Nyttend/Wikimedia Commons
A view of Main Street in downtown Pikeville, Kentucky
This article appears in the October 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right
By Arlie Russell Hochschild
New Press
In her 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land, Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild explored a seeming paradox. Why is it, she asked, that many people living near polluting petrochemical plants in southern Louisiana support a political movement that opposes environmental regulations and government intervention? She undertook an ethnographic experiment to find out, spending time with and interviewing dozens of people in the bayou country. Her book unfolds a “deep story,” that is, a symbolic, “feels-as-if” story that people tell themselves about themselves. The deep story of this large segment of the political right goes something like this: Hard-working conservatives find themselves patiently “waiting in line” to pursue the American dream, only to see others—“women, immigrants, refugees, public sector workers,” as well as people “on special visas or green cards”—cutting ahead of them. Anger and resentment ensue. If this sounds more like a Fox News talking point than a theoretical framework, it’s one that Hochschild’s downwardly mobile, largely white subjects readily cosigned.
Hochschild’s new book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, builds upon insights from her earlier exploration of life in working-class conservative America as well as her copious work on the management of emotions and feelings to tell an even deeper story about the emotional scaffolding of politics. This time, she trains her sociological lens on eastern Kentucky and the feelings of pride and “unwarranted shame” that float like free radicals in its atmosphere. For her purposes, “pride” and “shame” are “master term[s]” that encompass a range of other feelings, like “honor, respect, and status” and “humiliation, mortification, or embarrassment,” respectively. A host of factors, including the shrinking of the coal industry, declining unionization, job loss due to automation and offshoring, COVID sickness and death, extreme weather events, and widespread drug addiction, have turned the small Appalachian region of Pike County, Kentucky, into a kind of shame factory—“an epicenter of a larger crisis,” observes Hochschild.
Not that long ago, Kentucky had been a politically moderate state. It’s only relatively recently that the state has seen a significant shift to the right, particularly in Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District—the setting for Hochschild’s book and “the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the country.” For all their regional and historical differences, Kentucky and Louisiana share a number of similarities that make them useful for exploring what Hochschild has called “keyhole” issues, which offer insight into both the perspectives of individual people and broader patterns. Economically, both states have been hard-hit by the decline of key industries—coal in Kentucky and petrochemicals in Louisiana—leaving many communities struggling with high poverty rates and limited job opportunities.
Whereas Strangers in Their Own Land took up the issue of an environmental paradox—the more polluted a state, the more likely it is to vote Republican—Stolen Pride explores what Hochschild calls the “pride paradox.” In a nutshell: Appalachians pride themselves on their hard work, yet the “beleaguered economy [has] greatly lowered their chance of success and vulnerability to shame.” When the residents in KY-05 whom Hochschild got to know were unable to secure jobs, pay off debts, or move up the economic ladder, they felt ashamed and “turn[ed] shame inward, project[ed] shame outward,” or tried to devise a creative way out of the dilemma.
There is, as Hochschild points out, a long-standing tradition of attributing success or failure to personal effort. It’s no accident that many Appalachians are descended from ancestors who hail from Scotland and Ireland—the very populations that sociologist Max Weber identified as embodying the Protestant ethic and “worldly asceticism.” Surveys also show that Republicans tend to adhere more strongly to this traditional work ethic than Democrats; they “impose harsher conditions for deserving pride even as they struggle with making a living in the hardest-hit regions—those more prone to factory closures and lowered wages,” notes Hochschild.
Almost all the people Hochschild met with vividly recall instances in which they were “put down for being hillbillies.”
The theory of the “pride paradox” is buttressed by dozens of interviews, conducted over the course of seven years, with Kentuckians from both the “hill” and “holler,” or upper and lower classes. Her sources include: Andrew Scott, the mayor of Coal Run, ex-governor Paul Patton, a city manager, various right-wing extremists, a disabled TikTok artist, a Muslim doctor, prisoners, and recovering drug addicts. As in her previous book, Hochschild shadowed her subjects at work or visited them in their homes, quoting them at generous length. Through these stories, a clearer picture of their “pride biographies” emerges. Some of her subjects take “bootstrap pride” in their ability to support their family, others cling to “survivor’s pride” after escaping a drug-addled past, and still others style themselves as moral outlaws, which comes with the cachet of “bad-boy pride.”
Almost all the people Hochschild met with vividly recall instances in which they were “put down for being hillbillies.” One young woman remembered that when she told a bookstore employee in Boston that she was from eastern Kentucky, “he leaned over the counter to see if I was barefoot.” The Appalachians of Stolen Pride staunchly reject the stereotypes of being “fat, drugged out, talking funny, being poor and prejudiced.”
It’s a testament to Hochschild’s humane outlook and grace as an interviewer that none of her subjects comes across as a stereotype—especially impressive in light of the fact that she conducted a portion of the interviews over Zoom after the COVID pandemic made travel from Berkeley to Kentucky impossible. One person we meet who shatters all stereotypes of Appalachians is Ruth Mullins, a 73-year-old retired African American civil servant who has deep family roots in Pikeville. Although she attended an integrated high school, she still faced exclusion in everyday life. One particularly painful memory involved a school trip in 1963, during which she and other Black students were told to eat in a restaurant’s kitchen while their white classmates dined in the main area. Their teacher did nothing to intervene. To this day, Pikeville is overwhelmingly white—less than 3 percent of its population is nonwhite. And of course, as Hochschild reminds us, the Black-white wealth gap has not budged since 1968.
