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- [00:01]
A
Thank you so much for being a loyal listener to the Good Fight. The podcast has expanded significantly over the course of the last few years. We have millions of downloads a year at this point and it is all thanks to you. But our hard working team that edits these conversations and prepares the transcripts for them needs a little bit of a holiday. So for these two weeks we are rerunning some of the conversations from the last months and years of which we are most proud that we think you might enjoy listening to again. We will be back at the beginning of September with two weekly conversations about big ideas and a regular, perhaps weekly new format of A Good Fight Club in which I invite some of my favorite thinkers and podcast guests to discuss the political events of the past week. I hope you two are enjoying the rest of the summer and I very much look forward to welcoming you back at the beginning of September with our new content. In the meanwhile, if you want to support the podcast, please consider going to jasamunk.substack.com and becoming a paying subscriber.
- [01:39]
B
I think people feel afraid of empathy. Empathy is a dangerous thing thing actually. Not only is it not of interest, but people are scared of it. And now the Good Fight with Yasha Monk.
- [02:01]
A
My guest today is Ali Hochschild. Ali is Professor Emeritus at this point at Berkeley University, one of the most distinguished American sociologists. She has written very well regarded book called Strangers in Their Own Anger and Mourning on the American Right, which offered a deep story for why so many Americans have come to feel deeply disaffected with the mainstream culture and ended up supporting the Tea Party and later Donald Trump. And she has now published a new book called Stolen Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right, which is based on similarly detailed ethnographic work, this time in Pike County, Kentucky. This book was selected by Barack Obama as one of his favorites in 2024. Ali and I talked about the importance of actually trying to understand fellow citizens who have very, very different political views about why it is that so many academics, so many of our friends and colleagues are willing to try and understand the customs of people in faraway countries, but not those of their own fellow citizens who who have different political views. We discussed the role that pride plays in our own emotional lives and how a feeling of loss of pride and the shame that can induce can fuel political movements. We discussed whether the deep story she offered in Stranger in Their Own Land and that she updated in the new book, a story of people feeling like they're still stuck in line while others are cutting in can account for the demographic change in support for Donald Trump. It is primarily based on how white Americans see the country. But what do we need to do in order to understand the deep story of Latinos in Miami who flocked to Donald Trump in large numbers over the course of the last years? And finally, we discuss the liberal, or perhaps a progressive deep story, how a ethnographic study of our own tribe would try to explain the fundamental view of America and the world. Adi and I end up having quite an interesting disagreement about what that would look like for those latter parts of the conversation about Latinos in Miami and about what the liberal progressive deep story might be. You will need to support this podcast by becoming a paying subscriber. Go to jasamunk.substack.com and sign up. Thank you very much. Adi Hochschild, welcome to the podcast.
- [05:01]
B
Thank you very much. Delighted to be here.
- [05:03]
A
So you are a sociologist, a political scientist who tries to understand America, and you spend a lot of time trying to understand the American right. And you do something that academics should do a whole lot more, which is you actually go and talk to people and you go and study particular places with a lot of time and depth. Before we get into the particular story you tell in your last book and circle back to the story that you told in your previous book, what do you think that method that. What do you think we academics and social scientists, but perhaps Americans more broadly can learn with engaging some of the places that tend to be out of our way that we tend not to spend that much time in.
- [05:43]
B
Yes, feelings, emotions. That's what you learn about close up. You're not just looking on television, seeing people are angry and oh gosh, they're angry people. What you get to see why it's such a privilege actually to go into a small place. First, I did it in the Deep south, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Second in Appalachia, in Pikeville, Kentucky. When you really get sit down with people and have meals with them, visit their trailers, hang out, visit graveyards, you're seeing first what they feel and then the history. Why did they feel the way they do? What are the circumstances that might predispose them to be open to the kind of leadership that the people I came to know became open to Donald Trump.
