Arlie Russell Hochschild — Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right with Scott Tong

Watch author Arlie Russell Hochschild's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

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For all the efforts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we've ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. In Stolen 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 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 thirty years ago, by 2016, 80 percent of the district's population voted for Donald Trump. Hochschild's brilliant exploration of how the town responded in 2017, when a white nationalist march came to town--a rehearsal for the deadly Unite the Right march that would take place in Charlottesville, Virginia, just four months later--takes us deep inside a community that defies stereotypes.

In Stolen Pride, Hochschild--whose previous book, Strangers in Their Own Land, was heralded by the New York Times as one of a small handful of books to read to understand Trump and the 2016 election--focuses on a group at the center of the shifting political landscape: blue-collar men. Long conversations over six years with mayors and felons, clerks and shopkeepers, road workers and teachers, ex-coal miners, and recovering addicts form the core of the book, movingly introducing readers to real people living deep within the political storm.

Hochschild's great gift is to decode the emotional narratives that demagogues can speak to and lay bare the pain that lies beneath the rage. And 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.

Arlie Russell Hochschild is the author of many groundbreaking books, including The Second Shift, The Managed Heart, and The Time Bind as well as Strangers in Their Own Land, which became an instant bestseller and was a finalist for a National Book Award, and Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right (both from The New Press). Hochschild is professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Berkeley with her husband, the writer Adam Hochschild.

Hochschild is in conversation with Scott Tong. Tong joined Here & Now as co-host in July 2021. Before that, he was a senior correspondent at Marketplace and has reported from more than a dozen countries — from refugee camps in East Africa to shoe factories in eastern China. He was the China bureau chief based in Shanghai for Marketplace from 2006 until 2010. A highly-regarded public speaker and author, Tong has appeared on the PBS NewsHour, at the Aspen Ideas Festival and at TEDxFoggyBottom. In 2017, he published A Village with My Name: A Family History of China's Opening to the World — a critically-acclaimed narrative nonfiction account of China's economic opening, told through the lives of five people across five generations in his own family. In early 2022, Tong introduced audiences to The Great Wager, a new podcast and broadcast series.

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Founded by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade in 1984, Politics and Prose Bookstore is Washington, D.C.'s premier independent bookstore and cultural hub, a gathering place for people interested in reading and discussing books. Politics and Prose offers superior service, unusual book choices, and a haven for book lovers in the store and online.