Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has spent much of her career going places most sociologists often don’t and asking questions most academics wouldn’t think to ask. In Stolen Pride, she travels to Pike County in Eastern Kentucky. More specifically, she spends most of her time in KY-5, one of the poorest congressional districts in the country, to understand why white nationalist Matthew Heimbach chose it for a march, why eighty percent of its residents voted for Donald Trump, and the emotions driving the political upheaval reshaping rural America. The answer she arrives at is both simple and profound: shame.
Hochschild’s central argument is that shame underlies political appeal in ways that policy analysts almost always miss. She recognizes how most humans desire pride and how we all seek some sort of recognition. In Eastern Kentucky, however, pride has been systematically stripped away by the departure of coal jobs, the arrival of OxyContin, and decades of being called hillbillies and depicted as backwards in films and TV, news media, and political discourse. As sociologists working in the symbolic interactionist tradition have long understood, people seek narratives that explain what happened to them and offer a path back to dignity. Trump and Heinbach offered them, respectively. The Democratic Party, for the most part, did not and has not. Over the past decade or so, this has been the major problem for the Democratic Party. They define themselves as what they are not and seem allergic to telling us what they actually stand for and offer poor and working-class citizens in this country. “We’re not Trump” just hasn’t cut it.
The setting for the book is somewhat familiar terrain for Hochschild, whose previous book Strangers in Their Own Land introduced the concept of the “deep story,” or the logic that underlies political identity even when it seemingly contradicts material self-interest. In that book, Hochschild encountered white individuals in rural Louisiana who felt left behind and felt “cut in line” by immigrants, women, refugees, and people of color who the Democrats allegedly allowed to skip ahead in pursuit of the American Dream. Stolen Pride deepens that framework, focusing specifically on the pride and shame economy that operates in communities like Pike County. The book asks: what happens when the economic foundations of communal pride, such as skilled work and regional identity, are dismantled, and shame rushes in to fill the void?
What rushes in, at least in Pike County, are white nationalist figures like Matthew Heimbach who attempt to exploit that feeling of shame. They acknowledge people’s pain to a certain extent, but they offer their own self-interested diagnosis and message: “Immigrants took your jobs, elites stole your pride, white guilt is being imposed on you, and you suffer.” While Trump succeeded in earning the votes in Pike County, Heimbach struggled to get local residents to buy into his explicit messaging. Hochschild doesn’t exactly provide a satisfying answer as to why we see Trump succeed and Heimbach lose, but, as noted at the outset, much of that can be blamed on the Democratic Party’s lack of an agenda, narrative, and presence in many parts of America.
The profiles at the heart of the book are its greatest strength. James Browning, a homeless heroin addict who grew up punk but finally got help from fellow punk Tom Ratliff and sought to help those around him still in the throes of addiction. These are not deplorables. They are people navigating challenging circumstances with the tools available to them, and Hochschild portrays them with the dignity they deserve.
Throughout my reading, I kept thinking about Cleveland. The term “hillbilly” gets thrown around more than people might expect or even realize. It’s often used both as an insult directed at someone behaving in a reckless or seemingly unintelligent manner. Indeed, the local soda pop company once had a knockoff Mountain Dew brand named Hillbilly Joose with the tag line “Worth feudin’ and fightin’ over.” It was still around when I was a young kid in the 1990s. That says a great deal about the casualness of the othering of Appalachians that persists in the area.
Yet, Cleveland experiences some of the same sorts of shame from national media, particularly since deindustrialization hit the area hard beginning in the 1970s. The structural conditions are different, but the emotional logic is the same. There is a lingering sense that something was stolen from the Rust Belt and that the American dream that was once available to previous generations is long gone. The area gets labeled as miserable, depressing, and not worth visiting. Yet there has been a rebounding sense of pride that is palpable to anyone who visits. The endless array of Cleveland shirts. The intense pride in local neighborhoods. The devout following of the sports teams and local celebrities. In many ways, it’s all a reaction to the shame that the national media has tried to force upon the area.
These are the sorts of dynamics that Trump and his team understood, and Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, and the like have not. Trump’s entire political persona is organized around shame. He shames others relentlessly: immigrants, opponents, journalists, countries. And he positions himself as a man who has been shamed but is fighting back against those same elites that wish to tarnish America. He offers his supporters vicarious participation in that revenge narrative. Hochschild is clear on that point. Trump recognizes and acknowledges people in ways that feel rare in contemporary political life. He says their names. He validates their grievances. He promises restoration amid shame. Whether he delivers is almost beside the point, as the recognition itself completes the task.
Hochschild is equally sharp on Heimbach, whose trajectory is one of the book’s more unsettling threads. His attempted march in Pikeville failed, and most locals called his followers Nazis and made clear they weren’t welcome. Heimbach himself has since drifted away from white nationalism, isolated and apparently reconsidering his life, at one point reportedly contemplating becoming a nurse. He laments that he’s unable to shed his past and move on. Hochschild notes too that there is virtually no infrastructure to help people exit extremism once they’ve been involved in it.
If the book has a weakness, it is that it meanders in its final sections. The emotional core of the argument involving pride, shame, recognition, and narrative is most powerful when Hochschild stays close to the ground in Pike County, and the book is at its best when it trusts that local specificity to carry the larger argument instead of shifting the focus to broader dynamics.
These are smaller criticisms of a genuinely important book. Stolen Pride is good reading for anyone trying to understand not just Appalachian politics but the broader emotional landscape of working-class America and the emotions that govern it. It’s not the same in all places. The working-class exists everywhere in this country, but there is a lingering shame that working-class individuals feel or that politicians attempt to stoke and attribute to coastal elites and the college-educated. As someone who has spent years conducting my own research on working-class communities in Northeast Ohio and asking similar questions about what people actually want and feel, I found Hochschild’s framework both challenging and clarifying. Emotions matter, and she demonstrates that.
The politics of shame are not going away. If anything, they are intensifying. Understanding them, as Hochschild does with much empathy, is not just an academic exercise. It is a prerequisite for any politics that hopes to offer something real to the people who feel left behind.
Tim Gill
Tim Gill is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Global Studies at the University of Tennessee.