- [06:44]
A
And I feel one of the things that it does is to create empathy for people who one might otherwise see as the adversary or the enemy or something like that. I mean, I'm always struck by the fact that when my social circle, my friends and acquaintances that remain overwhelmingly in left Leaning liberal America. When we look at cultures very far away from them, what contain people whose moral values are probably much, much more different than that of most people living in the same country and therefore shaped in some ways by the same political intellectual influences. They have a lot of understanding, they have a lot of empathy. They can try and have empathy for people living in very traditional societies in Asia or Africa, South. When it comes to the proximate other, when it comes to people living in their own society who disagree with them about economic policy or about trans rights or about the virtues of the new president of the United States, that empathy can quickly go out of the way. You have an interesting vantage point here because, as you say repeatedly and explicitly in both of your last books, you're a liberal college professor from Berkeley, California, and you have profound disagreements with many of the people who you study. But I think you genuinely try, more so than many other people who write about these topics, not to let the tendency to sit in judgment drive you. And I get the impression that, you know, there's nice and not so nice people everywhere, and I'm sure you didn't like every person you talk to in Louisiana and every person you talk to in Kentucky, but there is a genuine sense one gets that you come away with a positive view of these communities and the people within them. Tell us a little bit about that and whether you share my suspicion that that openness is unfortunately quite rare in our public life at the moment, perhaps particularly in the kinds of places in which you and I usually spend time.
- [08:34]
B
Actually, I think when I come home from these field trips and talk to people, I think people feel afraid of empathy. Empathy is a dangerous thing, actually. Not only is it not of interest, but it. People are scared of it. I think that if you empathize with the, quote, enemy, you're complicit, you're switching sides, you're not holding on to who you are or not helping, you're not helping. So that's very interesting. That tells you how fragile actually people feel in their membership. I often get told, oh, I don't know how you do it. First of all, I don't know why you do it, and then I don't know how you do it. And that strikes me. One thing that I think, I hope that my books do, these last two is first, to be a mirror on liberal subcultures bubbles, that we are all in urban educated bubbles, so that we see ourselves. And the second is to invite people to not be alarmed at making room in their hearts for people who are very different. Making room doesn't mean you keel over. It doesn't mean you're any less who you are. I mean, I don't feel my politics change at all. What I do feel is I have more room, I see more. And I guess I write my books to help people become bilingual. And in the sense that we are used to tuning into and understanding rational speech, you know, you've got policy, it's got four parts, you want to understand them. So that's rational speech. But we're not tuned into the logic of emotion, which I think is hugely important in the historical moment we're in. So tuning into becoming emotionally literate is very important today. And that's what I try to do. But that's what you get the hang of and feel very. You learn a lot if you do field work.
- [11:13]
A
That's very interesting. And I like this question of how do you do it? Because it relates to what I was saying earlier. I can't imagine that if you are a sociologist or an anthropologist who goes to study very traditional, very patriarchal society somewhere abroad, the reaction of colleagues over dinner would be, how do you do it? Even though presumably the gulf in lifestyle, habits and values is much bigger. But there people would say, oh, how exciting. That must be wonderful and interesting. But the response to visiting a different community within the United States is, oh my God, that just must be so exhausting. And being around these people, it is, I think, very revelatory in that respect. So the last book, built in many years of spending time there, is about Kentucky. It is about, in part why it is that the particular part of Kentucky you spend time in is one of the most strongly Republican, one of the most strongly pro Trump, one of the places that used to be solidly Democratic, like many parts of of the American South. But it is also about the role that pride plays in politics and in our emotional life. So how does pride help to explain the political evolution of KY5?
