For all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we’ve ignored one critical question: what can economic and cultural loss do to pride? What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, in a work called “one of the year’s most important books” by Counterpunch, when the people of a hard-hit, long-ignored, region are grappling with a loss of pride while being confronted with a powerful political appeal—one that makes it feel “stolen”?
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 the city is reeling: coal jobs have left, crushing poverty persists, and a deadly drug crisis has struck the region. Although Pikeville was in the political center thirty years ago, by 2016, 80 percent of the district’s population voted for Donald Trump.
Hochschild, “a curious and skilled listener” (Financial Times), focuses on a group swept up in the shifting political landscape: blue-collar men. In small churches, hillside hollers, roadside diners, trailer parks, and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, she introduces us to unforgettable people, and offers an original lens through which to see them and the wider world.