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What explains the fierce loyalty of Donald Trump’s base, even when he enacts laws that hurt them?
Arlie Russell Hochschild has searched for answers in the heart of Trump country. She is one of America’s most thoughtful writers about right wing movements, whose insights are informed by her deep relationships with people on the right.
Hochschild is a renowned professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book, “Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right,” is based on her work in eastern Kentucky, where she spent seven years exploring one of the poorest and whitest areas in the country. Her 2016 book, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,” was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times, which recently published her essay, “My Journey Deep in the Heart of Trump Country.”
Hochschild says that communities that have been ravaged by poverty, disinvestment and the opioid epidemic have suffered a deep loss of pride. Trump provides an appealing narrative by telling people that their pride has been stolen from them by undeserving immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, and African Americans, to name a few. Trump promises revenge for this stolen pride.
Arlie Hochschild spoke to me this week from her home in Maine.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The unabridged audio version of this interview can be heard by clicking the audio bar above.
David Goodman
On July 4, Donald Trump signed into law his “Big Beautiful Bill.” It includes draconian cuts to government services that will shred the safety net that many of his working class supporters rely on. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next decade, some 17 million people will lose their health insurance and millions will see the loss or reduction of food assistance. Some one third of Americans will see their incomes decline and many rural hospitals are likely to close. Yet you report that in your conversations with people in eastern Kentucky that Trump’s followers are mostly happy with what he’s doing. Explain.
Arlie Hochschild
They’re happy and confused and a little worried. We’re talking about an area of the country, Kentucky 5 (congressional district), which is the whitest and second poorest in the country. It’s coal country. They’ve become used to a kind of up and down economy, and now it’s been down. Like the 42% of all Americans (who are) without a B.A. degree and white, they have in the last three decades been downwardly mobile: less income, decline in owned property, more people living alone, and signs of what are called diseases of despair — alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide, especially among men. So it’s kind of a depressed area. It has known better times, and now it’s bad times.
Donald Trump speaks to a social vacuum and they didn’t see anything for them that the Democrats had to offer. Among registered voters (in this district), 80% voted for Donald Trump, 20% voted for Harris, and 45% didn’t vote at all. So most people in this reddest of places actually didn’t vote for Trump but (Trump supporters) were the mobilized people. So you’ve got a loss story, and then a mobilization of people who are experiencing loss, and now what’s happened? Wham, they’re losing. Most of them are on Medicaid. All the children in this area qualify for Medicaid and their rural hospitals — there’s a major one in Pikeville, but without Medicaid money, it’s going to have to do layoffs — Head Start summer programs in public schools, all that will be gone.
When I went back to the people that I wrote about In “Stolen Pride” about a month ago, they were not sure how this was going to land. They were keeping a close eye on tariffs and the effects that would have on the price of gas, the price of eggs, the price of bread, and worried, but they weren’t giving up (on Trump) yet. They had been promised some relief. Finally, someone’s come to save us, so they were hanging on.
There was a metaphor that Donald Trump put out that sustained this that said, “America has been sick, and I’m the tariff doctor. I’m the budget cuts doctor. I will cure you, but it might hurt. There may be some chemo pain along the way, but hang on, and you’ll be cured at the end.” So that metaphor has been holding on.
There is a counter metaphor that the Black man who is head of the Democratic Party in Kentucky told me: “Sometimes if (people who) look like me are called the enemy, then maybe you don’t mind when the president is peeing on your leg and calling it rain.”
So you have these two metaphors. One is a sense that, “Donald Trump is betraying me personally,” versus “Hey, catch on. It’s happening.”
David Goodman
I feel like I got a glimpse of the world that you’re describing. A few weeks ago, my wife and I were riding bikes across western Pennsylvania on a famous rail trail called the Great Allegheny Passage. It follows a defunct rail line that once carried coal and steel, but those industries have died. So now it’s a beautiful bike trail and there are historical markers along the way explaining what once thrived here — this used to be a steel plant, or a coal mine. What struck us besides the wonderful biking was cycling through these small, rural downtowns that were just hollowed out. I kept thinking that this is like the land that time forgot. There has been no improvement here. They are like frozen in time from the 50s and 60s when the steel mills and the industries here closed and nothing has come in to replace it. There are just empty storefronts.
What happened here in these Rust Belt communities that you write about in Kentucky and that I saw in western Pennsylvania? This is very much Trump country.
Arlie Hochschild
Yes, it is. What I saw was a group of people who would be called “stayers” — the people who haven’t left. I went in thinking there’s race, there’s social class, there’s rich, there’s poor. But I wasn’t thinking in terms of stayers and leavers. What I realized is that when an economy goes down and the center of economic gravity is somewhere else, a lot of people, often the more educated people and the younger people, leave. So there’s that new divide. The people who stay feel abandoned and feel a sense of anger and betrayal.