- [12:30]
B
Let me back up to say KY5 is the whitest and second poorest congressional district in the country. And I found there a kind of small version of a national story that has to do with basically white, non college, 42% of Americans who've taken a hit. You know, we know this from Raj Chetty's work. They've taken a hit in the sense of over the last two decades, lost income, lost property and have more all the social signs of downward mobility. More people live alone, they're in worse health, more subject to what are called deaths of despair. And that's what I saw close up and personal. But even as other areas in the country were doing pretty well and opportunities were opening up, so what we saw was in microcosm in Pikeville, Kentucky was a smaller version of a larger story. So that if we go back to 70s, we're looking at globalization creating the haves and have nots of globalization. So there's a sector that people in blue bubbles haven't been looking at that's been hurt. And how pride has to do with it is that in the community I came to know and in Appalachia generally and a lot of blue collar rural, semi rural areas, what we're seeing is very proud people, people who are extremely resilient and proud of being resilient and highly individualistic. So I came to focus on what I called the pride paradox. You have people in this community used to have wonderful coal mining jobs and they felt proud. They were like GI war heroes because it was dangerous work and they felt heroic doing this dangerous work. And they came back with black lung. They were sacrificing their health for their family and community. All of this was a source of great pride. Then, oops, it goes out. These jobs, the mines close, you're on your own, There are no other good jobs. You either stay there and as one man told me, you can either stay and get a girly job. By girly job he meant a low paid service job for teenagers, girls with a wage that won't support a family and you feel kind of a loss of pride there. Or you go on Route 23 north to Cincinnati, you try to get an industrial job there, but you're a nobody there and those factories close too. And then you come back empty handed. There are a lot of loss. So you have proud people, but a story of loss and three kinds of loss. Loss of your job, absolute loss, loss relative to the people with BA degrees in cities and devaluation of what you're really good at. Doesn't matter anymore. What you know, that's the main one, that's the hard one, that's the hurt one. And all those losses, you're very proud of yourself and you have an individualistic culture of pride that is you think, look, if I succeed, I succeed. I did that, you know, and if I fail, oh man, that's on me. So it's individualistic. Blame the self culture of pride and loss. You have to deal with loss. Meanwhile, what makes it a paradox is in the blue states there's sunnier economic news and people apply a more circumstantial culture of pride. Well, if the sector's going down, blame the sector. So that's the paradox. And in a way, what I argue in this book, if we keep our eye on emotions as a main thing that's going on and we look, we're looking at losses and we're looking at people who've given up on both parties, the Republicans, the Democrats aren't answering their sectoral painful circumstances. They turn to a magic man, to a charismatic person. And the two kinds of leadership are so different. If you look at Joe Biden, he is a perfect example of Max Faber's rational, bureaucratic leadership. He's don't look at my face. Don't look for reasons, assurance. Don't look for, you know, big proud strongman. No, look at what I've done, the build back better bill, the inflation reduction act and so on. Whereas Donald Trump says, oh, look at me, don't look what I've done, look what I promise. Look at, look at the loss I acknowledge and see in you. Look at the shame that you experience because of your individualistic culture and you've had to take an economic hit because of the failure you feel like I'm going to lift that away from you. I'm going to take it on myself and almost like Jesus, you know, just take this on. And so that seems to me the secret sauce of charismatic leadership. And that's what I went in looking for. How does charisma work? One man told me, oh, Donald Trump, he's like lightning in a jar. And I said, tell me about the lightning. What I'm interested in that. Why are you excited? I understand why you vote for him, but I'm not. Tell me why you're excited. And that's what I came back to. One more thing. I think I came back saying, wait a minute, this is a whole hurt and shamed group of highly proud individualist people. And in a way, this pride paradox made them a sitting duck for a charismatic leader who would relieve them of this painful, unwelcome, what I call structural shaming. So he did this, I think in four moment ritual. And I think we're witnessing it. We will continue to witness it every day. Every week goes with moment one is when he says something transgressive. So Haitian immigrants are eating your pet cats and dogs. Okay, that's moment one. Moment two is the punditry shames. Donald Trump for his transgressive statement says, oh, you can't say that. It's a lie. It just isn't true. You don't repeat lies. That makes you a liar. So the punditry shames Donald Trump. Moment three is Donald Trump becomes the victim of the shamers. Look how they always criticizing me. They're beating me up. Do you know how hard that is? You know how hard that is? They're always beating you up too. Don't. They're shaming you. Well, I'm taking that burden off of you. And in moment four is the roar back shame to blame, and now blame to retribution. That is an emotional narrative and I'm trying to lift it out as thing that's going on. And yeah, so pride turns out to matter a lot. Turns out to matter a lot. Maybe in other historical moments less. But really got to keep our eye on it.
