Pride, Prejudice, and the Politics of Being Poor

Pike County in eastern Kentucky is part of the nation’s second poorest congressional district. It is also the second most conservative district; 80 percent of Pike County voters picked Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. This is despite Trump’s absent or dismal record on issues that could improve the lives of poor people in Kentucky—such as a higher minimum wage, universal health care, and strong taxation of corporations and the super-rich.

This disconnect between the interests of poor people and the rightwing policies they embrace is the focus of Arlie- Russell Hochschild’s new book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right (The New Press). Hochschild, a University of California, Berkeley, sociologist, immersed herself in the lives of Pike County residents for six years. 

Pike County has been devastated by the simultaneous disappearance of mining jobs and an immense influx of opioid pills driven by a pharmaceutical industry unconcerned about widespread addiction and overdose deaths. Hochschild carefully peels back the layers of daily life to reveal how the emotional “pride economy” so deeply colors how Pike County residents see the world. “If you succeeded, you felt proud,” she related. “If you failed, you felt shame.” 

Kentuckians have felt intense pride in their embrace of hard work and personal responsibility. Yet, Hochschild writes, “their beleaguered economy greatly lowered their chance of success and vulnerability to shame. This presented victims with a dilemma: how to respond to unwarranted shame.”

The number of coal jobs in Kentucky fell from 30,498 in 1990 to 3,874 in 2020, according to Stolen Pride. Despite Trump’s talk of restoring coal jobs, this job loss actually accelerated rapidly during his time as President, decreasing from 6,460 to 3,911 jobs. The remaining coal jobs are largely non-union and are based on “mountaintop removal,” which leaves behind stripped landscapes, polluted water, and the constant danger of coal-slurry pools collapsing on communities located below. 

Efforts to rekindle a sense of personal pride, for instance by teaching ex-miners and other displaced workers skills in computer coding, have largely failed. Along with the sharp decline in well-paid jobs, people in Appalachian communities like Pike County have experienced a painful loss in their heritage and now-despoiled land, while their proud tradition of ingenuity has been devalued in the twenty-first-century economy.

One response to this dynamic has been reliance on OxyContin and other opioids. Huge drug companies, led by Purdue Pharma, targeted Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, flooding these areas with millions of pills. In Pike County, opioids have ruined lives and caused numerous overdose deaths. “Especially hard hit has been white, blue-collar men without a bachelor’s degree,” Hochschild notes.

Making matters worse is a pattern of public hostility toward recipients of government assistance. While 22 percent of Pike County residents rely on SNAP (food stamps) benefits for survival, resentment is high towards those who are seen as “takers” rather than “makers.”

Into this morass strides Donald Trump, whose false claims of a stolen election dovetails with the sense that Pike County, too, has been victimized by outside liberal forces. The former President is hailed by some in Pike County as “our bully,” willing to take on the Democratic Party, the media, and the federal government.

But even in this forbidding, barren environment, organizing efforts keep popping up, not just in Pike County but elsewhere too. Coalitions have emerged to protect the environment. Activists have tried out new structures to promote local economic development. Local movements are challenging political machines rooted in serving the fossil fuel industry. Groups are working to unify small farmers against the increasingly corporatized agricultural industry.

Such efforts are the focus of another recent book, this one by the Reverend Dr. William Barber II, one of the most important figures in Black America. Barber has launched a new initiative, Repairers of the Breach, to mobilize the sixty million white Americans he says should be classified as poor. 

In White Poverty: How Exposing Myths and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy (Liveright), Barber and co-author Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove argue that the near-exclusive focus on Black and Latinx poverty reinforces the myth that America’s economic and political systems are working just fine for everyone else. 

The book calls for incorporating the white poor as a driving force in a multi-racial movement.

For Barber,” the problem in American politics isn’t that poor white people vote against their interests but that poor people don’t have anyone to represent their interests.” Both parties show a barely disguised contempt for the poor, in large part because of their failure to vote. In Pike County for example, there are more people receiving SNAP benefits from the federal government than going to the polls, Hochschild notes.

Republicans ignore the needs of the poor while waging culture wars against transgender people and “woke” culture. Meanwhile, Democrats confine their electoral appeals to the middle class, with an overwhelming emphasis on persuading moderate Republicans to vote for them. Almost entirely unmentioned are the issues which really matter to low-income people, like raising the minimum wage and making health care a right.

But Barber is heartened by signs that voting among poor people is increasing and that they may become a serious voting bloc in this year’s elections. “When our research teams told us that six million more low-income people had voted in 2020 than in 2016, I knew we were witnessing something larger than the results of our efforts alone,” Barber writes.

Disappointed by the lack of attention to low-income people in this year’s presidential race, Barber argues for a new focus on the plight of poor white people. The dominant depiction of poverty as essentially a Black issue sends the message that the economic and political systems don’t really need fixing. 

Yet Barber continues to see signs of eager participation by poverty-stricken whites in what he calls progressive “moral fusion” coalitions, and he argues forcefully for both the media and progressives to focus more on this development. He believes this emerging participation could make low-income white people an essential “swing” vote that neither party can afford to ignore any longer.

Unfortunately, this emphasis on the poor has been largely absent in 2024 as Kamala Harris has been focusing almost exclusively on, in Barber’s words, “euphemisms like those aspiring to the middle class.”