In Arlie Russell Hochschild’s acclaimed 2018 bestseller, “Strangers in Their Own Land,” the sociologist took a deep local dive into the people and politics of Lake Charles, Louisiana, to understand why the country had just elected Donald Trump as president. In her new book, “Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right,” she turns her sharp gaze to the small city of Pikesville in Eastern Kentucky’s Pike County.
She centers her narrative on a neo-Nazi march in Pikesville in 2017, when the town became a stage for both marchers and counter-protesters. Most townspeople stayed home. But it played out on national news as the press arrived in droves.
As Hochschild explains, the media coverage and how the community looked to the world mattered to the people of Pikesville, because of the community’s relationship with concepts of shame and pride. Pikesville residents struggle over many things: poverty, the scourge of meth and prescription pain medications, and declining economic opportunity. They take pride in their place of birth, home, church, jobs, and a way of life passed down from generation to generation. The flip side of this narrative is shame: personal, familial, economic, and regional. This is the kind of community alternately lionized and denigrated by politicians, most recently Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance.
The neo-Nazis came to Pikesville because they thought the people there would be receptive to their call. They were wrong; most didn’t come out and join the march. Still, groups outside of Pikesville flooded in to define their home: 100 neo-Nazis, 200 counter-protesters and a gaggle of press holding a scorecard in their hands. Would it be shame or pride they felt? Both: as Hochschild reports, the community felt shame over the whole episode, but also pride that they weren’t baited into demonstrations of white supremacy.
“Stolen Pride” is, at its core, a book about the right-wing turn of the nation since 2016 and its resulting turmoil through the eyes of a tiny community. Pikesville and the surrounding area was once a reliably Democratic district, then moved to a Republican majority, ultimately becoming one of Trump’s sites of strongest support in the last election.
Hochschild spent time in Pikesville starting in 2017, interviewing hundreds of people. Her focus was those four words political pundits have been obsessed with since 2016: white, rural, blue-collar, men. She wanted to know what happened to them, what moved them so rapidly to the right. She thought Pikesville would have answers. And she was right.
She takes us into a community under intense pressure and reveals the story of that community in a nuanced and graceful way, avoiding heated rhetoric and allowing her subjects to reveal their world with sympathy and understanding.
Hochschild finds a jumble of contradictions and paradoxes in Pikesville. The “American Dream” is still alive and matters to people here. But for many in Eastern Kentucky, it feels continually out of reach. She uses the metaphor of a long waiting line for that dream. The line stalled and it stalled some more, and those waiting grew bitter. These line-waiters then saw what they perceived as line-cutters, jumping ahead of them. In this extremely white region, what they saw or were told they saw were immigrants, Black and brown and LBGTQ+ people jumping ahead of them. They felt that these line-cutters were not like them and didn’t wait patiently as they had; they argued that they were let into the line by forces that didn’t care about rural America. They saw their own group having diminished opportunities and rather than understand it as a structural issue around the economy or the political system, they saw it through the lens of culture.
Pikesville is a place where being white matters a great deal. It’s a place where being rooted in the land for generations matters. Not long ago, jobs were plentiful, and workers were well off. Now, feeling forgotten and forsaken makes the community vulnerable to voices of hate. But it has limits, as the failed neo-Nazi march showed.
Hochschild ends her book with this hope. She found what she called an “empathy bridge” in Pikesville between cultures and communities too often divided by politics. The work of healing is being done by those living in the community. There is no uniformity of program in these “bridge-crossers,” as she calls them. They do not share motivations, but they share a commitment to their neighbors and a desire to weave a frayed fabric back together. They see their differences, but reach out nonetheless. What all share is the feeling of pride and shame and the need to connect before the fabric tears fully.
America is frayed, not broken, and Hochschild believes that what is happening in Pikesville is happening elsewhere, and maybe everywhere, and it is this: there are enough caring people who have quietly taken up the mending of America. I hope she is right.
STOLEN PRIDE: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right
By Arlie Russell Hochschild
The New Press, 400 pages, $30.99
Richard A. Greenwald teaches history at Fairfield University in Connecticut.