We have to think about emotional narratives. I think they’re the main thing going on and it’s unspoken. I believe that the conditions you biked through and that I saw over quite a few years are a story of a loss. Donald Trump came in and spoke to people predisposed to listen to a narrative that explained it and offered a way out. Trump came in with a promise to make America great again. Many politicians make promises, but there was also an unspoken narrative, which is, “You used to have a lot, and now you stayers have a little. It’s not just lost — it’s been stolen from you. Someone took it.”
David Goodman
In your book “Strangers in their Own Land,” you talked about the “deep story” that people experienced in these places where they felt forgotten. Could you describe that deep story, and also how your sense of the deep story has evolved as you’ve continued to research and write?
Arlie Hochschild
A deep story is what the world feels like to you. Your politics flow from that. The original deep story that I discovered in “Strangers” was this: you’re waiting in line, and you don’t feel like you’re angry at anyone, you don’t feel prejudiced. You just feel like you’re waiting in line for the American Dream. The line hasn’t moved in decades. You’re just waiting there, and the dream is far away. Many more are behind you, but you only look ahead. You’re sort of in the middle. The dream is just ahead, and you’re stuck.
Moment two of that deep story is you see line cutters cutting in line ahead of you and pushing you back. Who are they? They’re women, African Americans, immigrants, refugees. You think, Oh this isn’t fair. And you look and you see that there’s President Obama who seems to be waving at the line cutters, legitimating them and pushing you back.
The final moment of the deep story is that someone ahead of you looks back and says, “You’re uneducated. You’re backward. You’re prejudiced. You’re a redneck.” Then you’re just insulted. You’ve lost all pride. You’ve been publicly humiliated. And you say, “I’m out of here. Whatever anybody has to offer me that’s an inch better than that, I’ll take.”
That was the deep story that I heard and checked out in Louisiana for my first book. I brought it with me (and shared it with people in Kentucky) in “Stolen Pride.” One guy told me that what’s different now is that there’s a bully in line, and that bully is helping the line cutters. He’s not letting (me) go forward. He’s the bad bully. But also in line is a good bully. (Trump) is our bully who is fighting the bad bully. That’s how it feels.
Feeling is underlying all politics. We need to not just focus on policies and logic, because often you don’t find that in a Trump speech. But there is an emotional logic that is allowing him to build up the kind of MAGA loyalty that he has. The bully is part of his appeal, that he’s going to be strong.
David Goodman
It also explains something that I’ve found politically confounding, which is Trump promising as part of how to make America great again that “I am your retribution.” I’ve never heard a politician say that. He’s saying, I am going to inflict pain on those people. That’s the part that I find so disturbing, these displays of inflicting harm and terrorizing immigrants in Los Angeles and elsewhere. The pain is the point. It’s the theater of revenge.
Arlie Hochschild
That’s right. There is a sequel to the narrative that I described in “Stolen Pride” of loss turning to shame, and then loss turn to stolen. Donald Trump says, “They took it from you.” Who is the “they?” It keeps getting expanded.
What he also does in his narrative is to say, “I’m standing up for you. I’ve just said something transgressive and people are shaming me. Look at the press, they’re making me feel terrible. (You) know what that feels like to be shamed. Doesn’t it feel awful? They’re doing to me what they want to do to you, and I’m taking it on. I’m heroic, almost a religious figure. I’ll take your shame on. But unlike religious figures, I’m getting revenge. I’m getting retribution. I’m going to get even for the bad things and the shame that have occurred. And now I’m in power. It’s legitimate to feel angry.”
Elon Musk has said empathy is how civilizations get lost. If you count up the number of times Donald Trump says “hate” or “loser,” that’s part of this retribution. He’s establishing a category of insider and outsider – “And you my follower are the insiders. You’re American, American-born, really American. And these outsiders, the cause of your pain, they’ve been taking things from you.” He’s giving back their pride.
Here’s the paradox for me: I don’t see a whole lot of difference between this sinking blue collar white sector of America and migrants coming and trying to get a better life. They’re both at a border control. For migrants, it’s geographic control that they can’t get over. For white blue collar, it’s the B.A. they don’t have that could give them access to the jobs they seek. There’s a border control there too. Getting a B.A. is the knife that cuts between blue collar jobs that are going down and white collar jobs that are going up. You have two groups that actually have all this in common. (Trump) does a lot of rhetorical work to degrade and demean and demonize the non-American, and then he’s going to extend that category of non-American from undocumented workers to residents who are here legally and to people who don’t talk in an American way. There’s already a clampdown on dissent.
He is establishing what I would call new “feeling rules:” It is good to be angry. That’s the main thing he’s doing now, to put us in a different emotional atmosphere by saying, “It used to be rude or bad to be angry and impolite to insult people. Now that’s good.”
