The Pride Paradox

Film critic Pauline Kael, the epitome of New York sophistication, is often misquoted as having said that she didn’t know anyone who had voted for Nixon. Which is pretty funny. What she in fact said was that she knew “only one person who voted for Nixon,” that the rest of them were “outside my ken,” and that she could feel their presence only sometimes “when I’m in a theater.”^[1] Which is no longer funny, just irritating. Kael’s willful ignorance cannot be maintained outside the rarified world of New York. Yet, as the Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild shows in her new book, the well-publicized contempt of the elites for those they consider “hillbillies” or “rednecks” significantly contributes to our current political malaise.

The last election confirmed what many pundits had already feared but wouldn’t admit even to themselves—that Trumpism isn’t a fringe phenomenon but drifts squarely in the often toxic American mainstream. Perhaps one of the most sobering things about the most recent election was how quietly it unfolded—with none of the violence widely expected, without riots or mass protests. Afterwards it seemed as if even some of the winners were in a state of shock over what had actually happened—that a convicted felon more interested in victory for victory’s sake and in avenging himself on his foes than concrete policy proposals had been given a second chance to be President.

Hochschild has long warned us that we ignore, at our own peril, the way people think and feel outside the nation’s urban centers. Stolen Pride is the powerful sequel to her Strangers in Their Own Land (2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, a record of conversations she had conducted, over a period of five years, with Louisianans living in the Tea Party stronghold of Lake Charles.^[2] In Strangers she inaugurated the concept of the “deep story,” the nexus of feelings and perceptions underlying the way people see the political landscape and their own place within it. For the sequel, Hochschild traveled to Pike County, Kentucky, the “whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the country” (p. 271), not even a blip on the horizon of the national consciousness. Here a lethal combination of factors—the demise of the coal industry, the attendant loss of jobs, the mounting contempt for rural life that residents feel coming from the urban centers—has wreaked havoc on people’s lives. Thirty of the 1,265 people charged in the January 6 attack on the Capitol came from Kentucky.

Hochschild is an unfailingly kind interviewer and adept storyteller, and her gallery of arresting characters, from both sides of the political divide, sticks with the reader. Managing to be both self-effacing and authoritative, she is remarkably successful in eliciting honest self-assessments from even the most reticent interlocutors. Evoking a landscape scarred by loss, with mountaintops sawed off in the quest for more coal, stores shuttered on Main Street, and trailers rusting across from well-kept homes, she also paints, with a novelist’s light touch, vivid portraits of the people who make their home here: the retired college administrator and ex-Governor of Kentucky, a praiser of his own past, ensconced in his wood-paneled office at the University of Pikeville; the half-Cherokee convict and KKK acolyte, who, delighting in his own “badness,” endorses white supremacy; the pony-tailed designer of scary online art who didn’t finish school and considers himself “antiracist” even as he wonders where exactly in the hierarchy of national grievances poor whites like him might fit.

Strangers in Their Own Land came out when the first Trump presidency was already underway; the appearance of Stolen Pride coincides with the advent of—still hard to believe—Trump’s second term in office. The narrative thread holding the book’s various chapters together is a march of Neo-Nazis through Pikeville planned for April 2017. The leader of the parade: Matthew Heimbach, America’s most recognizable homegrown fascist, a strange bespectacled, round-faced, and jack-booted creature clad in black, his body covered with tattoos, a “virtual United Nations of the extreme right,” in Hochschild’s words (p. 49). None of the residents of Pike County, the Trumpists as well as the remaining handful of progressives, wants anything to do with Heimbach. Yet, when pushed to disclose the reasons for their disdain, they inevitably reveal their own disgruntlements. Drawing on concepts familiar from political science,[3] to which she adds a new psychosocial dimension, Hochschild demonstrates that Pikeville—and other communities like it—lingers in the grip of a “pride paradox”: “low opportunity coupled with the belief that the blame is on you if you fail” (p. 77). In Hochschild’s economy of pride, self-blame, somewhat contradictorily, goes hand in hand with righteous anger directed at others, mostly the affluent folks living in the cities, from Lexington, Kentucky to Washington, DC, who, undeservedly, seem to have it better than you.

Alex Hughes, a resident of Prestonsburg, half an hour north of Pikeville, is a case in point. In his view, the stores he launched—a tattoo parlor and a computer store—failed not because of the economic downturn affecting the area but because he failed to read the writing on the wall. And while Hughes was eventually able to pull himself up by his bootstraps, attending a computer training program and learning how to code, the shame of his years of poverty still stings and manifests itself in visceral hatred of anything that smacks of governmental overreach. Hochschild’s interviewees want to be sure, as one of them disarmingly puts it, that when they die, people will say “nice things” about them (p. 158). But, as they don’t or can’t see, the odds are already against them: the “invisible hand” of capitalism (Adam Smith’s term) has an inclination to hit hardest the ones who most fervently believe in it (p. 33).

An unsettling subplot in Hochschild’s book is the fate of Heimbach, a Maryland-born college graduate with parent issues, whose story of stolen pride is a narrative he consciously crafted. After being arrested for domestic abuse in Paoli, Indiana, Heimbach was expelled from his Traditional Workers Party, had to find a job, and thus became, in his own assessment, a transformed man. How deep that transformation went is anyone’s guess: “A lot of Jews were skilled,” the self-absorbed former Holocaust denier tells Hochschild over dinner. “But I am not sure about the gas chambers” (p.187). While Hochschild is careful not to reveal her personal preferences, the reader senses that she is more drawn to those Pike County residents who have turned genuine feelings of wounded pride into ways of helping their community—James Browning, for example, whose painful history of addiction makes him an effective healer at a local recovery center.

