What’s the Matter with Kentucky?

Are Trumpists found—or made? A ground-level report from eastern Kentucky only tells half the story.

Arlie Russell Hochschild (2024). Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right. The New Press.

Why do people continue to vote for Trump?

Arlie Hochschild is an eminent Berkeley sociologist with half a century’s worth of experience, having invented key concepts like “emotional labor” in a 1983 study of service work, The Managed Heart, and the notion of a “second shift”—the domestic labor that is (still) disproportionately performed by women. More recently, Hochschild has published a 2016 study of the Tea Party movement, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, based on observations and interviews in Louisiana.

Now Hochschild has moved north. With Stolen Pride, Hochschild applies her signature brand of empathetic ethnography to try to disentangle the knot of Trump’s enduring appeal.

Zooming in on an especially rural and red slice of America, Kentucky’s 5th congressional district and its constituent Pike County, Hochschild tries to unpack the mentalities and emotions underpinning Trump’s appeal in the region (and beyond). In the district we encounter here, KY-5, described by some as the “heart of Appalachia,” Trump won around 80 percent of the vote in all three of the last presidential elections. One way of thinking about Stolen Pride is as a kind of Hillbilly Elegy for the liberal intelligentsia, a Thomas Frank-style What’s the Matter with Kansas?, transplanted two states over and less economically, more culturally, oriented.

Good and Bad Bullies

The results, unfortunately, are mixed. Stolen Pride’s insistently restrictive framing of Pike County’s political psychology as that of a contest between “shame” and “pride,” brings to mind an amusing scene from the movie Donnie Darko, where one of the characters, a teacher, presents an idiosyncratic theory that all of life is a contest between “fear” and “love”—in other words, a reductive framing that misses much else of relevance.

In Stolen Pride, readers are told repeatedly that the fundamental problem facing eastern Kentuckians, and by extension Trump supporters in other (somewhat) economically backward areas, is one of a lack of pride and an excess of shame. They are unable to take pride in their economically depressed, coal-abandoned regions; they have been shamed for their refusal to adopt progressive cultural values, and they have been left pride-less by the machinations of “globalization.”

Enter Donald Trump, the book suggests, who alone has shown himself able to restore their pride and take away their shame. He is the “good bully” (p. 205), from the perspective of MAGA voters, willing to protect Kentuckians from the “bad bully”—a shadowy quadrumvirate made up of “the Democratic Party, CNN, the federal government (apart from the military), and the defenders of urban America who rudely dismiss rural America” (p. 206). End of story, more or less.

Narrative and Reality

But Hochschild never considers why key signifiers like “pride” and “shame” get freighted with the meaning they do: Why does pride in this region automatically entail “independence from government authority,” as one of her interviewees reports (p. 150)? Why does “shame” emanate from the closure of coal mines lying decades in the past when the rest of the postindustrialized world has moved on and become, precisely, postindustrial? And why wasn’t it Biden instead who was able to appear to these residents as the good “bully” (if we are to accept this schoolyard metaphor as meaningful way of thinking about high-stakes politics), who stood up to the bad “bully” Trump—a seemingly much more resonant, sensible framing from the left-liberal standpoint?

The basic problem with Stolen Pride is that Hochschild, by and large, doesn’t attend to the political and social activation of feeling as a “mass emotion,” steered and shaped by political actors and the media. Historians sometimes call this memory politics—in other words, how consciousness of the past is shaped and activated by political actors. And while there’s a great deal of shared memory and nostalgia on display in Stolen Pride, there is rather less reflexive questioning of the memory politics involved in propelling certain narrative strands to the forefront of the public mind.

In fact, right-wing politicians are left with very little communicative agency at all in this book: All they can do, seemingly, is to capture and project, bullhorn-style, the public’s preexisting feelings, uncovered at ground level. Trump and the vast communicative ecosystem surrounding him are not only strangely lacking in independent powers to persuade and give shape to public opinion, but are simply missing in action here, essentially nowhere to be found in the pages of Stolen Pride.

When Hochschild asks her interviewees about “the right’s deep story,” or overarching meta-narrative, she does not stop to consider who might be the storyteller in this saga. Who concocted and spread the “deep story”? Surely not eastern Kentuckians alone. When Hochschild implicitly asks us, as readers, to reflect upon the allure of Trump as “the good bully,” against the “bigger and badder” bullies of the “Democratic Party and the federal government,” the only appropriate response seems to be that of the very consternation Hochschild reports among her friends on the left:

Who was the first bully? . . . Wasn’t Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill giving good jobs to people nationwide?