- [21:15]
A
So there's a lot in there. And I agree with a lot of this. I thought your explanation of these four stages is a more intricate and subtle way of saying something that I thought for a long time, which is that often it's a part of Trump's success to say outrageous things, not because most Americans, even most of his supporters agree with it, but because it provokes the disapproval of all of the people who a lot of Americans hate even more. And so if Trump says something outrageous and then the entire political establishment and all of the mainstream media and everybody flips out about it, people who don't trust the traditional Republican Party and certainly don't trust Democrats and don't like CNN say, well, there's got to be something good about Trump. If all of those people whom I hate beating up on him.
- [22:00]
B
That's right. You know, I went back to the people I was following and getting to know and said, look, I'm looking at this a little differently. I'm looking at emotions, I'm looking at pride and shame. And I think there's this anti shaming ritual and may I try it out on you? You can tell me if it's right or wrong. And they, you know what their response was? A man who led the East Kentucky patriots vehicle parade 20 miles, you know, hooting, hollering, highly excited MAGA followers. And he, he said, when I put this, 1, 2, 3, 4, he laughed. Yeah, yeah, that's not rocket science. Yeah. And another one. And oh, then I said, do you ever think that Donald Trump pokes the bear, that is, he finds a yet more transgressive, outrageous thing to say so that the punditry shames him so that he'd be the victim of them, so that he can roar back. And he laughed. And another one I tried it out on said, oh sure, and the left falls for it every time. And the media, media makes a mint often. And what I think is happening in America is that the Democratic half of it listens to moment one and two and the Republican half of America awaits for three and four. So we need to tune in to
- [23:39]
A
emotional narrative that seems absolutely right to me. And one of the things that drove me apoplectic during the first Trump presidency was that he was what in a nice phrase people say is a target rich environment. There is many things to rightly criticize about him and to rightly criticize about him in a full throated way. And yet again and again I saw friends and colleagues, I saw op ed columnists, I saw people on CNN and MSNBC beating up on things in a way that was way exaggerated, taken out of context, unfair. And I thought, why this makes it so easy for moment three and four, as you would put it, to happen. This makes it so easy for them to say they can't take a joke, they distort everything I say and everything is a five alarm fire, then it seems like nothing is. And if a lot of people, including people who are not deep paid up mugger people see Trump being criticized and see claims that he's incredibly dangerous for things that are perhaps tasteless jokes or perhaps not even that, then they force you conclude that nothing he does could possibly be dangerous because it's always exaggerated, it's always invented. And so I think that does tremendous damage. There's many very interesting which parts of the story you're telling. I want to go back about this pride paradox. In pointing out this paradox, you draw on one of the kind of standard questions that's asked in a lot of social science research to the extent of do you think that by and large when people succeed, it's because of their own individual agency or because of the kind of circumstances in which they're in. And you point out that there is a difference between more left leaning respondents, more right leaning respondents, and there's a geographic difference between some of the blue regions of a country and some of the red regions of a country, where the former tend to say that it is because of circumstances and luck and the latter tend to say it's because of individual choice. And I buy that there is this distinction. It's very well established in the research. I wonder though whether the reality of it is a little bit more complicated, because when you talk to those people in the blue areas, they say that in the abstract, but they also have incredibly intensive parenting practices because in their private lives they seem absolutely convinced that, you know, the extra sports team or the extra violin lesson and the lesson that comes with it that you need to work really hard, is what's going to get the kids ahead. So there's a little bit of a paradox there. In the same way, when it comes to the groups that are seen sympathetically within blue America, and particularly to underprivileged people from minority groups who don't succeed for one reason or another, I think you're right that at least in answer to Soviet responses, people say, well, you know, they have all this underprivileged and all this disadvantage and that's why they didn't succeed. When they look at Pikeville, Kentucky, I think many of those people might say, well, I mean, those parts of the countries aren't thriving because the people there are hillbillies, right? They're not educated, they're dumb, they're bigoted, of course they're not thriving. So actually, some of those same people I think might be quite open to a pretty individualistic, moralizing account of the struggles of parts of a country that they feel less empathy towards. Conversely, I wonder whether there isn't some amount of structural thinking even among the people of Pikesville, Kentucky. And I'm on this firm ground here because I know that milieu a lot less well. So you can tell me whether or not what I'm saying is right. It seems to me that they're perfectly willing to say we've been screwed over, right? These companies moved away and the politicians don't care about us and we, we don't really stand a chance here. I think they also seem to believe that when faced with that adversity and that hardship, people respond in very different ways. And some provide for their families in whatever way they can and bear the hard jobs that were in coal mining when that was relatively good paying. And they bear the hard jobs in fast food service or whatever girly jobs they may now be reduced to because they feel that sense of responsibility for themselves and their families. And then they would say, well, others respond to the structural challenges in different ways. They end up getting hooked on drugs and they end up being dad beat dads and all of those things. But that doesn't negate sort of the recognition of structural changes that are beyond anybody's agency that there used to be these great jobs here and those have gone away. So do we need to complicate sort of the extent of that paradox on both sides of it?
