set to reignite the myth of the prodigal son, it matters that we get this narrative right. As Barber most convincingly suggests, it requires recognizing the realities of the lives of poor white Americans, a full accounting of who is to blame, and a genuine path forward.
In recent years, economic precarity and political inertia on recovery plans have only increased in Appalachia. Parts of the region now face almost unsurvivable levels of poverty and its associated diseases of despair, including widespread opioid addiction. Hochschild travels to Pike County in 2018 to try to explain why people experiencing these forces and outcomes have forsaken Democrats and embraced Republicans.
Her answer is what she calls the “pride paradox,” the disjuncture between the political choices that dictate the presence or absence “of economic opportunity and one’s cultural belief about responsibility for accessing it.” In other words, the ideology of individualism—taking full credit for one’s successes, but also one’s failures—prompts people to see structural failures as their own, which in turn disinclines them from voting for policies that might rein in the savage capitalism decimating the region. Their resulting feelings of shame, Hochschild argues, make them vulnerable to political messaging that encourages them to view their pride as stolen by Democrats.
As a sociologist, Hochschild is best known for exploring the connections between emotions, values, and identity. She takes morality out of the equation, preferring to engage with subjects on their own terms before massaging their stories into a sociological conclusion. In Stolen Pride, she borrows the concept of a “deep story” from Strangers in Their Own Land: what a person feels to be true, a narrative that operates independently from facts. She sees the post-2020 rhetoric about a stolen election as one such deep story. Trump’s portrayal of himself as a victim—of the liberal media, of legal prosecutors, of nearly everyone—resonates with his supporters, building a connection with them as his brothers and sisters in victimhood.
In Kentucky, Hochschild also finds a version of a deep story she heard in Louisiana: crowds of white working-class people are patiently standing in line for the American Dream when suddenly minority groups push forward past them, waved ahead by Democrats. Enter a figure like Trump, who wins support for his willingness to target Democrats for their abuse of a rightful system. As one of Hochschild’s subjects from Pike County concedes, Trump “has obvious flaws, but you forgive them because he’s a good bully, strong enough to push around the bad bully,” meaning the theft-enablers. “He’s protecting you; he’s your bully.” The people Hochschild interviews often express resentment at being called racist “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton infamously said in 2016, and they bristle at the Democrats’ “war on coal.”
In calling this a deep story, Hochschild often suggests that ire for Democrats is irrational, an emotional narrative blind to the truth. Her subtext is that Appalachians’ vote against Democrats is a vote against their interests, the policies that would improve their lives. “Joe Biden spoke of the rich ‘paying their fair share’ and passed legislation to try to regulate monopolies, protect labor unions, and increase taxes on the 1 percent,” she reminds us, while “Republicans . . . have stronger faith . . . in capitalism without government help or regulation. . . . In the states they control, unregulated capitalism has given them a rougher ride.” But nowhere does Hochschild indicate that Democrats bear any responsibility for the economic forces that have victimized Appalachians—including the “offshoring, automation, and union decline” she otherwise vividly describes.
The book focuses instead on white nationalist organizers—most notably Matthew Heimbach, former leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party, a neo-Nazi group he created in 2015 that would wind up at the center of Charlottesville’s deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017. Hochschild’s arrival in Pike County coincides with Heimbach’s plans to recruit white-nationalists-to-be in the heart of Trump Country, and the fallout of his efforts carry the book’s narrative along.
Like Trump, Heimbach leveraged the rhetoric of victimhood and stolen pride in his recruitment campaign. Unlike Trump, Heimbach failed spectacularly at his messaging. He lacked coherence, charisma, connections, and, most of all, power. His rally was poorly attended and beset with infighting, leaving Heimbach snubbed by the people he aimed to recruit by appealing to their whiteness. Hochschild dresses up Heimbach’s failure as the casualty of two conflicting goals: the soft-pedaling of extremism, including racial separatism, for the sake of recruitment, and the building of solidarity among well-committed members of the far right.
On the ground, this looked like a parade of several hundred Nazi cosplayers, eager to flex their made-up tribalism among themselves as much as for their audience in the otherwise peaceful town of Pikeville, the county seat. Hochschild notes how cultural shame may have informed local reactions to the demonstration. She reveals, for example, a great sensitivity among the people she interviews toward common Appalachian stereotypes—as backward, uneducated, racist—and the ways they ricochet back onto the region in media coverage. Locals are embarrassed to be associated with Heimbach’s demonstration, and before the march they are already dreading a spectacle that is sure to attract negative attention.
Does it matter to these same people that Trump’s political ascendancy is a spectacle cut from a remarkably similar cloth, or that the goal of Heimbach’s movement is to accelerate a complementary set of goals? Hochschild is much vaguer here, though she warns that “were fascism to enter the mainstream of American life. . . it would not appear in Nazi-like, swastika-brandishing uniform” or “through the fringe, or not only that way” but “through the ballot box.” We do learn that Trump supporters in Pikeville, just like many of his supporters across the country, tend to disassociate themselves from the culture wars waged in their names. In Stolen Pride, we see them checking on their more vulnerable Black and Muslim neighbors, some even standing armed guard once the alt-right arrives, while remaining unreflective, in other contexts, about the implied danger of their politics.
