Arlie Russell Hochschild: Stolen Pride and the Rise of the Right

What’s the “pride paradox”?
For all the efforts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, people have often ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to 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 for her book Stolen Pride 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 Donald Trump.
Hochschild focuses on a group at the center of the shifting political landscape: blue-collar men. She had long conversations over six years with mayors and felons, clerks and shopkeepers, road workers and teachers, ex-coal miners, and recovering addicts. In some of the voices she listens to, Hochschild hears an alternative to the inchoate anger, as she and her subjects imagine a way we might build bridges and move forward.
Photo courtesy the speaker.
Speakers
Arlie Russell Hochschild
Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley; Author, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right
George Hammond
In Conversation with George Hammond
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[@mollyshredder]

She's got exceptional insight. She's brave to interview these folks. It's always important to have compassion for the folks who've been conned.

[@DaveRowan-d7k]

Acting together when we dont think alike. Thx for all you do Arlie.

[@gregorysouthworth783]

Great video and loved the input. I am going to suggest a radical idea. We need to create means of collective ownership which involves communities and employees of companies of larger firms at local levels. It creates a system of economic input and wealth enhancement by giving real pride in the sense they own their experience and participate in its growth, and it transcends race, ethnicity, and class and yet respects it at the same time. Brothers and sisters in community. Short of that, we will all be Appalachia eventually.

[@locomotion3656]

First

[@christopherjones534]

@@locomotion3656 being here is good 👍