- [28:11]
B
I think that's why we the beauties of getting down there and doing field work. That's what you see. Actually, that's what I report. There are huge complications. Sure. People in the heartland of red America look at circumstances, look at structures, and certainly blue Americans are worried about the flute lessons of their kid. How are they doing? And look at individual pride and shame. And one guy, for example, that's himself a recovering, very thoughtful recovering, a heroin addict who was homeless when I first met him. I asked him about pride and shame and he said, well, a guy gets laid off at the mines and first he shakes his fist at the supervisor, then he shakes his fist at the owner of the coal company and then he shakes his fist at the Democratic party and Obama who called for clean energy. So yes, you have an individual, a guy in an individualist culture that's blaming the structure. But it doesn't last, doesn't. You know, he thinks after a while his wife is saying, we need to feed the kids. My job doesn't cover it. And so then it's he says then. And when he goes to Cincinnati or Toledo to get a job and he comes back empty handed gradually, that's on him. That's when the shame kicks in. It's a process, it's complex. So everybody's got shall I blame the structure, shall I blame myself? Wherever you live, rural, urban, it more settles down to the south. I think there is a difference shows up in the statistics, national statistics, Republican, Democrat that you just mentioned. But yeah, it's why. In other words, we have to also ask why is it that if we look at deaths of despair from alcoholism, from a drug addiction, from suicide, why is it it's white non ba men that lead the pack there? I think it's shame.
- [30:52]
A
So I guess there's two interpretations of why they have more elevated levels of shame. And I'm open to both. And I wonder whether you might have an empirically founded answer to that. But one of them is just that they experience the kind of events that often induce shame at much higher rate. If losing a job, if not being able to provide for your family, if being humiliated, trying to find a new job, lacking the late John Rawls would have called the social basis of self respect are some of the things that induce shame universally, then it just happens to be the case that if you grow up in Pikeville, Kentucky, born in 1980, when the core jobs are still there and then they up and leave, you're just just much more likely to end up experiencing shame and blaming yourself because your Life circumstances are more likely to induce the causes of that relative to if you are born in an affluent suburb of New York City with the opportunities economically that go with that? The second interpretation is that it goes beyond that. There's a cultural element that even somebody who experiences that obviously there's going to be more people experiencing those kind of shocks in Pikesville, Kentucky than in Greenwich, Connecticut. But that if you are from Greenwich, Connecticut, and it so happens that despite the favorable circumstances, you're really unlucky and you also experience all of these shocks, you also lose your job, you also can't find a new job, you will end up as likely to blame yourself in that way, to experience that kind of shame, and then possibly the same kind of circumstances. So I guess one way of asking that is, is this kind of a compositional effect or is there a cultural element beyond the compositional effect that leads people in those two places to respond to similar shocks when they are present in different ways?
- [32:42]
B
My vote is that there's something beyond circumstance effect. Ofer Sharon, former grad student of mine here in sociology at Berkeley, wrote a book comparing Americans to Israelis who men unemployed in these two cultures. And what he's arguing is that actually Americans were far more individualistic. Hey, it's really up to me. And if I bomb, that's on me. And they were more thrown down by shame than Israelis were more circumstantial. Culture of pride.