As I explored whether Heimbach might be a victim of the pride paradox I felt an enormous sense of fatigue. Having lived through the aftermath of the Unite the Right rally, I reached the limits of my own emotional management. This backdrop also became distracting in a structural sense, with each chapter commencing with some variation of “Did you hear about the march?” It felt like Hochschild was missing part of the story about places like Pikeville—like these intermissions about pitiful white nationalists and Heimbach’s failed marriage had taken the place of more vital and less heard perspectives. The book’s lack of convincing justification for positioning Heimbach as a key informant raises more questions than it answers.
To be fair, Hochschild’s openness to give anyone a hearing is balanced by the intentional selection of people of color, immigrants, prisoners, and others typically underrepresented in regional analysis. Nearly everyone Hochschild meets is a survivor of some form of disaster, whether the collapse of industry or the addiction crisis. Their stories are stories of loss. But the peculiarities of Appalachia and its demographic decline mean that the story of a place or people can’t be told only through faces in the crowd. Appalachians, as a people, are also defined by our absences—the disowned youths and economic migrants.
When I was writing about Appalachia during the 2016 election, I was struck by how many people subscribed to the myth, which Hochschild might call a deep story, that a Trump victory would either force or tempt their children to return to the region. They seemed not to care whether the trigger was a total economic collapse or a bounty of riches. These voters in Appalachia were confident in stating the children of Appalachia would be returned. They weren’t, of course.
This mythmaking, and how its unrealized hopes may have shaken the confidence of Appalachian Trump voters, would have made interesting material for Stolen Pride. Statistics are good at quantifying this loss—Pike County, for example, saw a 9.8 percent population decline between 2010 and 2020—but they fail to capture how this decline plays out generationally. How can political messaging better reach people who both mourn for their children and subscribe to politics that would annihilate their futures? What do these children think, feel, and experience in their lives outside of the region? These questions, and not the soap opera of white nationalist lives, would have made much more fertile ground.
Barber, with Wilson-Hartgrove, is more interested in the story of these children. More rousing and polemical than Stolen Pride, White Poverty examines poor white people writ large, although many happen to be from places like Pikeville. One example is a young white woman from Eastern Kentucky named Lakin, who watches her family grapple with the shame of unemployment. That shame became projected onto her when she came out, and she was disowned by her family and forced to live in her car. In Lakin’s words, Barber hears that white poverty is “a curse that people are too often damned to bear alone.”
A prominent pastor and movement leader in North Carolina, Barber has served as the president of the state’s chapter of the NAACP and led several cross-racial protest campaigns. “I sound the alarm about white poverty,” he writes, “because I’m convinced that we can’t expose the peculiar exceptionalism of America’s poverty without seeing how it impacts the very people that our myths pretend to privilege.” Indeed, poor white people outnumber any other group experiencing poverty in the United States, he notes. The book debunks four myths impeding a complete understanding of poverty: that pale skin is a shared interest; that only Black folks want change in America; that poverty is only a Black issue; and that we can’t overcome racial division. Barber is frustrated—rightly so—that people who aren’t poor still imagine poverty to be an anomaly rather than a pervasive feature of American capitalism.
Barber finds isolation one of poverty’s most salient aspects. Much like Hochschild, he argues that cultural messages about hard work and individualism, often deployed by politicians, have encouraged poor white people to absorb structural failures as their own. In order to hide their shame, these poor people conceal the traumas of their lives. These concealed losses become a void filled easily by politicians and billionaires, Barber argues, with “lies that tell us Black people are on one side of America’s story, white people on the other.” Barber explains—more fully than Hochschild—how myths about Black poverty cross racial lines and how, for some white people, the reality of experiencing a social status closer to poor Black people than middle-class or well-to-do whites intensifies feelings of shame.
Suffused with his biblical imagination and on-the-ground stories, the book also reflects on Barber’s leadership of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays Movement and, later, the national Poor People’s Campaign. A corrective to our ways of talking about poverty, White Poverty is also a call for bottom-up organizing and shared connections among all poor people in an era of democratic renewal emphasizing racial and economic justice.
For Barber, this kind of “moral fusion” movement is both a strategic necessity—essential to building the coalitions we need in order to exercise power—and a historical fact. White Poverty looks to the Reconstruction Era’s cross-racial coalition building, particularly in the South, to give white people in the present a claim to a lineage of justice seekers and endow the movement with unfinished purpose. In alliances between newly freed Black people and whites who recognized their economic fates as linked, the momentum for political change grew to such intensity that its enemies resorted to violence—such as the 1898 Wilmington massacre, which saw Wilmington’s fusionist government ousted by white supremacists—to preserve their order. Later, these coalitions were revived again in the civil rights movement, a kind of Second Reconstruction. Barber calls for the revival of fusion among poor people across the nation—a Third Reconstruction uniting people of diverse backgrounds together in struggle. Fittingly, the Poor People’s Campaign launched its latest season of outreach this June.
