Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist, spent seven years getting to know people in eastern Kentucky for her most recent book, “Stolen Pride.” This is an important piece to read in full.
Arlie Russell Hochschild, NY Times - In the 2024 election, 81 percent of Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District — the whitest and third poorest in the nation — voted ... 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.
In the first months of Mr. Trump’s second term, his story of loss, shame, blame and retribution has split the country into two emotional zones. Many in America’s blue half have begun to feel a strange fear. They suddenly have to worry about losing college scholarships, jobs, grants, medical care and protection from the prying eyes of government officials gathering information from their social media posts. They have heard themselves described, in Mr. Trump’s Memorial Day tweet, as “scum.” Public officials whose security detail he’s withdrawn fear for their safety. Federal judges who’ve ruled against Mr. Trump have received threatening phone calls...
More than 40 percent of people in the Fifth District rely on Medicaid for their medical care, including addiction treatment. Now, Mr. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is poised to cut benefits, which could lead to layoffs in the largest employer in eastern Kentucky, the Pikeville Medical Center. Meanwhile, many children in the district qualify for food stamps, and the administration’s chain saw is coming for those, too.
These cuts have led Colmon Elridge, the head of Kentucky’s beleaguered Democratic Party who is Black, to wryly remark, “If somebody who looks like me is your enemy, then you don’t care if the guy in the White House is peeing on your leg and telling you it’s rain.
When I checked back in with many of the Trump supporters whose lives I describe in my most recent book, “Stolen Pride,” to see if this had changed any of their minds, the overall answer seemed to be no. Some seemed more committed to Mr. Trump than they had been before.
Rob Musick, a religious studies instructor at the University of Pikeville and shrewd observer of his community, noted: “Since the inauguration, I haven’t heard any alarm bells go off” — not when Mr. Trump dressed down Ukraine’s president in the Oval Office and fired U.S.A.I.D. workers, not when ICE raided a Mexican restaurant nearby. “There has been no public response,” he said. And of course, the rise in prices and loss of benefits haven’t hit yet.
Mr. Trump’s angry tone didn’t seem to bother his supporters in the district. Calling his opponents scum? “Oh, that’s how Trump talks. People know how he talks, and they voted for him. I wouldn’t talk that way and don’t like it, but I’m glad I voted for him,” said Andrew Scott, a Trump supporter and mayor of Coal Run Village, a town of around 1,600 nestled next to Pikeville.
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