How Trump Weaponized White Rural America’s Shame

Working class white voters are among the most sought-after in the upcoming presidential election, and the Trump/Vance and Harris/Walz teams are going toe-to-toe to appeal to them. Most analysts see economics as the key to unlocking these votes. While economics matters, it only partly explains why people vote as they do. To understand that more fully we must turn to emotions, which are often overlooked. Two emotions are key: shame and pride.

I’ve realized this over the last seven years as I have come to know people who live and work in the hollers around the coal-studded mountains of Pike County, Ky., the whitest and second poorest congressional district in the country. Once home to LBJ, Kennedy and Bill Clinton Democrats, in 2016 and 2020, roughly 80% of its voters supported Donald Trump. I’ve come to know the sons and grandsons of miners, mine guards, and coal truck drivers whose identities are tied to shuttered coal mines and who lament the absence of good replacement jobs. They cut grass, are night front desk clerks at Motel 8, make sandwiches at Subway, and are policemen or mayors of small towns. Whatever they do—like most among the nation’s rural, non-college whites—they sense themselves in decline relative to their urban, college-educated counterparts. They also sense, correctly, that while Blacks remain on average far poorer than whites, they’re better off than they were three decades ago, while non-college whites are worse off.

A sense of loss easily gives way to shame. A 40-year-old grandson of a coal miner, himself a recovering heroin addict, explained it to me this way: “Shame comes gradually. First thing, a guy gets his layoff slip and he blames the supervisor. Then he shakes his fist at the Obama administration for blaming climate change on coal, and adds in Biden and the Democratic Party and the deep state.” Next, as this man tells it, comes low unemployment money and “girly” service jobs like waiting tables that make him feel bad about himself. Shame becomes stronger and for so many, this leads to drugs which can then lead, in turn, to divorce and separation from your family—which stirs up more shame. He continues: “Then he may read some op-ed in the Appalachian News-Express calling people like him a deadbeat for not supporting his family and paying taxes the town needs for its sewer repairs. On top of all that, he sees on the internet people outside the region firing insults at him as ignorant, racist, sexist, or homophobic. Now he’s mad at the shamers. And by this point he’s forgotten about shame. He’s just plain pissing mad.”

Such a man is likely to embody what I call a “pride paradox.” Blue-collar whites in economically suffering rural or semi-rural areas—most of whom are Republican—are likely to base their pride on an older, stricter version of the Protestant Ethic: if you succeed at work, you take the credit, and if you fail, you take the blame.

Read More: The Demonization of Rural America

Ideas about pride vary surprisingly with a person’s political party. As one recent Pew survey shows, 71% of those who were or lean Republican but only 22% of those who were or lean Democrat think people are rich because they “work hard.” When asked why a person ends up being poor, a third of Republicans but 69% of Democrats say it’s due to circumstances beyond their control. So, in a terrible irony, those who face a tougher economy in which—due to external forces as automation in the mines and the declining price of natural gas—blame themselves for failing. They feel a more painful pinch between the cultural terms set for earning pride and the economic opportunity to do so.

The pride paradox is central to the great appeal of Donald Trump. It is through his masterful ability to shift shame into blame that he has pushed this part of Kentucky and much of the rest of white working-class America to accept his turn to the far right, a matter that seems baffling or crazy to many outside it.

His supporters hear in his words an anti-shame ritual. This ritual is composed of four moments: In Moment 1 Trump says something transgressive. To take an early example, when he announced his presidential bid in 2015 he declared, “when Mexico sends its people…they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” In Moment 2, the punditry shames Trump, saying in essence, “You can’t say that! How disgraceful.” After Trump’s Mexican rapist remark, Macy’s announced that it would discontinue Trump’s menswear line. NBC—which hosted Celebrity Apprentice—announced it was severing ties “due to the recent derogatory statements by Donald Trump.” Univision revoked its promise to air Trump’s Miss America and Miss Universe contests.

In Moment 3, Trump turns to his followers saying in effect: They hurt me. I’m in pain, as you are. I’m suffering for you. Then comes Moment 4, the most important: Trump roars back at the shamers. “If NBC is so weak and so foolish,” Trump said in 2015, “as to not understand the serious illegal immigration problem…” and he unleashed accusations against a variety of enemies—Macy’s, NBC, the “treasonous press,” the “deep state,” and the Democratic party—saying, in effect, I will protect you against these causes of your distress.

Later repetitions of this ritual have begun with different provocations. For example, Trump’s claim that immigrants “poison the blood” of America, or after the 2017 killing in Charlottesville, that “there are good people on both sides,” or the claim that some Black Lives Matter protest participants were “animals.”

When I outlined the idea of this 1-2-3-4 shame ritual to a Republican business developer in eastern Kentucky who led a spirited 20-mile pro-Trump vehicle parade before the 2020 election, he laughed out loud. “Sure. That’s right. Trump can’t be shamed.” I asked him if Trump didn’t sometimes poke the bear—that is, provoke liberal critics to shame him, enabling him to claim victimhood and roar back. Again, he laughed and said, “Sure.” When I asked Andrew Scott, mayor of Coal Run, Ky., he replied, “Yes, Trump taunts the liberal media to taunt us, and they fall for it every time. And then the networks make money covering it.”

This turn from shame to blame and revenge has been meanwhile exacerbated by some liberal taunting. Hillary Clinton’s description of Trump backers as “a basket of deplorables” or Bette Midler’s tweet describing West Virginians as “poor, illiterate and strung out” are used to expand an imagined army of enemy shamers. Whipping up a sense of anger at such shaming, Trump has transformed lost pride into stolen pride and vowed “retribution” against the imagined thief—a deep state, a treasonous press and an uncaring liberal left.

As the Book of Proverbs says, without wood, there is no fire. Sadly, the wood kindling this fire—burning slowly in the declining white working class since the 1970’s—is shame. And the politics now attached to it is a danger to us all. The way forward is to think back through the emotional logic of the anti-shaming ritual—from 4 to 3 to 2 to 1 and the situation that has made that ritual so strongly appealing in the first place. Then, in times to come, we need to fix the nation’s economy, revise its culture of pride, and heal its divided heart.

Copyright © 2024 by Arlie Russell Hochschild. This excerpt is adapted from Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.