- [33:27]
A
And.
- [33:28]
B
And he said that what that did was lead Americans to become less likely to get up and try again. So I think it's culture beyond.
- [33:41]
A
We've been talking a lot about the individual level of pride, the pride you have in your own life achievement and in your own status within a particular social context. Of course, there's also a feeling of collective pride that some of us lean more deeply into than others. And often having a lot of grounds for individual pride makes it easier to not lean into those forms of collective pride. But you're right about the ways in which places like Pikesville, Kentucky, have also lost the grounds for a lot of that collective pride that it used to be the case that they could say, we deliver a lot of a nation's coal, we have a growing economy, we are making progress here. And all of those things could provide people with a form of collective pride. But that the longstanding injury of being mocked as hillbillies, of being one of the poorer parts of America, of being looked down upon and joked about when you go and visit places outside of Palatia now bite more because those grounds for Collective pride are more vulnerable. So how has that change happened? And to what extent is that on us? To what extent is that on the late night comedians who make jokes about hillbillies on the way that nice, pleasant, friendly, educated people in Berkeley or Cambridge, Massachusetts might react when somebody shows up in the bookstore with an Appalachian accent and so on?
- [35:04]
B
Yes, collective pride is hugely important. I'm glad you raised that. And they've taken a hit in their collective pride. We used to be the regent. We kept the lights on. We won World War I and II. Look, we're the provider to the nation. It's like, you know, the providing dad to the whole nation. And that's another hit, another loss. And that made them also this very sad paradox that when Lyndon Johnson came to Appalachia, started the war on poverty, there were many media follow ups that showed children without shoes and with tousled hair. And they felt, oh, man, the whole nation is getting a look at us as down and out. We represent need. And so that was humiliating. And people felt that, in other words, their own internal individualism and pride paradox was added to. They thought, oh, no, the whole nation is looking down on us. Our collective pride, we take a big hit in that. So. So let's look at national pride. And Trump comes in there too. Hey, American, we can put other people down, other nations down, because people were kind of starved, took a lost hit, not just as an individual in their collective pride.
- [36:43]
A
That's very interesting, and it relates to one of the most persuasive part of your previous book that you sort of update. In the new book, when I teach about populism, I have a whole section of the course that I've taught in different kinds of iterations about the roots and the origins of populism. And I assign many works of political science and sociology and economics. And, you know, consistently, one of the texts that my students find to be most convincing, and that I too, have been very influenced by, is your account of what you call the deep story when you were working on Louisiana. Tell us what the deep story that you discovered in that research was and how you think it might now be updated in light of your more recent work in Kentucky.
- [37:32]
B
The deep story is not a matter of what you say you believe. It's not a matter of your party affiliation. It's a matter of how you feel. It's a feeling story, and it's a narrative that evokes that feeling. And this deep story that emerged when I was talking, listening to people's accounts of their lives in Louisiana Was that you're a man and middle aged, you feel like you don't begrudge anyone. This is a right wing deep story. Okay? The left has its deep story. I can tell you about that.
- [38:20]
A
I haven't heard that. So I do want to hear about that. But let's focus on the right wing one first. But I definitely want to come back to that.