Schaller and Waldman are far less sympathetic to the plight of poor white people. “Since the rise of Jacksonian Democracy nearly two centuries ago,” they write, “rural Whites have enjoyed what we call ‘essential minority’ status because they have been able to extract concessions from state governments and especially the national government that no other group of citizens of their size possibly could.” This outsized power stems in part from malapportionment of the Senate. Enshrined in the Constitution, this form of representation gives a state like Wyoming, the least populated state, the same right to political representation as California, the most populated. As a result, government money that might have been spent on say, urban hospitals, gets sent to subsidize rural postal routes or airports. Schaller and Waldman make a similar argument about the Electoral College and the reversal of power that would be assured by replacing it with the popular vote. At the same time, they note, rural white people “are the only significant part of either party’s coalition that has no coherent set of demands, for all the power they hold.”
This sense of entitlement, the authors believe, has prompted increasingly large segments of the rural white population to react to social change with “belligerent contempt,” seeking opportunities to air their rage and resentment at those who threaten their special status in American life. Schaller and Waldman argue that “rural White Americans assert a deep reverence for the Constitution and America’s democratic principles” while at the same time harboring “anti-democratic attitudes” and a propensity “to use violence to carry out their political agenda”—what they call the “patriotic paradox.” By way of comparison, the book points to the realities experienced by rural Black, Latino, and Native peoples, but it also refuses to define what “rural” actually is. Instead, the book extrapolates on research performed by academics in a variety of fields, some of whom have criticized White Rural Rage for overstating the prominence of extremist views among white rural Americans.
Although starkly different in tone, White Poverty and White Rural Rage both acknowledge that white people who want change, rural or poor or both, might simply not know how to organize. As Schaller and Waldman note, rural whites lack a model like the NAACP “with which to understand how politics is done and how it might affect their lives. There is no prominent National Association for the Advancement of Rural People lobbying and filing lawsuits on their behalf.” In other parts of the country, white people might look toward unions (and therefore acknowledge the diversity among organizers of the actual working class) or white-specified ally spaces like the Showing Up for Racial Justice movement. Schaller and Waldman find the most potential for shake-up in demographic trends that suggest “steadily increasing diversity” in rural spaces, but they defer on suggesting an ideal approach. “We won’t presume to tell rural Americans exactly what policies they should be asking for,” they write. “That’s something any movement has to decide on its own.”
As for outside observers, will Stolen Pride help in this political moment? I hope it does. Like Barber’s, Hochschild’s emphasis on unrecognized grief is a necessary corrective.
But Hochschild is more an explainer than a strategist. We can aim for “relief from the uneven burdens of the pride paradox,” she counsels, “by revising the American Dream and by equalizing access to it.” The closest she comes to plotting a concrete path forward is to stress “calm deliberation” and emotional understanding across partisan divides. “How does one person understand how another person got to feel the way he or she did?” she asks, looking to individuals unburdened by shame who can cross “the empathy bridge” within their communities.
This vision can sound like an out-of-touch sociologist’s fantasy. There are limits to reducing politics to a matter of enlightened empathy and emotional intelligence, especially when unmoored from clear political demands and the kind of organizing and power building that Barber calls for. (As Hochschild admits, “To empathize is not to agree, or seek common ground”—though she hopes “these can more easily follow.”) Stolen Pride’s key example of a “bridge-crosser” is a university chaplain who reacts to the news of the impending white nationalist march with calls for dialogue between the marchers and the community. To no one’s surprise, Heimbach declines the invitation—as does the university chancellor, who staunchly opposes inviting the marchers on campus.
But the concept of community mediators isn’t a bad idea in itself; as all organizers know, good mediation plays a pivotal role in holding coalitions together. Appalachia could use as many actual mediators as it can get—or really anyone trained to help address the staggering mental health crisis devastating the region. Appalachians have 50 percent fewer mental health care providers than the national average with a 17 percent higher risk of suicide. Our political discourse has tended to subsume these realities under the umbrella of “despair,” but greater access to health care should be a standard talking point for anyone attempting to discuss the region’s future.
The stories in Stolen Pride are not particularly deep if you’ve been close to the poverty line. After years of strategic abandonment by Democrats, a political figure that makes poor people feel seen and powerful takes a significant advantage. At a certain point, to what extent these individuals believe Trump will advance policies that materially improve their lives becomes literal white noise. The appeal is not the promises, but the attention and validation. Yet this moment offers an opportunity for pundits to learn from past mistakes and set aside some bafflement. As Schaller and Waldman argue, there is indeed an elevation of whiteness at work in the modern fixation on Appalachia, both regionally and nationally.
The larger question is what Democrats will offer poor white Americans. Will they acknowledge, as Barber demands, that the horizon of our current political imagination fails to capture the realities of millions of lives lived on the precipice? What space will Democrats grant for the overdue public reckoning with the enormous sense of shame and grief carried by poor people across the nation? Weaponizing this shame has long been a bipartisan project with bipartisan benefits.
Stepping out from behind that truth might win the Democrats some advantages, as will concrete strategies to make housing more affordable, increase real wages, and expand access to health care that isn’t contingent on one’s ability to pay for it. The absolute worst they can do is retreat to moderate platitudes about achieving the American Dream.
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