Stolen pride
By 
Arlie Russell Hochschild does interesting ethnographic work in the heart of Trumpland, and I look forward to at some point reading her latest book. This extended essay (gift link) left me feeling somewhat exasperated, since it adds up to “a bunch of people with radically wrongheaded beliefs about the world end up voting directly against their own economic interests because of those beliefs.” I acknowledge that exasperation is not a useful response in the context of figuring out how to peel off some necessary votes from this demographic, but that’s your job not mine.
In the 2024 election, 81 percent of Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District — the whitest and third poorest in the nation — voted with Mr. Ford for Donald Trump. Once full of New Deal Democrats, the region had suffered losses that its people felt modern Democrats didn’t care about or address. During World War I and II, the “black gold” dug out of their mountains fed industrial America. Then the coal mines closed, and the drug crisis crept in.
In 2016, Mr. Trump’s answer to these losses took the form of policy promises and a story. Many of the policies he promised never panned out. As James Browning, a thoughtful drug counselor and grandson of a coal miner killed in a mining accident, recalled, he never brought back coal or “great, new jobs.” He did “nothing about drugs.”
But Mr. Trump’s story of stolen pride did take hold. With the fall of coal and American manufacturing, he told his followers, you lost your pride. That’s because others stole it from you, just as they stole the 2020 election, and they still want more — your guns, your families, your way of life. I’ll take revenge on them, he declared: on the pet-eating immigrants, uppity women, spying international students, idle government workers, and the institutions behind them — the universities, the mainstream press, the judiciary, the deep state.
Meanwhile:
In many local minds, the word “Democrat” is no longer associated with openness, daring, imagination and care. During the last administration, Democratic attempts to build a green America, which many Kentuckians support, fell on deaf ears because the people providing these ideas were Democrats. With his Inflation Reduction Act, Joe Biden directed 73 percent of clean energy investments to projects in red states — projects like making batteries and installing solar panels. Red state residents were expected to receive almost double the investment compared to their blue state counterparts.
Etc.