- [38:26]
B
Yeah, yeah. It's in strangers and you're waiting in line. At the very end of the line is the American dream. It's top of the hill. In fact, a little over the hill. You can barely see it. You're waiting for it, you want to get to it. And the line hasn't been moving. One guy told me, I haven't had a raise in a decade. And so you're waiting, you feel patient, you're not prejudiced against anybody as you see it, but you're waiting patiently. And then there are line cutters. So who are the line cutters? Well, you're a white male member, it's a woman that gets there and damn half the population of them. So new competitors, blacks getting in, immigrants, refugees, highly paid public sector workers are all line cutters. And then you look over your shoulder and there is Barack Obama who's waving to the line cutters. And oh, so his America is their America. He's pushing us back and he's in cahoots with them. And then there's an existential crisis. Am I getting out of this line? Am I? What's. What's happening? And then final moment in the right wing deep story, someone ahead of you, maybe with more education, is turned around and said, you prejudiced, racist, sexist, homophobic redneck. And then you think, okay, I am furious. I've been shamed in two ways here and pushed back and then shamed for being in the back. And then charismatic leader comes. That seems to take you out of that situation. Okay, that is the right wing story. I went around to people and said, well, does this make sense to you? What does this story tell? Oh, yeah, man, I live your narrative. Yeah, that's it. It's the story. And then one woman told me, no, you have it a little bit wrong. But actually the people waiting in line have paid the taxes that are benefiting the people that are cutting in line. And another woman said, oh, we're just sec. Succeeding. It's just intolerable. We're seceding. So those were the stories that I heard people responding to that. In the second book, Stolen Pride, a guy told me, actually he had Read the first book.
- [41:24]
A
Oh, interesting.
- [41:25]
B
Yeah. And he said, well, you have that not quite right. It's not up to date. And I said, please tell me. And he said, in line, you're right, we're waiting in line. And there are the line cutters. That part's right. But there's a bully in line that is keeping us back and helping the line cutters. That's the bad bully for them. That was Barack Obama with calling for clean energy in this coal region. And then that's the bad bully. But then there's a good bully in line. And you may know that he's not really a nice person, doesn't obey the rules, you don't admire his personal life, but he's our bully. That is the update to the deep story and the danger for democracy.
- [42:28]
A
And that I think is a helpful update because it does make sense of how smart and thoughtful and decent people can support Donald Trump. It's not that they don't recognize his character flaws, not that they're idiots. There may be some people who are just bamboozled by him and generally think that he's the most amazing person who's never done anything wrong. I think those people exist a little bit more in the liberal imagination than in conservative reality. But it provides a story for why it is that you might support that person. And the instinct behind that is, I think quite universal. I'm trying to recall now there was a paper by sociologist at MIT and some others that imagined election for student council. I may be butchering the details here and it is looking at somebody who is lying and whether probably mostly liberal progressive leaning college students, probably undergrads at MIT who are being asked to take part in this experiment, I would imagine given these things work, would vote for this person. And it turns out that they wouldn't. That if somebody is lying then they're not going to vote for this person. But now they have a second scenario in which the current president of a student council lies in a self serving way in order to improve their chances of getting internship at Goldman Sachs. They deliver a different student under the knife in some kind of way and now the same candidate who's lying but who is taking on the corrupt student council president ends up getting a lot of support from these liberal progressive leaning undergrads. And I think what you're telling about the sort of story of a bad bully in the budget good bully is a little similar. It's not that those students at MIT suddenly were incapable of recognizing that this candidate was lying. It's that they thought that a lying candidate that takes on a self serving corrupt leader may be the remedy you need. In a similar way, you're saying now that part of the deep story is that a good bully may be precisely what you need to take on the supposedly bad bully.
- [44:30]
B
He seems like a Robin Hood of stolen pride, is a good, good bully in that way. And I do believe that stolen pride is the major right wing prevailing narrative. I think the election was stolen, that our jobs were stolen. What's happened is Moss real loss has been and real shame has been moved to stolen and blame and blame to retribution. That there's an emotional narrative that we need to that's I think, a prevailing feeling narrative on the right today. And so if you feel, hey, that Robin Hood's getting me my pride back, let him go ahead and steal from others to get taps into that fits in with this MIT study you mentioned.