Look what he’s done: he’s attacking universities, on the one hand, which should be the center of rational thought and civility, and he’s getting Ultimate Fighting on the White House lawn — anger, get it out.
We’re in the middle of a new retribution narrative that’s playing out. It’s unspoken: “I’m recruiting you all to feel and act like soldiers in an army and I’m picking my enemy list, and you’re to join me.” That’s what the new deep story is.
David Goodman
You’ve talked about the need to build “empathy bridges.” Explain what those are. And how do you build empathy bridges across a divide of retribution and anger?
Arlie Hochschild
Empathy bridges aren’t bridges of agreement. The Norwegians have a name for it that translates into “communities of difference.” You differ and you’re probably never going to agree. But that doesn’t mean you fall into silence. It doesn’t mean you’re hostile. It means you’re talking because you come to like each other and you think there’s common ground.
The people I feature in “Stolen Pride,” we’re actually planning to all get together next October. We’re going to get a “holler log” going, including people who fear and hate Donald Trump and others who think he’s sent by God.
David Goodman
What are you going to do?
Arlie Hochschild
We all need to learn to listen. Learning to listen and turning your own moral frame off temporarily so you can listen without defending your beliefs. Just listen. It’s an art, and I don’t think either side knows how to do it. Actually, polls have shown that people on the left are a little less good at doing this than people on the right, who are more likely rural or semi-rural. They live in more diverse communities than do people on the left. Studies also show that more Americans are more moderate than either party is.
I think common ground can be found actually on issues such as clean energy. The people even in coal country would say, “You see that sawed off mountain up there? I think we ought to have a solar array up there or a windmill up there.” And Biden, paradoxically, has through the Inflation Reduction Act given billions of dollars, 80% of it to red states. This man who thinks God sent Donald Trump is against Trump on this issue. He says (renewable energy) can be a basis of economic growth. There could be crossovers. We’re never going to agree totally.
David Goodman
You have been clear that Democrats bear a lot of responsibility for the fact that their popularity is now hovering around 25 to 30%. What have Democrats done wrong? What should they do to right the ship?
Arlie Hochschild
The Democratic Party is more than a little the author of its own defeat here. I think it has closed the door to the white working class. And that’s a huge mistake and big problem. We used to have labor unions 30-40 years ago that were the middleman between the workers of both races and the Democratic Party. Now fewer than 9% of American workers are unionized. So that building block of the Democratic Party is gone. We’ve kind of disappeared into a variety of interest groups — women’s groups, African American groups, gay pride. We’re in pieces and we agree on a lot, but we haven’t got the leadership that we need to articulate that. There is a lot of great ferment and activism out there, groups like Indivisible, for example, but they’re not connected to the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party needs to eat some humble pie. Get some great leadership. There are great emerging leaders. I think I would even look at Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, a Republican state, who’s very popular. So surprises all out there.
David Goodman
We began this with you saying that politics is really about narrative, and Trump had one that just resonated with more people. What would a new Democratic narrative sound like?
Arlie Hochschild
It should begin with, Yes, a lot of us have suffered. The whole class system has gotten out of whack. The middle class has shrunk and a bunch of super rich have risen to the top and Trump is having us look the other way while that has happened. A lot of people are anxious that they’re falling down. So we need to say, Yes, there’s loss that you used to have something and now you don’t, because that’s the psychology that creates terrible anxiety. But nobody stole it from you, apart from the outsourcing large corporations that sought cheaper labor pools in Mexico and China. So if you want to blame someone, don’t blame your nearby migrant, but look at larger economic forces. And then say, don’t look around for the robber. Look around for the good people out there that see a problem and are rolling up their sleeves and in the American style fixing it, like the rescuers in Texas that are trying to get people out of harm’s way. Let’s not wait til there are more dead bodies.
Let’s start with renewable energy, and let’s restore America through universities, our source of ultimate jobs and knowledge. They are a passport. Open the passport control to education. It’ll get you a job, and it’s gotten more expensive and out of reach. You need to extend curriculum so that you open the gates to the middle class. Base pride not on just being rich and having an enemy, but on being a giver. The translation of the word “pride” is to be able to help, to be of service, to make a difference for other people. I think we go back to that original concept of pride. Our narrative should be based on that, building instead of tearing down.
David Goodman
You shared with me just how unsettling and scary this moment is. You spent your life in a university, and Trump is now taking a sledgehammer to higher education. Where do you find hope in this moment? What sustains you?
Arlie Hochschild
Foremost, I have family and friends. But I also see a lot of great people who could make that alternate narrative come true.
There are two stories out there. I know one person who says, Well this is getting so bad, I’m going to go to New Zealand. But there’s another person that I know who said, Look, I’ve been living in New Zealand, but the fight is on and I’m coming back.
That’s the job ahead of us: to be fighters and creators of this new narrative.