Indeed. There’s a “deep story” liberal-minded people could tell about a state like Kentucky as well—one in which the state’s economy is doing reasonably well, unemployment remains relatively low (5.2% statewide in December 2024, “lower than the state’s almost-50-year historical average of 6.5 percent,” as a recent policy brief notes), and where Andy Beshear, a Democrat, was able to capture the governorship in 2019— a fact which Hochschild alludes to in the concluding chapter but leaves largely unanalyzed.

We shouldn’t, of course, blame the messenger: Clearly, it isn’t Hochschild’s fault that her informants have bought into the lie of the 2020 “stolen election” or, more generally, hold reactionary views. And it isn’t the job of ethnographers, for the most part, to condemn their subjects.

But Hochschild does insist on Explaining Trumpism—behind this book’s pretense at anthropological particularity, it remains a sweeping argument about cultural driving forces in U.S. politics, concealed as fine-grained journalism. In her framing, Hochschild lends symbolic authority to ideas about “pride” and “shame” that are themselves the products of Trump’s own messaging. While Hochschild’s demand-sided account repeatedly suggests that there is an organic appetite for resentment in the population, a more supply-sided theory would recognize that the art of late-modern politics is about the creation and activation of resentments.

Hochschild doesn’t make room for this other half of the equation. In Stolen Pride, the author presents a micro-level view, without pausing to ask how narratives filter down from above and transform the view from below. Trump’s MAGA makeover of the American political landscape was the result of a relentless communicative bombardment, at all levels of the media ecosystem, from tweets and Truths to Fox & Friends. Hugging the ground provides only a partial glimpse of this wider story.

What Winning Takes

For Democrats to win elections in red states like Kentucky, one might think it would be enough to promise more economic populism and stronger reconstruction programs, including Ezra Klein-style abundance policies, as the historian Rutger Bregman has recently argued. Hochschild’s book also veers onto this ground, if not in so many words. If the central problem is that coal jobs have disappeared (inducing shame), the solution might seem to be to bring back jobs (producing pride).

The trouble is that both Biden and Harris already promised and pursued this sort of agenda to a significant degree. Biden secured $1.6 trillion in green and infrastructure spending; and while Bidenomics was hampered by the failure to pass Build Back Better, spin-off legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act were clear attempts to strengthen the economic base. Harris’s 2024 campaign—though more moderate than her 2020 primary run when Harris supported more radical, sweeping legislation like Medicare for All—still promised around $5 trillion in tax increases over a decade aimed at corporations and the wealthy.

Clearly, this is not yesterday’s neoliberalism. Democrats learned from Trump 1.0, but also Bernie Sanders’s popular 2016 presidential campaign.

What Democrats couldn’t properly contend with was the toxic, decade-long MAGA-fueled inculcation of nativist, reactionary narratives that obscured their economic record and set tens of millions of Americans on a direct collision course with basic humanist values.

Perhaps this is a form of “stolen pride” Hochschild could give a hearing in future work: The once-proud belief in a uniquely American dynamism, driven by immigration and diversity; and pride in the country’s liberal-democratic values, from “checks and balances” to the right not to be abducted by plainclothes agents in broad daylight or deported to an offshore supermax prison without cause.

Yes, these ideals were always in part illusory: Internally a fractured and imperfect democracy, the U.S. was and is also an aggressive overseas imperial power. (Read Stephen Kinzer’s The Brothers for a capsule view of the postwar record, seen through the actions of John Foster and Alan Dulles.)

But both Americans and the wider world are coming to discover just how much even those purported values will be missed as they fade from view. It’s a sorrowful tale of something of great value that has been taken away from the world.

Millions of people are ashamed, too, to return to Hochschild’s parlance, that these things are now being stolen from them.

Reclaiming Narrative Hegemony

Shame isn’t necessarily all bad. Longing for the Confederacy’s defense of slavery, for instance, ought to induce a sense of shame. Part of the left’s cultural-hegemonic work must be to ensure that xenophobia, misogyny and other reactionary positions do in fact engender a proper sense of loathing—the sense that this sort of thing simply isn’t done. One could call this “identity politics” or “wokeism”; in other words, basic civility and humanism.

As the right cements its grip on power around the world, there’s a growing realization that the left needs to win the narrative war. Hearts and minds are being shaped daily by people like Joe Rogan and on platforms like TikTok and X. The left lacks its own counter-messaging apparatus attuned to these times. The cultural momentum has been lost.

What’s needed now is to reclaim lost cultural ground, build new narratives, and counteract the right’s successful messaging. Unfortunately, Stolen Pride, with its partial view and restrictive framing, offers little guidance for what comes next.