- [45:40]
A
I told you that of the many texts I assigned to try and debate different kinds of explanation for the rise of populism, my students are reliably drawn to yours and find it to be very convincing. And that is absolutely right. There is also one point that they started to make, particularly in response to the 2024 presidential election, but a little bit previously as well, which is, well, this story seems to explain a lot of the 2016 vote for somebody like Donald Trump, or at least what we saw as the 2016 vote for Donald Trump. The dominant reaction to that election among political scientists was to think that it was the kind of last stand of an aging, white, predominantly male electorate that was becoming less and less important as an overall portion of the electorate. And so it was still in keeping with a broader idea that eventually it would become impossible for Trump, or for Republicans more broadly to hold that kind of coalition together because the number of non white voters would rise as a proportion of the US Population. And at that point this would no longer work. Now, of course, one of the key stories of the 2020 election less noted because Joe Biden ended up squeaking through. And certainly one of the key stories of the 2024 election is the huge swing towards Donald Trump in many minority communities among African Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans, but particularly among Latinos. And it seems to me, or it seems to my students that the deep story you tell doesn't quite seem to apply to that part of the electorate. That first of all, a lot of the people who are voting for Trump are the people who, in that metaphor, are the ones supposedly cutting into line. And secondly, that that is a part of the American electorate for whom the line often has been moving not because they're so much more advantaged than white Americans or something like that, but because they might have immigrated or have parents who have immigrated from very poor societies. They might have started their life in America out at the very bottom rung of society because perhaps they didn't speak English yet. And now many of them are starting to have associate's degrees, bachelor's degrees, perhaps master's and professional degrees, and they're actually doing a lot better than their parents or grandparents were. So the idea that they feel sort of stuck at the back of the line doesn't seem to apply, at least to all of them, perhaps to some. So how should we think about the very different demographic pattern and support for Trump in 2024 relative to what it was in 2016, relative to how many academics have thought about it for the last decade? And can we square that with the deep story that you're telling?
- [48:28]
B
You know, I think there were three kinds of voter in the area that I was focusing on. One were true believing MAGA people who felt this is my Robin Hood of my stolen pride and I believe in Trump. But the second group were pragmatists who said, it's useful to me to vote for a guy like that. I'm not a true believer. I'm quite critical of him, but hey, maybe he could help my group. And the third category were Democratic dropouts. People just altogether had despaired of the political process. And my theorizing was about the first group. But I think there are a lot of pragmatists and I would suspect a lot of the Latino new Trump people. Something in here. For me, he looks like he's on his way and let me get on that train. But it's perhaps some more, I would say, pragmatic. I talked to a lot of evangelical ministers who said, oh, look, we know he's not Christian. We actually don't like him very well. He's good for us. So there's that second group, and that may be who the newcomers are from the minorities this time around, of course, it's global. Everybody was a kick the bums out vote in Germany and Italy and Netherlands, everyone else.
- [50:07]
A
So that's interesting. So you're saying that your explanation in some ways is more useful for the sort of mugger true believers than it is for the people who vote for him, either out of his kind of pragmatism or out of disappointment with the Democratic Party. That seems to me like a very reasonable response. And each part of his puzzle is important to explain. But it feels to me that for many purposes that means that we really need an explanation for the other groups. Because I always had this impression during the first Trump presidency, where we fought far too much about how do we persuade the MAGA true believers to change their mind. Because it always seemed to me that that's not what makes him win. What makes him win is that a lot of people who are not true believers are willing to vote for him, are willing to go along with him. And so I imagine you're not willing to hazard this, but perhaps this is me, as in an act of great hubris, suggesting to what your next research project might be. But I just wonder what you think the deep story of the Latino voter in Miami who voted for Obama in 2008 2012, already old enough to do so, but who swung to Trump in 2020 and 2024, helping to make Miami Dade now quite solidly Republican county in Florida, a salty Republican state. What is their deep story? How do they make sense of American national politics and why did they shift to Donald Trump?
- [51:42]
B
Well, maybe it is a next book and I don't think I have a great answer. I haven't been hanging out with Latinos and I think there's a huge disaffection so group three. But you know, nothing.
- [52:08]
A
Thank you so much for listening this week to get to the rest of this conversation where I push Ali a little bit on how exactly Latinos and other ethnic minorities think about why many of them supported Donald Trump in this election and in which we try to figure out what a liberal, what a progressive deep story about America might look like. Please become a paying subscriber Support this podcast by going to jasamunk.substack.com and becoming a paying subscriber. Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you too have been enjoying the podcast, please be like them. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [53:09]
B
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chet Pieces.