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PORTSIDE CULTURE

TRUMP’S BIGGEST FANS AREN’T WHO YOU THINK  
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Zack Beauchamp
September 4, 2024
Vox
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_ A new book shows how people are getting the right’s class appeal
all wrong. _

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_Stolen Pride
Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right_
Arlie Russell Hochschild
The New Press
ISBN: 978-1-62097-646-3

In her forthcoming book _Stolen Pride_
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sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild describes her time spent in the
towns and hollers of 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 who tended to be most excited about the Trump
movement.

“Those most enthralled with Donald Trump were not at the very bottom
— the illiterate, the hungry,” she writes. Rather, Trump’s
biggest fans could be found among “the elite of the left-behind,”
meaning people “who were doing well within a region that was not.”

It’s an observation that cuts against the prevailing theory of
Trumpism
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that he is the tribune of the left-behind and impoverished white
people suffering due to globalization. It is also one that is backed
by hard data.

In 2020
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three political scientists studied how location and income affected
white voters’ voting decisions
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They found that, on a national level, poorer white people were indeed
more likely to vote for Trump than richer ones.

But when you factored in local conditions — the fact that your
dollar can buy more in Biloxi
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than Boston
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— the relationship reverses. “Locally rich” white people, those
who had higher incomes than others in their zip codes, were much more
likely to support Trump than those who were locally poor. These people
might make less money than a wealthy person in a big city, but were
doing relatively well when compared to their neighbors.

Put those 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 poorer parts of the country,
like KY-5, but are still able to live a relatively comfortable life
there.

So what does this mean for how we understand the Trump-era right? It
cuts through the seemingly interminable debate about Trump’s appeal
to “left behind” voters and helps us understand the actual
complexity of the right’s appeals to region and class in the United
States. America’s divisions are rooted in less income inequality per
se than is widely appreciated, and often tied to divisions inside of
communities and social groups.

In _Stolen Pride_, Hochschild locates the heart of Trump’s appeal to
rural voters in emotions of pride and shame — including pride in
their region’s traditions and shame in what it’s become in an era
of declining coal jobs and rising drug addiction.

For Roger Ford, a KY-5 entrepreneur and Republican activist who serves
as Hochschild’s exemplar of Trump’s “locally rich” base, Trump
helps resolve those emotions by offering someone to blame. Ford may
not be suffering personally, but his region is — and Trump’s rage
at liberal coastal elites helps him locate a villain outside of his
own community.

“He based his deepest sense of pride, it seemed, on his role of
defender of his imperiled rural homeland from which so much had been
lost — or, as it could feel, ‘stolen,’” she writes.

Ford’s comments to Hochschild shift seamlessly between economic and
cultural grievances. In discussing his opposition to transgender
rights, he situates it as the latest in a long line of dislocations
that people in his region faced.

“With all we’re coping with here, we’re having a hard _enough_
time,” he tells Hochschild. “Then you make it fashionable to
choose your gender? Where are we going?”

This comment might make it seem as if economic concerns are somehow
prior to cultural ones, and people like Ford are angry at transgender
people because of economic deprivation in coal country. But
high-quality research tells a different, more complicated story.

In 2022, scholars Kristin Lunz Trujillo and Zack Crowley examined the
political consequences of what they call “rural consciousness” for
politics
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They divide this consciousness into three component parts: “a
feeling that ruralites are underrepresented in decision-making
(‘Representation’) and that their way of life is disrespected
(‘Way of Life’) — both symbolic concerns — and a more
materialistic concern that rural areas receive less resources
(‘Resources’).”

When they tried to use these different “subdimensions” of rural
consciousness to predict Trump support among rural voters, they found
something interesting. People who saw the plight of ruralities in
cultural and political terms were most likely to support Trump, while
those primarily concerned about rural poverty were, if anything, less
likely to support him than their neighbors.

Taken together, these findings suggest that the story isn’t simply
that economic deprivation breeds cultural resentment. Trump’s
strongest supporters in rural areas tend to be angry that their
regions don’t set the social terms of American life: that they
don’t control the halls of power and that, as a consequence, both
political and cultural life is moving away from what they’re
comfortable with. Economic decline surely exacerbates this sense of
alienation, but it isn’t at the heart of it
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This more sophisticated understanding of rural white politics
contributes to a broader
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literature complicating
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how we think of Trumpism’s class base, be it Floridian boat paraders
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or GOP mega-donors
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This body of work suggests that the conventional class shorthands
political commentators use — rural versus urban, elite versus the
working class, the one percent versus the rest — are of limited
utility in discussing the political economy of Trumpism.

To really understand what’s happening on the right today, we need to
pay attention to the divisions within these broad groupings.

* Donald Trump
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* voters
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* class
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* Republican voters
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* white voters
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* Right Wing Politics
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