Hochschild recreates these conversations without judgment or bias, keeping her editorial interventions to a minimum (in a rare moment of disagreement, she charges Wyatt Blair, the mixed-race convict, with having made a “confusing point,” p. 108). But she doesn’t mince words when explaining how Trump, with a real estate investor’s predatory instinct, has learned to exploit ordinary people’s “deep stories” for his own gain. In his four-step shame ritual (Hochschild’s terminology), he blithely violates the rules of political decorum by making an outrageous statement (“Mexicans… they’re rapists”; step 1), for which he promptly gets publicly shamed (step  2), which in turn allows him to pose as a victim (“Look what they are doing to me,” step 3), which then, in step 4, leads him to restate, without contrition or modification, the original provocation. Trump performs, and turns to his own benefit, what others have suffered. The lethal logic of Hochschild’s pride economy, in which self-blame and shame and anger alternate, prevents those caught up in it from realizing when someone who appears to speak their language merely imitates it. Like his occasional model Hitler (alternately embraced and then disavowed), Trump has a knack for condensing raw emotions—especially those he has never felt himself—into handy slogans, such as “Stop the Steal.” And he has coasted back into office on the idea that whatever has been stolen (your vote, the wages you deserve, the appreciation you need) will be magically restored, by him only, and maybe even on his first day in office.

Hochschild’s own proposed solution for our current political predicament is to tout the benefits of the “empathy bridge,” an invitation to seek dialogue and understanding rather than confrontation and contempt. James Browning, the addict turned community healer, or Robert Musick, the optimistic chaplain of Pikeville University, have, in Hochschild’s opinion, shown the way. (Faced with the potential disruption of the 2017 march, Musick wanted to invite Heimbach to campus, a request denied by the university’s president). Stolen Pride in itself is such an empathy bridge, a remarkable testimony of Hochschild’s patience with views radically opposed to her own. She doesn’t fault her interviewees for thinking the way they do; for her, the source of the problems they experience lie in the persistent hold the “American Dream” has over so many low-income Americans, the “More Is Better” ideology that has already caused so much collateral damage.

But Stolen Pride, for me one of the year’s most important books, also illuminates another path, increasingly endangered, to a better America. Note, for example, that James Browning’s turn from drug addict to healer came after attending classes at a community college. The “pride paradox” will lose its power over those who have learned to step outside of their personal bubbles to take a good long look at themselves and their country—the essence of civic education. Which is why the GOP, for much longer than most of us have realized, has striven to diminish and dismantle our educational system, from interfering with grade school curricula to sanitizing textbooks to restricting the freedom of expression for teachers and university professors.^[4]

When, at my own university, well over 90% of faculty declared their loss of confidence in our leadership, appointed by a Republican-leaning Board of Trustees, Indiana University President Pamela Whitten declared herself “stunned” and responded tartly that the views of her faculty on higher education differed “wildly from how we are viewed … by much of the general public.”^[5] But public education shouldn’t simply reproduce and reaffirm the social consensus; if this were true, we’d still think that the sun revolves around the Earth and that humans, along with all other animals, were created by divine decree exactly the way they look today. “Thirst for learning,” the American essayist John Jay Chapman wrote more than a century ago, “is a passion that comes, as it were, out of the ground; now in an age of wealth, now in an age of poverty.”^[6] As Arlie Hochschild’s Stolen Pride makes clear, we owe it to the residents of the Pikevilles everywhere, as well as to ourselves, to continue to nourish that passion and, by teaching the hell out of our classes, to resist, every single day, those who move to quash it. Lest we forget: every library book zealously removed from our classrooms and libraries is a further nail in the coffin of the “land tolerating all, accepting all” the poet Walt Whitman once envisioned.^[7]

Notes.

^[1] Quoted in Richard Brody, “My Oscar Picks.” The New Yorker, February 24, 2011, November 27, 2024.

^[2] Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2018).

[3] See David Keen, Shame: The Politics and Power of an Emotion, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.

^[4] Jonathan Chait, “Indoctrination Nation,” New York, May 8, 2023, November 26, 2024.

^[5] Jack Forrest, “Shared governance, Expressive Activity Policy and More Discussed at IU Trustees Meeting,” Indiana Daily Student, June 16, 2024, https://www.idsnews.com/article/2024/06/iu-trustees-discuss-expressive-activity-policy-approve-budget-more-summer-meeting, accessed November 24, 2024; Pamela Whitten, “Reflections on Moving Forward Together,” email sent to Indiana University faculty, April 16, 2024; Marissa Meador, “Updated: Whitten Rebuked: IU Faculty Vote No Confidence in Whitten, Shrivastav, Docherty,” The Indiana Daily Student, April 17, 2024, https://www.idsnews.com/article/2024/04/whitten-rebuked-iu-faculty-vote-no-confidence-in-whitten-shrivastav-docherty, accessed November 26, 2024.

^[6] John Jay Chapman, “Learning” (1910), in An Introduction to John Jay Chapman’s Philosophy of Higher Education, ed. Alan L. Contreras (Eugene, Oregon: Cranedance, 2013) p. 62.

^[7] Walt Whitman, “Thou Mother With Thy Equal Brood” (1891), November 26, 2024.

 

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