Pride, shame, and what Democrats must say to rural Americans

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild on how a deep sense of loss has pushed rural voters to the right — and what Kamala Harris can do about it

What does it mean to lose a way of life? What are people pushed to the brink willing to embrace to avoid shame — the exposure of that loss in front of peers and the world?

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild has built a career out of deep engagement, built through in-depth interviewing and long-term participation, with people and places, exposing with unusual sensitivity and care the root concepts that lay at the heart of people’s lived experiences. Her books, from The Managed Heart to The Second Shift to Strangers in Their Own Land are essential in our understanding of how Americans live and work (along the way she’s coined terms like “emotional labor”) and stand as key explanations of America to itself.

In her forthcoming book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, Hochschild visited Pikeville, Kentucky, a small city at the heart of KY-5, the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the United States, where 80 percent of voters supported Donald Trump in 2016, to understand the emotional undercurrents that drove the region — and the nation — to the right.

Beginning her investigation with the town’s response to a neo-Nazi march that took place in 2017, she conducted interviews with a broad range of Pikeville residents, from young people struggling to find a future in a place with severely limited employment prospects, to former coal miners retraining for tech jobs, to incarcerated people, to town leaders in education and health care, to the organizer of the march itself.

The common thread in the stories Hochschild tells is a sense of loss, and taken together, her interviews paint a picture of how, in the wake of economic collapse, a deep sense of not just material loss, but a loss of pride becomes shame, and opens the way for the emotionally satisfying but ultimately false solutions offered by the right.

I think of pride as kind of the skin of the self. We have feelings about how others see us. And that can make us feel bad. It can make us feel good. And that's what pride is. Guilt would be something no one else necessarily knows about us, how you see yourself. But this is how you feel about how other people see you. 

We got a chance to speak with Hochschild about the new book, her understanding of how pride works in America, her powerful analysis of Donald Trump’s appeal on the basis of shared shame, and, significantly, her advice for Democrats if they want to have a chance of winning over the rural counties — former strongholds of labor that have abandoned a Democratic Party they see as elitist — in November.

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In your books, you've always had a way of picking a very simple concept that we all talk about all the time and making us realize what a big and significant thing it is, and what role it's playing. 

And in this case, it's pride. Everybody thinks they know what pride is. We all experience it in different forms. But can you talk about what you think pride is fundamentally and why you came to the thought that it might be a significant player in American political life in this era?

To back up a little, I've long been extremely interested in emotions as having a logic almost of their own. And I have felt that our understanding of social life is too economic. And our economic reality is very powerful. But it can set off other human feelings, which themselves tell an extra and important and underobserved story. 

So with pride, I think of pride as the skin of the self. We have feelings about how others see us. And that can make us feel bad. It can make us feel good. And that's what pride is. Guilt would be something no one else necessarily knows about us, how you see yourself. But this is how you feel about how other people see you. 

So it's an inherently social emotion. 

Yes. Yes, it is. It is. And we can go up and down and people can be in every kind of circumstance, but feel proud. For example, in this last set of interviews I've done for this new book, Stolen Pride, there was a woman who told me:

"Well, all six of us kids were helped out around the house. My dad was a coal miner. My mom stayed at home. We grew our own vegetables, but when dad was laid off, we had to go on welfare. He would have rather broken his leg than go on welfare. So we had to go away to shop, not at our nearby store, but where people wouldn't see us using food stamps.”

So there was that pride. And then she also kind of took pride in how they handled poverty. She was not ashamed of being poor, but was proud of how resilient the family was in handling this period of poverty. 

But having just said that, let me a little bit unsay it because for many people, if you're poor, you've got two problems.

One, you're poor, and two, you're ashamed of being poor, or you're homeless. Two problems. One, you're homeless, and two, you're ashamed of being homeless. So shame management and maintaining your self-regard when that becomes hard to do. The social air you can breathe is less. That's a whole story in itself, and it's the one I write in this book. 

So I love this notion that pride is a special emotion that is kind of a mirror emotion. You can almost imagine it kind of recursing back and forth. It is about me perceiving how they perceive. Can you talk about why pride has this connection historically and in the present to authoritarianism, to demagoguery, to strongmen, et cetera?