Another member of Pikeville’s chromatic minority is Dr. Syed Badrudduja (affectionately known as “Dr. Budgy”), a general surgeon who emigrated from Hyderabad, India, to eastern Kentucky in 1976. Initially, he felt isolated in the remote hills of Appalachia, where he was the only Indian in the area. Over time, more Muslim families joined him, and today there are dozens of medical specialists “from India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Bangladesh, [and] Syria.” Yet Dr. Budgy has felt targeted at times because of his Muslim faith. After 9/11, he received “harassing drunk phone calls” and found that the windows of a mosque that he oversees were shattered by BB gun shots.
While Mullins and Dr. Budgy learned to be “on guard for thrown-off shame-turned-blame,” other subjects embody what Hochschild calls “bootstrap pride.” This form of pride emphasizes self-reliance and personal responsibility, and will be recognizable to anyone who has so much as glanced at the cover of J.D. Vance’s memoir, which recounts his Horatio Alger–like ascent from a poverty-stricken childhood in an Ohio steel town to Yale Law School. One of Hochschild’s interviewees, a small-business owner named Alex Hughes, has long embraced an ethos of “bootstrap” individualism. When first his tattoo parlor and later his computer networking business collapsed, he felt both shame and anger—as if he had been “forced to pawn his honor.” Unable to secure unemployment insurance or food stamps, he scrambled to cobble together a series of odd jobs, only to watch those opportunities dry up as well. Yet rather than blaming structural or external forces, like the collapse of the coal industry or the rise of Amazon and big-box stores, which had decimated small businesses across America, he held himself accountable.
ALBIN LOHR-JONES/SIPA USA VIA AP
A co-leader of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, seen here, also organized a dress rehearsal in Pikeville, Kentucky, where the book takes place.
Stolen Pride is careful not to hierarchize different kinds of shame, but the book’s most enlightening section concerns the feelings of people who experience a disjuncture “between public narratives and personal struggles for pride.” David Maynard, a 34-year-old white disabled artist, relates to Hochschild that neither the left nor the right offers him a narrative in which he can see himself reflected or respected. Raised in a trailer park, he “couldn’t be seen as a bootstrapper” but also couldn’t “disregard the pride most Americans [feel] based on being one.” He lives, as he says, “between two racisms”—between the Scylla of Donald Trump and his venomous racism toward nonwhites and the Charybdis of a “new form of racism from the far left” that proscribes talking about “your own experience of being put down” as a white person since whites are assumed to benefit from white privilege. Even as Maynard holds onto a kind of “survivor’s pride” from moving out of the trailer park, he perceives the pride paradox as “a shame trap” for people like him: white, poor, and deprived of full access to “white privilege.”
One of the more infamous figures Hochschild profiles is Matthew Heimbach, the neo-Nazi founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party. Heimbach’s involvement with white supremacist groups is well documented and has been covered in other recent books like Vegas Tenold’s Everything You Love Will Burn and It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US by Alexander Laban Hinton, the first of which Hochschild references.
The connection of right-wing extremism to the pride paradox is relatively straightforward: For many in Appalachia, the rhetoric of groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers appeals because it taps into their feelings of grievance and loss.
Heimbach’s efforts to restore lost pride—he is a descendant of both German and Confederate ancestors—through racial separatism and white nationalism are a direct response to the perceived emasculation and marginalization of white working-class men. In 2017, he was sued for having co-led the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, which left one person dead and 35 others injured. Prior to that march, he had organized another white pride march, in Pikeville, Kentucky, and it is with this earlier march that Hochschild begins her book. The dress rehearsal march, held in 2017, had its detractors: The Kentucky legislature passed a resolution weeks before the march disavowing the Traditionalist Worker Party even as it upheld their “First Amendment right to espouse their hatred.”
In subsequent interviews with Heimbach, Hochschild learns that he was driven by three aims: to “mainstream an extremist message in the peaceful town of Pikeville” by softening the edges of white nationalism; to “lure regular people to his cause”; and to unite the hodgepodge of groups that had signed on to the march, which included the Knights of the KKK, National Socialist Movement, the Dirty White Boys, the Masons, White Lives Matter, and the Council of Conservative Citizens. Hochschild kept in touch with Heimbach for four years, during which time she professed to see “astonishing changes” in him. Years after the march, however, Heimbach admits that he still admires Russia’s Vladimir Putin and that he has not passed “the DHS definition [of] ‘de-radicalized.’” His story is a ringing reminder of how easily the pride paradox can be exploited by those with dangerous agendas.
Hochschild suggests that a major part of Donald Trump’s appeal lies in his ability to tap into the deep wells of shame that exist in communities like those of eastern Kentucky. As the coal industry has withered, so too has the region’s pride, leaving behind a void that has been filled by feelings of shame and resentment. Hochschild speculates that several “stayers” in the region found in Trump a salvific figure through whom they could “grieve their own stolen pride.” His rhetoric of economic nationalism and his promises to “bring back coal” resonated with those who felt that globalization lowered their rank in the national pride economy. To Roger Ford, the CEO of an energy corporation and an organizer of a 2020 pro-Trump parade, Trump symbolized nothing so much as “a master anti-shame warrior,” who could dispel both personal and collective shame.
Left unchecked, the deep sense of grievance that exists in regions like eastern Kentucky has the potential to fuel further political polarization and even violence, while contributing to the further erosion of democratic institutions and the rise of authoritarianism.
Noting these dangers, Hochschild urges “relief from the uneven burdens of the pride paradox.” What this looks like in practice is left unsaid. Even as Hochschild refrains from providing specific, actionable policy items to resolve the pride paradox, however, she suggests that we revise the notion of the American dream and equalize access to it. Some people, like David Maynard, the TikTok artist who felt excluded by dominant narratives, may elect to put themselves on a path to an “emotional American Dream” rather than a material one. No matter where we sit on the political spectrum, Hochschild urges us to “recognize the faces of the overburden,” which is the term for “the mountaintop soil the machines dump over the side,” and “expand access to a re-envisioned American Dream.”
