His upcoming book Stolen prideSociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild recounts her time in Holler, her hometown in Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District — one of the whitest, poorest and most Trump-supporting districts in the entire country. During her time there, she noticed something interesting about the trends most excited about the Trump movement.
“Those who were most enamored with Donald Trump were not at the very bottom — the uneducated, the hungry,” he wrote. Rather, Trump’s biggest fans can be found among “left-wing elites,” meaning “those who are doing well within a region that was not.”
It’s an observation that counters the conventional theory of Trumpism: that he’s a tribune of left-backs and poor white people because of globalization. This is one that is supported by hard data.
In 2020Three Political Scientist Studies How Location and Income Influence White Voters’ Voting Decisions. They found that, at the national level, poor whites were actually more likely to vote for Trump than wealthier ones.
But when you factor in local conditions — your dollar can buy more Biloxi than Boston – The relationship is reversed. “Locally affluent” white people, who had higher incomes in their zip code than others, were much more likely to support Trump than the locally poor. These people may make less money than a rich person in a big city, but are doing relatively well compared to their neighbors.
Put these two results together, and you get a picture that aligns precisely with Hochschild’s observations. Trump’s strongest support comes from people who live in poor parts of the country, like KY-5, but are still able to live relatively comfortably there.
So what does this mean for how we understand the Trump-era right? It cuts through the seemingly endless debate about Trump’s appeal to voters on the “left” and helps to understand the true complexity of the right’s appeal to region and class in the United States. Division in America is less at the root of income inequality than is widely appreciated and is often tied to divisions within communities and social groups.
In Stolen prideHochschild finds the heart of Trump’s appeal to rural voters in emotions of pride and shame — including pride in their region’s heritage and shame at what it has become in an era of shrinking coal jobs and growing drug addiction.
Roger Ford, a KY-5 entrepreneur and Republican activist who serves as Hochschild’s example of Trump’s “locally wealthy” base, helps Trump address those emotions by offering someone to blame. Ford isn’t suffering personally, but his territory is — and Trump’s anger at liberal coastal elites helps him find a villain outside his own community.
“He based his deepest sense of pride, it seemed, on his role as protector of his beleaguered rural homeland, from which so much had been lost — or, as it might seem, ‘stolen,'” he wrote.
Ford’s comments to Hochschild switch seamlessly between economic and cultural indictment. While discussing her opposition to transgender rights, she described it as the latest in a long line of struggles faced by people in her region.
“We’re dealing with everything here, we’re having a hard time enough time,” said Hochschild. “So you make it fashionable to choose your gender? Where are we going?”
This comment might seem like economic concerns are somehow ahead of cultural issues, and people like Ford are angry at transgender people because of economic deprivation in coal country. But high-quality research tells a different, more complex story.
In 2022, scholars Christine Lunge examined the political consequences of Trujillo and Jack Crowley. What they call a “rural spirit” for politics. They divide this consciousness into three components: “a sense that rural people are under-represented in decision-making (‘representation’) and their way of life is disrespected (‘way of life’) – both symbolic concerns – and a more materialistic concern that rural areas have fewer resources ( ‘wealth’) gets.”
When they tried to use these various “sub-dimensions” of rural consciousness to predict Trump’s support among rural voters, they found something interesting. Those who saw the plight of rurality in cultural and political terms were more likely to support Trump, while those primarily concerned about rural poverty were less likely to support him than their neighbors.
Taken together, these findings suggest that the story is not simply that economic deprivation breeds cultural discontent. Trump’s strongest supporters in rural areas resent that their regions do not set the social terms of American life: that they do not control the halls of power, and that, as a result, both political and cultural life are slipping away. Are they comfortable? Economic decline certainly exacerbated this sense of isolation, but It is not at its heart.
This more sophisticated understanding of rural white politics a extensive literature complicated Be that as it may, how we think about the class base of Trumpism Floridian Boat Padder or GOP mega-donors. This body of work suggests that the conventional class shorthand used by political commentators — rural versus urban, elite versus working class, one percent versus the rest — is of limited utility in discussing the political economy of Trumpism.
To really understand what’s happening on the right today, we need to focus on the divisions between these broad groups.
