Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right

From the bestselling, National Book Award finalist, author of Strangers in Their Own Land, an intimate glimpse into the cultural factors that gave rise to the right in one of our country’s most overlooked regions-Appalachia, with a new afterword by the authorFor 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