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.

Organizer: George Hammond

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